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Curiosity Stream - The History of English
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00:00This is the history of the English language.
00:05The saga of a language that wouldn't quit.
00:08Responding to invasion after invasion by snagging the conqueror's most useful words.
00:14Streamlining their grammar and becoming today's linguistic superpower.
00:22Conquerors and conquered living together blended their languages.
00:27The result is a language that has doubled the vocabulary of any other language.
00:34Today, more people learn English as a second language than any other.
00:48Ten thousand years ago, when the last ice age was ending and ice was retreating,
00:54global sea levels were 400 feet lower than today.
00:59Back then, you could have walked from Denmark to Britain without getting your feet wet.
01:06Across a flat plain that has since been called Doggerland.
01:12But as global sea levels slowly rose, Doggerland began to disappear beneath the waves.
01:19And the people retreated.
01:22They called themselves Britanni, from which we get the name Britain.
01:28Nomadic hunter-gatherers who roamed across it spoke a language that was probably the forerunner of Celtic.
01:38Which would have sounded something like this.
01:42Like this.
01:43Yn oes yr hefeiniad, roedd iaith y Prydeinwyr yn swnio o'chydig fel hyn.
01:48Rwyf yn siarad Cymraeg, un o'r ieithoedd Celtiad sydd wedi gorwysu.
01:52Roedd diwylliant y Celtiad yn goeth,
01:55ac roedd yt yn fylein llaw mewn technoleg, am eithyddiaeth, maslach rhwngwladol a'r celfyddydau.
02:00Ond pan ddaeth yr hefeiniad i Prydein,
02:03gweld Sant y gallwn hefyd fod yn hryfelwyr ffyrnig.
02:06It took almost a hundred years of fierce fighting
02:12before the Romans finally gained control of the land they called Britannia.
02:18Of course the Romans brought their language with them.
02:22Latin, which sounded something like this.
02:26Hori e multi sunt, qui nesiont quod lingua Latina olem in Britannia lingua multurum erar.
02:36Latine loquevantur milites legionum Romanarum,
02:41sic etiam administratores civiles, sic et principes populi,
02:48sic clerici ecclesiastici, et mercatores, et nonc dico ego.
02:55By 400 AD, Rome was collapsing,
03:01and a thuggish bunch of obscure Germanic tribes
03:05were looting their way through Europe.
03:08People were actually scavenging in Roman ruins
03:11to get the last few remnants of Roman consumer goods,
03:16so economically it was absolute devastation.
03:20Some of them turned their eyes to a large island known as Britannia,
03:27opening the door to a flood of invaders
03:30that would change British history forever.
03:34Over time, Jutes migrated from Northern Denmark,
03:40Engels from Southern Denmark,
03:43and Saxons from Germany.
03:49In 600 AD, Christianity began to return to Britannia for the first time since Roman times,
03:57and spread religion and literacy throughout the land.
04:06Unlike the occupying Romans,
04:08these invading Germanic tribes were also true immigrants,
04:12who quickly settled into their adopted home.
04:18It was long thought that the invaders exterminated the Celts and their language,
04:23replacing Celtic with Old English, or Anglo-Saxon.
04:29The traditional story is that they drove all the Celts to the borders.
04:34The Celts ended up in Scotland,
04:35in the outer edges of Scotland,
04:37and in Wales, and Cornwall.
04:39But in fact, a lot of Celts did stay behind,
04:41and they intermarried with the Germanic tribes.
04:45We know this now from archaeological evidence,
04:47from biological evidence, genetic evidence.
04:50There is a lot of Celtic blood in England proper these days.
04:54The linguistic influence, however, is very, very small.
04:59Apart from place names, there's a lot of place name evidence,
05:02because the names for any kind of towns, rivers, mountains,
05:05would often stay the same, and this is a typical thing.
05:12By the 7th century, the tribes had settled seven separate kingdoms,
05:17who battled each other for the control of the place,
05:20later called Inglaland.
05:25It was a time when reading and writing flourished,
05:28particularly under Alfred the Great,
05:30who reigned as King of Wessex toward the end of the 9th century.
05:34He was determined that people should be literate in English.
05:41One of the unusual things about England in this period is,
05:45there's so much written in the vernacular,
05:47which was not the case on the continent at all.
05:50So you have beautiful works of English.
05:52This is the period when the Beowulf manuscript is written.
05:56And, you know, that's the most important work of English in the whole period.
06:02Beowulf, set in 6th century Scandinavia,
06:06is the oldest surviving long poem in Old English.
