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English Language - History and Origins

  • 450

    Anglo-Saxon

    Anglo-Saxon
    The Romans leave Britain, and a lot of tribes such as the Angles and Saxons Strat flooding in.
    This tribes leaved behind their Latin language, using simple and daily frases, also four days of the week are named in honor of their gods.
    Later came the Christians and vikings who also contributed with a lot of words.
  • 1066

    The Norman Conquest

    The Norman Conquest
    William the conquer invades England bringing new concepts such as the French language.
    French was used for all official bussines with words like judge and justice.
    Latin was still used in church but the common language was English.
    The English adopted many words from the Normans.
  • Period: 1502 to

    American English

    When the Britains came to America, the needed words for all the new plants and animals, so they used the words from the native Americans. America created new words for capitalism, and adapted words from all over the world.
  • Period: 1564 to

    Shakespeare

    Shakespeare invented about 2,000 handy-words and showy-words, like eyeball and anchovy (handy-words), besmirch and dauntless (showy-words).
    He showed the world that English is a rich and unique language.
  • The King James Bible

    The King James Bible
    There was a knew translation of the Bible into books. This brought a hole glossary of morality and metaphors that still shape the way English is spoken today.
  • The English of Science

    The English of Science
    Britain was full of physicists, The Royal Society was formed; at first they worked in latin, then they realize that they all spoke english and they could transform our understanding of the universe much quicker by speaking their own language. Science was advancing much quicker so they had to invent words like acid, gravity, electricity, pendulum, cardiac, tonsil, among others.
  • Period: to

    The Age of Dictionary

    Everyone was spelling the words slightly different, and the lexicographers wanted to put and end to this anarchy.
    Dr. Johnson took 9 years to write a dictionary that contained 42,000,773 entries. With this, you could understand exactly what people where saying and have a standard spelling. After this, words continued being invented and in 1857 a new book was made and it became the Oxford English Dictionary, although it took another 70 years to finish (1928).
  • Period: to

    English and Empire

    Britain decided to take the English language on "tour", asking for land, wealth, natural resources, total obedience of the crown and a few local words in return. They brought the word cannibal from the Caribbean, from Africa words like voodoo and zombie.
    Between the years of Napoleon and the WWI the British Empire gobbled up around 10,000,000 square miles and 400,000,000 million people, leaving new varieties of english to develop all over the world.
  • Period: to

    Internet English

    n 1972 the first email was sent, soon the internet arrived and new words where invented and abbreviations where used.
  • Global English

    Global English
    Right now about 1.5 billion people speak english. Right now the language has very little to do with England.