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Where did English come from? - Claire Bowern

  • 0:07 - 0:11
    When we talk about English,
    we often think of it as a single language
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    but what do the dialects spoken
    in dozens of countries around the world
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    have in common with each other,
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    or with the writings of Chaucer?
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    And how are any of them related
    to the strange words in Beowulf?
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    The answer is that like most languages,
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    English has evolved
    through generations of speakers,
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    undergoing major changes over time.
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    By undoing these changes,
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    we can trace the language
    from the present day
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    back to its ancient roots.
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    While modern English
    shares many similar words
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    with Latin-derived romance languages,
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    like French and Spanish,
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    most of those words
    were not originally part of it.
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    Instead, they started coming
    into the language
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    with the Norman invasion
    of England in 1066.
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    When the French-speaking Normans
    conquered England
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    and became its ruling class,
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    they brought their speech with them,
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    adding a massive amount
    of French and Latin vocabulary
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    to the English language
    previously spoken there.
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    Today, we call that language Old English.
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    This is the language of Beowulf.
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    It probably doesn't look very familiar,
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    but it might be more recognizable
    if you know some German.
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    That's because Old English
    belongs to the Germanic language family,
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    first brought to the British Isles
    in the 5th and 6th centuries
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    by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.
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    The Germanic dialects they spoke would
    become known as Anglo-Saxon.
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    Viking invaders in the 8th
    to 11th centuries
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    added more borrowings
    from Old Norse into the mix.
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    It may be hard to see the roots
    of modern English
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    underneath all the words borrowed
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    from French, Latin, Old Norse
    and other languages.
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    But comparative linguistics can help us
    by focusing on grammatical structure,
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    patterns of sound changes,
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    and certain core vocabulary.
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    For example, after the 6th century,
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    German words starting with "p,"
    systematically shifted to a "pf" sound
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    while their Old English counterparts
    kept the "p" unchanged.
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    In another split, words
    that have "sk" sounds in Swedish
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    developed an "sh" sound in English.
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    There are still some English
    words with "sk,"
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    like "skirt," and "skull,"
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    but they're direct borrowings
    from Old Norse
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    that came after the "sk" to "sh" shift.
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    These examples show us
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    that just as the various Romance languages
    descended from Latin,
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    English, Swedish, German,
    and many other languages
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    descended from their own common ancestor
    known as Proto-Germanic
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    spoken around 500 B.C.E.
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    Because this historical language
    was never written down,
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    we can only reconstruct it
    by comparing its descendants,
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    which is possible thanks
    to the consistency of the changes.
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    We can even use the same process
    to go back one step further,
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    and trace the origins of Proto-Germanic
    to a language called Proto-Indo-European,
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    spoken about 6000 years ago
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    on the Pontic steppe
    in modern day Ukraine and Russia.
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    This is the reconstructed ancestor
    of the Indo-European family
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    that includes nearly all languages
    historically spoken in Europe,
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    as well as large parts of Southern
    and Western Asia.
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    And though it requires a bit more work,
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    we can find the same systematic
    similarities, or correspondences,
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    between related words in different
    Indo-European branches.
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    Comparing English with Latin,
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    we see that English has "t"
    where Latin has "d",
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    and "f" where latin has "p"
    at the start of words.
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    Some of English's more distant relatives
    include Hindi, Persian
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    and the Celtic languages it displaced
    in what is now Britain.
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    Proto-Indo-European itself descended
    from an even more ancient language,
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    but unfortunately, this is as far back
    as historical and archeological evidence
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    will allow us to go.
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    Many mysteries remain just out of reach,
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    such as whether there might be a link
    between Indo-European
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    and other major language families,
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    and the nature of the languages spoken
    in Europe prior to its arrival.
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    But the amazing fact remains that nearly
    3 billion people around the world,
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    many of whom cannot understand each other,
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    are nevertheless speaking the same words
    shaped by 6000 years of history.
Title:
Where did English come from? - Claire Bowern
Speaker:
Claire Bowern
Description:

View full lesson: http://ed.ted.com/lessons/where-did-english-come-from-claire-bowern

When we talk about ‘English’, we often think of it as a single language. But what do the dialects spoken in dozens of countries around the world have in common with each other, or with the writings of Chaucer? Claire Bowern traces the language from the present day back to its ancient roots, showing how English has evolved through generations of speakers.

Lesson by Claire Bowern, animation by Patrick Smith.

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Video Language:
English
Team:
closed TED
Project:
TED-Ed
Duration:
04:54
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