Who created English?

A brief introduction to the historical origin of English

The various periods experienced by ancient Europe are somewhat similar to those of China in the East, or coincidentally, only delayed for centuries. In the East, after the decline of the Zhou Dynasty, the vassal states began to dispute. In the west, the Roman Empire was divided into East Rome and West Rome in 286. In the fifth century, the once powerful Roman Empire finally disappeared. An important result of the demise of the Roman Empire was the invasion and plunder of many "barbaric" tribes in northern Europe, and the Mediterranean civilization, which was mature in the ancient Greek city-state era and accompanied by the prosperity and glory of the empire, was also doomed to disaster.

We already know that English is not the mother tongue of the British Isles. It was brought by three Germanic tribes, the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes, in the 5th century. Before that, people living in Britain spoke Celtic.

The native places of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes belonging to Germanic tribes are present-day Denmark and northern Germany. They crossed the North Sea to England and soon drove the Celtic-speaking locals to remote Scotland and Wales. Some of them had to migrate to continental Europe.

These Germanic tribes invaded from northern Europe established their own kingdom in Britain. Among them, seven are very powerful. They are Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex, Essex, Sussex, East Anglia and Kent.

The place where the Angles used to live was called Engel. Their language is "English ISC"-this is the origin of the word "English" today.

English belongs to the Germanic family of Indo-European languages. Tracing back to the source, I'll start with the Indo-European family.

Indo-European is considered to be the language used by tribes living in the forests of the northern Black Sea (present-day Ukraine) in the Neolithic Age (before 7000 BC). Around 3500-2500 BC, they began to migrate to western Europe, the Mediterranean, Scandinavia and even India in the East. Their language then spread and differentiated into various languages in the Indo-European family.

The Indo-European language family has twelve branches, and there are still ten branches in use. The main branches are briefly introduced below.

Celtic branch-this is the smallest branch, but it has to be mentioned because it is mainly used in Britain today. Celtic originated in Central Europe and once ruled the whole of Western Europe around 400 BC. Celts migrated to the British Isles more than two thousand years ago. Later, after the Germanic-speaking Anglo-Saxons came to England, the Celts were driven to Wales, Ireland and Scotland. Celtic became Welsh, Irish Gaelic and Scottish Gaelic today. Some Celts returned to France in continental Europe and lived in Brittany Peninsula. The language they speak is Brittany. All other Celtic languages have disappeared. The sentence structure of Welsh is "verb+subject+object"; Irish literature is the oldest in Europe (second only to Greek and Latin).

Germanic branch-these languages evolved from old Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon. Influenced by early Christian missionaries, most Germanic languages and Celtic languages use Latin letters. English belongs to this branch. Some facts about English are as follows: English is the second largest spoken language in the world-the first is our Chinese; English is the most widely used; English is the language of science and technology; English has the richest vocabulary; English is the mother tongue in most countries and regions.

The languages most closely related to English are German and Dutch. Also belonging to the Germanic language family are Danish, Norwegian, Swedish (Swedish has intonation, which is not common in Indo-European languages, but somewhat similar to our Chinese) and Icelandic. Other languages that have disappeared are Gothic (Central Europe), Frankish (France, not French), Lombardy (Danube region) and Vandal (North Africa).

Most languages of Indo-European family have changed in "case" and "sex". This is mainly reflected in nouns/pronouns, and of course verbs and so on will change accordingly. German nouns have four kinds of "case" and three kinds of "nature" changes, such as das Herz (the first case, as the subject), des Herzens (the second case, as the attribute, equivalent to the heart), dem Herzen (the third case, equivalent to the indirect object) and das Herz (the fourth case, equivalent to the direct object); If you add the plural of Di Herzen, De herzen, Deng Herzen and Di herzen, that's eight kinds of grids. There are three kinds of nouns: masculine, feminine and neuter, such as der Lehrer (teacher, masculine), die Universitat (university, feminine) and das Buch (book, neuter). There is basically no such change in case and sex in English, but it can still be seen in some words, such as pronoun case I (first case), my (second case), me (third and fourth cases), we (first case plural), our (second case plural) and us (third and fourth case plural). The legacy of gender in English is reflected in some affixes, most of which change with the natural gender of things, such as monitor (positive), monitress (negative), tiger (positive), tiger (negative) and fortress (negative), and gender is gone.

Latin branch, Italian or Romance-all these languages have evolved from Latin. Latin is the most important classical language in Europe, although it has disappeared from people's mouths. For a long time, it used to be the main tool for scientific communication with the church. Its letters are still used in most languages.

In the Latin family, Italian and Portuguese can be regarded as the core direct languages of Latin. Spanish is influenced by Arabic and Basque. Romanian is deeply branded with the surrounding Slavic languages. Another important language, French, has gone further in the evolution of Latin, and its pronunciation is very different, but it has more traces of Germanic and Celtic, but there are still some traces of Latin in spelling. More than a thousand years ago, Spanish and Portuguese were the same language. Spanish is the most widely used language in Latin. Except Spain, most countries in Latin America speak Spanish, which is one of the five official languages of the United Nations.

The grammatical system of Latin has a very important influence on many languages in the world. Its nouns include three kinds of "sex" and six kinds of "case". Especially its sentence structure (subject, predicate, object, etc. ) has become the norm in many other languages. Ma Shi Wen Tong, the first grammar book in Chinese, is a "Latin method", and its influence is so great that today's Chinese grammar can't get rid of it anyway.

Last but not least, a very important branch is Slavic language, which is used in Eastern Europe. With the disintegration of the Roman Empire in the 4th century (DC in 364) and the disintegration in the 5th century, the Christian Church also split into the Catholic Church in the West and the Orthodox Church in the East. In Catholicism, people still use Latin letters, while in Orthodox areas, people use Cyrillic letters, which evolved from Greek and are used in Slavic languages. Many Slavic languages are very similar, but the characters are slightly different. For example, Croatian and Serbian are actually one language. Slavic languages are characterized by their consonant combinations and a large number of nouns (up to seven). The oldest Slavic language is Bulgarian; The most important thing is Russian. Other main languages are Polish, Ukrainian, Czech, Slovak and so on.

In the Indo-European language family, people often say that the three branches are the Germanic branch, the Latin branch and the Slavic branch mentioned above. What is not mentioned is: Baltic branch (the representative languages are Lithuanian and Latvian), Greek branch (the only remaining language is Greek) and Ilirian branch (the representative language is Albanian). The branch of Armenian (and now Armenian) and the branch of Iranian (both evolved from ancient Persian), the largest of which is Iranian-a considerable number of people in Afghanistan speak Iranian, followed by Kurdish. Only the Kurds living in Turkey, Syria, Iran, Iraq and other countries today do not belong to their own countries), and the branches of Hindi (all evolved from Sanskrit) are the most diverse language branches, such as Hindi, Pali-Buddhist, Urdu, Nepalese, Nepali and Bengali. ). In addition, there are two branches, Anatolia branch and Tohoku branch, and there is no existing language.

The above is an overview of the Indo-European family to which English belongs. Since all the languages spoken here belong to the same language family, it can basically be said that they all evolved from the same language-ancient Indo-European, so we should always find some connections among them. This is also a fact. -Englishman william jones (1748- 1794) found that Sanskrit was strikingly similar to other European languages, which made this ancient language return to the Indo-European family. As far as English is concerned, it is a member of the Germanic branch and has a natural connection with German. In the development of English, it is inextricably linked with Latin and French. These languages have obvious traces in English, which we should know when learning English.