06:11I wish the one who has been to 18th century,
06:14uh,
06:15and they're both a day,
06:16and they're very lucky.
06:17Oe,
06:18the old man you've visited the world,
06:19the other world have come,
06:20you rather feel like you're here,
06:21and the last one to the city.
06:22You have been with you,
06:23and this isn't the most important thing,
06:24you have been with you.
06:26A lot of changes in the world,
06:27the most important thing is to have you
06:29to see the world's vision.
06:32Fenn und Fasten.
07:02Beowulf is the most important surviving Old English poem, and it is a heroic poem that
07:12is a bit over 3,000 lines long, and it is the one thing that people tend to think of
07:17when they think of great works in Old English.
07:21But there are many other great works, too, and much of what we know about the history
07:26of Britain comes from this time period and from the Anglo-Saxon chronicles, which were
07:31begun in the reign of King Alfred in the 9th century and continue to be written through
07:38the 12th century by different groups of monks in different monasteries.
07:42And so we have examples of interesting events during these times, but one really important
07:50event for British history is recorded in 793.
07:55And the language spoken at the time would have sounded something like this.
08:01Here were an raitha for a beechna kymina over Northumbra land, and that folk ejarmlich
08:08prayed on, that wharren urmeet a thodenas, und regreschas, und furena drakern war iesewene o tham luft
08:17af lehogende.
08:18The heathen men were the vikings. They came from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and they
08:39inhabited a region in the north of England mostly for about 200 years. Their language
08:46was Old Norse, which was a relative of Old English, and the closest relative of Old Norse
08:52in contemporary days now is Icelandic.
08:55This is the English language. The English language is the language that the Vikings
09:00were told when they were born in Breddland in the 19th and the 19th century.
09:05No one knows how many of the Vikings and the English people are skilled,
09:11but they were told when they had a certain difference about what was right.
09:16The linguistic impact is huge. We have this very substantial body of words that come into English from the Vikings.
09:25Because so many Scandinavian settled in England and lived alongside the English,
09:30that a lot of words got borrowed into English from Danish, and we're still using a lot of these words today.
09:39I have a different text about how many people are built in the average way and the northern English ones were built in English.
09:42The bandhasen, which means window, which became window in modern English.
09:51Ransaga, which means house search, became ransack.
09:56Berserkur, which means bare shirt, became berserk.
10:05which means house dweller, which became husband in modern English.
10:12So for two centuries then, the Danes and the Anglo-Saxons lived together,
10:17especially in this north and eastern area of England.
10:20They mingled, they married, and the Anglo-Saxon language absorbed many words from Old Norse,
10:28including some of our most common words, they and their, them.
10:33But also many of the SK words in the English language, like skill or skeet.
10:39Then in the 11th century, however, the language received another important jolt, really,
10:47through a historical event, the invasion by the King of Norway,
10:52which is recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
10:56They come out of the King on the onward on that Norman,
11:00and hit a hit on the onward at Stamford Bridge,
11:03with a little bit of English's focus.
11:06They were on dice with the stranglish effect on behalf of it.
11:10They were slaying Harold Harfager on toasty ear,
11:13and the Norman they thought to lava well on woolda on flama,
11:17and enga act on whilst over your world.
11:20Harold Godwinson King races north to Stamford and defeats the King of Norway and kills him.
11:30And then it's all good, right?
11:33Except that at that very moment, William the Conqueror is landing in the south.
11:38And slowly but surely, through attrition, the shield wall of soldiers at the top of the south,
12:06of the hill where the Anglo-Saxons were, was weakened.
12:10And that's when, finally, one last charge was successful.
12:15And the Anglo-Saxon King, Harold, was killed during the battle.
12:20And with that, the game was over.
12:23If Harold Godwinson had not had to go north and defeat the Scandinavian ruler,
12:38he would have been well placed to meet the threat from William in the south.
12:52So without that other invasion, the Norman Conquest probably would not have succeeded.
12:57King Harold's defeat marked the end of the Anglo-Saxon period and the beginning of the Norman Conquest.
13:06The term Norman comes from Norsemen, which is the term for those who inhabited the northern part of France,
13:12which had been itself invaded by the Vikings.
13:16But when William came over and he replaced the aristocracy existing then with his own people,
13:23and the language spoken at the top was then a dialect of French.
13:28So there was then a trilingual society with French being spoken by the king in court and aristocracy,
13:35and Latin being used by the church and in administrative realms,
13:41and then English used by everybody else.
13:44So at this point, English is still continuing to absorb to itself other languages,
13:51and during this period it's estimated that about 10,000 words from French were picked up and absorbed into English.
