a brief history of the English language

1. Why English Spelling is Such a Mess (Or, a Brief History of the English Language)

2. Blame These Guys for Starting It In the 9th Century, Viking raiders began taking over the island we now know as England.

3. Both spoke Germanic. Their languages merged to form Old English. The two most powerful invading tribes were the Angles and the Saxons

4. Germanic Languages Beat Out Celtic Soon, everybody left who spoke Celtic was crammed into Ireland or Wales or Scotland. Scotland

5. Or Maybe We Should Blame Caesar… Actually, the Celtic language had already been mixed up with Latin, thanks to the Roman Empire invading Britain in 55 BC.

6. Hwaet! So, you start with Celtic, mix in Latin, add Germanic, bring to a boil and get Old English, but it doesn’t stop there…

7. In 1066, the Normans conquered Britain, and guess what? They spoke French!

8. Since the King spoke French… oui French became the language of the nobles, and only peasants spoke English

9. Buy and Sell? Vin? You had to learn Frenchwords to deal with people with money.

10. The Printing Press Made a Mess! Pronunciation kept changing, but printing stopped spelling from keeping up with the changes

11. British trade by ship expanded world-wide Ketchup! Tycoon! and more foreign words were borrowed into English

12. Colonization brought more foreign words into English hickory

13. The world’s largest vocabulary Borrowing has made the English lexicon huge, versatile, expressive, and complex

14. Close to a Universal Language Upwards of 350 million people speak English as their first language, with many morethan that using it as a second language

15. So, that’s how its history made such an amazing mess of English And it keeps on borrowing, growing, and changing, even as we speak.