Experimental Blog #72

Comments on "The Adventure of English" - The Biography of a Language by Melvyn Bragg

Although this author writes that, "In the 1890's over ninety percent of African Americans lived in the rural south; sixty years later, ninety-five{!!??} percent had moved to the urban north", and at other places his description of the American West sounds a little bit too fabulous; hopefully, the rest of his book is more factually reliable.

In the 5th century, the 400's, the British Isles were invaded, the author says that the invaders were invited by the people who remained from the Roman occupation, by as many as 12 German tribes, but mostly Angles, Saxons, and Jutes. There were, perhaps, 150,000 of them altogether, and they all spoke different, but mutually intelligible, dialects of what is called West German.
These dialects eventually joined together in about 300 years, and with the addition of only about 2 dozen words from the native Celtic language, and only about 200 words from the Roman Latin language, they formed what is sometimes called "Old English".

In the 8th century the Viking invasions began, but terrible as they were, English eventually only accepted about 150 new words into its vocabulary of about 25,000 words. However, the grammer began to change with the use of prepositions and word order taking the place of different word endings, or inflections, on nouns and their adjectives to indicate different sentence cases of words.

However, everything changed after 1066 AD, when England was conquered by the Norman French. The English language was replaced by Norman French at virtually all the higher levels of society, and did not completely return as the dominant language again for over 300 years.
And by this time there were over 10,000 new French words incorporated into English.
During the English Renaisance, in 30 to 40 years around 1600, thousands more Latin and some fewer Greek words were added to the English language by scholars and other influential people.

The year 1604 saw the appearance of the first English language dictionary, but it only had 2,543 words considered to be uncommonly difficult. This date compares to the appearance of the first Sanskrit language dictionary in India sometime after 600 AD, and the first Arabic language dictionary around 800 AD. Samuel Johnson's historic and rather eccentric and controversial dictionary of around 43,000 words came out in 1755.