JovialJman - English 101 (Some Interesting English Concepts)

Dictionaries are a good way to show English.

English being one of the most widely spoken languages, spoken by about 1.5 billion people or more, have very interesting roots and things about it that not many people know. Lets talk about that.

Vsauce has done a video with the title of ENGLISH. I will talk about some of the points Michael made, but I highly recommend you watch the video. In the year 400 A.D. and earlier, there were people that were named Angles, (not because they were good at maths, teehee), and after the roman ruling period a lot of the Angles migrated from their homeland Anglii, (what is now northern Germany) to a land called Britannia, (Britain) which was named after the people that lived there. Now so many of these Angles lived on this island that it was referred to as Angel land, which then came to be the county name of England.

This image is taken from wikipedia, showing an early map of North Africa, Europe and a bit of Asia

Now in 1066, the normans invaded the land and won, and this event is believed to be the biggest change to the English language. One of the changes that the normans brought were the words of the meat they ate, (i.e. pork and beef), while the natives still called the animals with their own words, (i.e. pig and cow), and because of this, English is one of the very few languages that have different words for the meat of the animal then the name of the animal itself.

Now if you take that into consideration, you will have Germanic derived words, and Latin derived words. English has taken a lot of words from other languages and calls them english. Greek derived words are used for specific things, like things in science and biology, where as informal, and rude things would be germanic, (this is due to the Normans making that the common tongue offensive) and there are others.

Accents and dialects are something on their own as well. For instance Americans sound quite different to Europeans, and both of those nation speakers would sound different to people that are taught and brought up in another language then learnt to speak english. Some nations have rather Stereotypical accents associated with them. Like in the beginning of this paragraph when I generalized the countries you would most probably think of one accent for the group, where in fact in one country there may be 10's of accents. This to some degree may also lend itself to the spelling differences as well.

Americans spell some words different to those of Britain, or have different words for them entirely. Colour and color is a good example of that, gas and petrol is another, (gas coming from Gasoline and petrol from petroleum). Tom Scott has done a few videos on english in this playlist, and I would recommend watching all of them as it is very interesting. OP english is a widely debated subject on pronunciation. How would people in the Shakespearean era sound like? Well this video may help.

Now English is still evolving and many new words are made every year. Noob has made its way into the Oxford Dictionary, whereas just a few years ago it was only considered slang. Many words like this have slowly made their way into our speech. Now when does a noise become a new word? Well this is hard to answer directly, but Oxford Dictionary, (the place where many Scrabble players and others will look to see if a certian arrangement of letters is a legitimate word) usually adds a word to their list when it becomes apparent that it is used by enough people often enough with a particular meaning for it.

Now english is known to be really confusing to learn if you are not a native speaker already, words have silent letters in them that seem to serve no purpose, (pterodactyl is one), and others words that you would think would mean one thing but means the opposite or something completely different, (these words are known as misnomers one of which is inflammable which I have mentioned before). Then you get words that were in the dictionary that weren't actually meant to be there. Dord is a famous example of this, and Vsauce made a brilliant video on it, (I seem to really like Vsauce, but who wouldn't)

Now, (sadly because it is early morning), I have to end this post. This was more of a history lesson, but don't fret as I shall continue this topic in the next post where I talk about point of view and grammar to a certian extent. I am sorry i have been MIA these past several days, but I am back in action and shall post the following blogs in a more timely manner to suit you, the readers, a bit better. I hope you have enjoyed today's post (supposed to be yesterday) and if you did, or would like to ask, tell me/us anything please do so in the comments below and/or on Facebook/Twitter. If you would like to see the newest post as they are published please follow us on Twitter and/or like us on Facebook using the associated buttons on the bar to the left. Thank you for taking the time to read today's post, and I hope you have/had a wonderful day.

Keep learning comrades.