VIDEO: excerpts from The Story of English
0'06" The Anglii, a Germanic people who lived in northern Europe in Roman times, buried people in bogs. The well-preserved remains of such bog-burials have been discovered in Denmark.
1'28" Map of migrating Germanic peoples: Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Frisians.
2'21" Mr. Martin Sitimas says the Frisian words for cow, lamb, goose, foal, boat, pole, dung, and rain. Frisian "in kopke kofie" is English "a cup of coffee".
3'02" In A.D. 449, the Germanic speakers invaded Britain.
In the area of modern England, the Germanic invaders defeated the Britons, who were a Romanized Celtic population. Celtic words which survive in modern English include mostly place names, such as Avon, Thames, Kent, Dover, combe, and crag.
5'30" The Celtic Britons fled to Ireland, France (Brittany), and Wales.
6'32" A Frenchman speaks Breton with a Welshmen who speaks Welsh.
7'18" A Welshman talks about fishing in English with a Welsh accent.
8'09" Map of Anglo-Saxon kingdoms.
8'42" Language lab students reading Old English (i.e., the Wessex dialect of Anglo Saxon).
10'03" In Old English, the word endings are grammatically important.
se cyning (the king)
thaes cyninges (of the king)
thaem cyninge (to the king)
se cyning meteth thone biscop (the king meets the bishop)
thone biscop meteth se cyning (the king meets the bishop)
11'03" Dr. Christopher Page says that many of the basic, little words of English come from Anglo-Saxon words. Moreover, the density of these words is quite high in any modern English passage.
11'50" The conversion of Anglo-Saxons to Christianity resulted in the borrowing of many Greek and Latin words, e.g., altar, angel, martyr.
12'30" In 793, during the Viking invasion of Britain, the great monestary at Lindesfarne was destroyed. The Viking attacks continued for many years, and more and more Anglo-Saxon territory was conquered. By 870, the only remaining Anglo-Saxon king was Alfred of Wessex.
14'08" Alfred commisioned the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and he encouraged the use of Old English for writing as well as speech.
14'32" Map of the Danelaw. Aflred's kingdom to the southwest, and Denmark to the northeast.
15'08" Fishing huts shaped like Viking longboats.
Personal names and place names from Norse: -by, -wick, -thorpe, -thwaite, toft, scale.
Compare names from Anglo-Saxon: -ham, -ing, -stowe, -sted, -ton.
(Other words borrowed from Old Norse include: get, hit, leg, low, root, skin, same, want, wrong, sky, skein, skirt, skill, skin. At least 900 modern English words are of Norse origin.)
16'25" Mr. Erwin Bilby speaks an old Yorkshire dialect. The postman speaks the typical Yorkshire dialect.
16'43" Mr. Bilby speaks in his old Yorkshire dialect of English, with English subtitles.
18'30" Professor Tom Shippey explains the history of language mixing of Old English and Old Norse, comparing two versions of "I'll sell you the horse that pulls my cart.":
Old Norse: Ek mun selja there hrossit er dregr vagn mine.
Old English: Ic selle the that hors the draegeth minne waegn.
They understand the main words:
vagn=waegn (wagon or cart), hros=hors (horse).
As a result, the noun and verb paradigms become simplified.
21'50" Around the year 1000, the ancestor of modern English was created in the little valleys inhabited by English and Danish farmers.
23'05" In 1066, the French-speaking Normans conquered England.
Old French became the language of government, law, and administration.
Old French and Latin became the language of the Church, and the old English-speaking bishops were replaced by French-speaking bishops.
25'46" By 1155, the writing of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle had ended.
Although English was no longer written, it continued to be spoken by the poor people and rural people. Gradually, the upper class French speakers eventually learned English. By around 1250, English was preferred for colloquial speech, and French had become more-or-less a learned language. Eventually, by the 1400s, English had once again become the standard language of government and learning.
30'05" Because of the long use of French, the English language acquired many new vocabulary words, especially in areas of science, law, and government.
About 10,000 new words were borrowed from French into English, which resulted in English having a vocabulary about twice as large as that of other European languages. The English of the 14th Century (Middle English) was very different from the English of the 11th Century (Old English).
32'00" By the mid-1300s, a grammatically simplified English, with a lot of new French and Latin vocabulary, became popular among merchants, aristocrats, and educated persons of London. Geoffrey Chaucer was the first great author of genius to write in English. Although he began his career writing in French and Latin, he later made the brave avante-guard decision to write in English.
36'01" A professional reading, in Middle English, from the Canterbury Tales.
37'33" Map of English dialects at the time of the first English printer, William Caxton: Northern, Southern, Kentish, West Midlands, East Midlands.
37'15" The language of the Oxford-Cambridge-London triangle, in the East Midlands, became the standard dialect of modern British English.
39'40" By the late 15th Century, English had become a language easily understandable by today's speakers.
39'51" Actors perform the play Mankind (c. 1470) using authentic language, with English subtitles.
42'59" Elizabethan English.
Shakespeare.
62' END OF VIDEO

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The King James Bible.
The first colonies in America:

(1) Virginia and the Tidewater dialect of American English which resembled the Southern English of Devon and Cornwall;
(2) Massachusetts and the New England dialect of American English which resembled the East Midlands English of East Anglia.