14:00The change to English due to the Norman Conquest is enormous.
14:05English was already becoming the language of the people,
14:08and this actually speeds up language change,
14:13and then you get this huge influx of words from Mormon French.
14:20And so that's why we basically have a huge vocabulary in English.
14:24We have a vocabulary twice the size of most other European languages
14:28because we have two words for everything.
14:31We have a Germanic word and a French word for almost anything.
14:35The French words tended towards aristocratic and courtly things,
14:40such as crown, castle, prince, duke.
14:46Lowly tradesmen still went by their Anglo-Saxon terms like shoemaker and baker,
14:53while more esteemed tradesmen enjoyed French names like tailor and merchant.
15:00And food on the hoof kept its Anglo-Saxon farm names like cow, calf, and swine.
15:09But once it reached the high-class table, it was the French beef, veal, and pork.
15:17The largest proportion of words in English are, in fact, of Roman's origin, from Latin or French.
15:23The most common ones, however, are Old English words.
15:26If you look at, let's say, the hundred most common words in English,
15:29the majority of those are from Old English,
15:31including all the ones that we would find the most familiar short words
15:35that are part of our language.
15:36These are words that have been part of the language as long as it has been spoken as English.
15:40Words like bad and good and for body parts from, you know, from head to foot.
15:53Words like love and strong and road and apple.
15:57These are all from Old English.
15:58These are words that have been part of the language as long as it has been spoken as English.
16:02Now, in terms of literature, that's where the English excel,
16:07because they produce people like Sir Geoffrey Chaucer,
16:11who is the great poet of this period.
16:16He made a blend between English and French vocabulary,
16:21a normal part of the English literary scene.
16:26The best-known work of Chaucer's is, of course, the Canterbury Tales.
16:30And in this work, Chaucer does something with the language, too.
16:34He sets himself up to have stories told by characters from all ranks of society.
16:40And in doing that, brings in this richness that represents the, you know,
16:44the state of English at this time.
16:50So Chaucer was writing in more or less a London English, you know, a Southern English.
16:54And that's the English that led to what we speak nowadays.
16:58So, it is still very different.
17:02But if you look at Chaucer, you can see, you will recognize many of the words.
17:07You will understand the grammatical patterns in general.
17:12The general prologue of the Canterbury Tales describes the beautiful spring morning,
17:18and which Chaucer falls in with a group of sundry folk,
17:22making a religious pilgrimage to Canterbury.
17:26When that April with his sure soughta, the draught of March hath persed to the rota,
17:33and bathed every vein in switch liqueur, a virtue which engendered is the floor.
17:38Then long and folk to gone on pilgrimages, and palmers for to sake and strondes strondes,
17:46to fair in the hallways, cooth and sundry landes.
17:49And specially from every shearers ende of Ingerland to Canterbury they wende,
17:55the holy blissful martyr for to sake and that him hath hopen when that they were sake.
18:04So, the opening lines here are so fresh.
18:08This fresh spring opening is leading forth into this collection of stories
18:13that's so varied and diverse.
18:15It's also a kind of fresh opening for English literature at this time.
18:20Middle English by Chaucer's time was changing so rapidly in different parts of the country
18:26that many Englishmen from the north could not understand their compatriots in the south of the country.
18:33But the dominance of London meant that London English became Chaucer's English,
18:40and eventually fully modern English.
18:44Chaucer's manuscripts circulated quite widely.
18:47We know that, and manuscripts are again the handwritten copies of literary texts and other texts,
18:53but a major event was to happen in the mid-15th century with the invention of the printing press.
19:00The printing press meant that writing was available to many more people,
19:05and that is generally true throughout Europe.
19:08There was a much more widespread access to writing of all kinds.
19:12So, when a bright young playwright named William Shakespeare began to make a name for himself later in the 16th century,
19:19he had an audience who could understand what he was saying.
19:24Had Shakespeare been born 80 years before he was born in 1564,
19:31we probably wouldn't be talking about him today.
19:33He arrived just in time for the success of the printed book,
19:39and he arrived just in time for professional theatre.
19:42At Tuputain.
19:44Which meant that people would be able to hear his words, the words of his actors,
19:49without necessarily having to travel to a court setting or some kind of elite environment of performance.
19:58Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears.
20:06I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
20:09The evil that men do lives after them.
20:12The good is oft interred with their bones, so let it be with Caesar.
20:18It was a form of entertainment that really hadn't been in England.
20:22There'd been Roman theatres a thousand years earlier, but this was a new initiative.
