The roots of English

Image courtesy The Guardian

Language is a strange thing. Human beings seem to have devised speech systems quite a long time ago -- perhaps 150,000 years -- but nearly all of its early evolution is lost to us; since there were no writing systems until about 5,000 years ago, we have only the very last slice of this history in hand.

That said, we can at least sketch out where English stands in this latter-day family tree. At about the time the cuneiform was invented by Sumerian scribes, a large group of as-yet-illiterate peoples were clustered around the slopes and steppes of the Caucasus mountain that divide Europe from Asia. Their speech was the ancient ancestor of a great many languages that still exist today, among them Hindi, Bengali, Latin, Italian, German, Greek, Turkish and Irish. Linguists have been able to trace a good many "root" words in this speech, even though it was never written; these roots are "hypothetical" but almost certainly existed. This status is shown by their being preceded by an asterisk -- so, for instance, the root *nrek-, which is the original word for king or ruler. In Sanskrit, it evolved into "Rig" (as in the Rig Veda or Royal Vedas), while in Latin it became "Rex" (though retaining the "g" in its possessive form, "regis"); in French it's Roi and in Irish Rí. Modern English however chose a different branch; its work "King" comes from the Germanic branch, where in German it's König; the Old English form was "cyning" (with a hard "c").

Old English itself branched off from the Germanic tree when its speakers crossed the English Channel somewhere between the fourth and fifth centuries; the Romans had gone home and they came to fill the power vacuum. Long before, of course, the Celtic peoples (ancestors of the Irish, Welsh and Scots) had been there already, and before them the "megalithic" people who set up Stonehenge -- but no matter. Its speakers were illiterate, but luckily were converted to Christianity somewhere around the year 700. This mean that they had to both learn Latin (then the universal language of the Church) but also could use its letters to come up with the means of writing out their own tongue. This they did along very phonetic lines; all letters in Old English sound like what they look like ("C" always being hard like "K") though there were a couple of exceptions. The special characters thorn (Þ) and edh (ð) were used for voiceless and voiced "th," and Æ (for the Bugs Bunny "aaah" sound) was known as "ash" (spelled "æsc").

The collected body of written works in Old English that survive is quite small, a mere 400 or so manuscripts. Nearly all of them are in one dialect -- "West Saxon" -- which was (not unexpectedly) the dialect spoken by its most powerful rulers, who were based in the western area around their capital of Winchester. The far greater body of speakers in the area around London spoke a dialect known as "Mercian," of which little written materials survive.

All of this, of course, was turned topsy-turvy when the French-speaking Normans conquered in 1066, making English a subaltern speech -- at least for a couple of centuries -- to Norman French -- of which more anon.