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