20:26It was a new media form.
20:28This story shall the good man teach his son,
20:33and crisp in crispine shall ne'er go by from this day to the ending of the world,
20:39but we in it shall be remembered.
20:43We few.
20:46We happy few.
20:49We band of brothers.
20:52For he today that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
20:56Be he ne'er so vile, this day shall gentle his condition.
21:00And gentlemen in England now abed shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
21:05and hold their manhoods cheap, whiles any speak that fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
21:11It's often said that Shakespeare coined some very, very large number of words, thousands of words.
21:18Very large numbers are thrown around, and people use examples of these different words that Shakespeare coined.
21:24To us, looking at his plays, sometimes you feel like a bird watcher.
21:30You're keeping your eye out for these really rare, odd creatures.
21:36I can think of Shakespeare writing entire scenes so that he gets to use a word in a new way,
21:41because he loves it, and his audience loves it.
21:44We're finding out that a lot of things that we thought Shakespeare's the first user of, in fact, were in use earlier by other people,
21:51which is no slight on Shakespeare.
21:54It doesn't mean he was not a great author.
21:56It just means that he's not the only author to write in English at that time.
22:00I think that's just terrific, because even if Shakespeare's word count goes down, his creativity and cunning goes up.
22:09You know, he was like a, I think he was like a magpie.
22:13He just kept his eye out for very clever things that people were saying, and he would just steal it.
22:18Shakespeare was a terrific thief, and that part of his creativity was in keeping an eye out for things that he could just say,
22:26I'll take that.
22:30Just think about the world Shakespeare is beginning to work in.
22:33He's got global trade beginning, the beginnings of science, incredible religious tension.
22:41This was a period of great growth in the English vocabulary.
22:45Again, even more words coming in from Romance languages, increasing trade with other countries.
22:52So, you know, an influence of words from Dutch or German coming into English.
22:56We have the sense right now, and this is a very important thing, and people say like, well, right now we have all these words coming in from the internet,
23:07and this is a huge influence on the language, we've never seen anything like this before.
23:10Well, 50 years ago people were saying, the space program, you know, so important, we have never seen an influence like this in the language before.
23:17A hundred years before that, railways, you know, this incredible technological development.
23:22We've never seen, like in fact, the farther you go back, the more you see that in fact technology has always been an extremely important part of English.
23:29There was technological innovation, there was increasing exploration, so words associated with other, you know, very distant cultures,
23:39including a wide range, you know, both cultural things and physical descriptions and names for animals from other places that were just being discovered.
23:49And these were all being written about.
23:52So the scruffy dialects of the Anglo-Saxon brutes that survived the Vikings pummeling and the Normans invasion was now freely moving about the world,
24:03growing and gorging on new words as the British Empire spread to the corners of the world.
24:13It was also importing a hoard of unexpected treasures, words.
24:23Modern English enjoys the rich and extensive vocabulary it does now because it's been so flexible throughout its history.
24:29Like a snowball rolling down a hill, it's just absorbed useful words into it and it's been very capacious and flexible.
24:39The result is a language that has adopted words from just about every era of civilization and every country in the world.
24:47From Latin, which comprises almost 30% of our vocabulary.
24:54From French, also accounting for nearly 30% of our words.
25:00Germanic words are the source of over a quarter of our vocabulary and include those that originated during the Norse and Old English eras.
25:08Greek words, Arabian words, Indian words, Chinese words, and a surprisingly large number of everyday words come from proper names.
25:28So we are in a globally connected world where English is the lingua franca.
25:38So in the realm of science or technology or for practical purposes, for medicine and for literature and for communication of all kinds of course,
25:48English is the language that we can count on to be spoken in more places in the world than ever.
25:54Well, I think that the future of the language is good.
25:58There are a lot of interesting things that are going to keep happening.
26:00We will keep absorbing words from different cultures.
26:03There will be technological innovations.
26:06And its evolution continues every day.
26:10I wonder what the Celts, or Julius Caesar, or the Vikings, King Alfred, William the Conqueror, Geoffrey Chaucer, or William Shakespeare would have made of this.
26:25In case you were wondering, here's a translation.
26:32But then, you knew that, didn't you?
26:36Right.
26:37What are they from studying?
26:38Matt Dше from behind here?
26:39I was here before my eye, but that was in India to go virtually.
26:40I really enjoyed this as writing before caring.
26:41Why think so?
26:42Of course.
26:43You know that, how do we want to be perhaps and that's not
27:00the translation?
27:00Let's make sure we understand about something else.
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