-
410
Anglo - Saxon
Romans left Britain. The saxons, the Angles and the Jutes (Germanic tribes) arrived to name the language as "Anglo - saxon" It was more useful for the daily and simple things tah Latin vocabulary. They put their god´s names to some days of the week. -
597
Christian Missionaries
Augustine arrived on the Isle of Thanet in 597 and established his base at the main town of Canterbury. He was sent by Pope Gregory I to head Kent mission. They brought more latin words to English Language (Lyle, Marjorie, 2002) -
800
Vikings
c.800
They brought action - man words, such as, drag, ransack, fast and die. They gave two of around 2000 words to the English Language -
1066
The Norman Conquest
William the conqueror invaded England. He brought with him the French Language and declare it the official language for England. It was mostly used for business and Latin for Church. Even these were the "official languages" for England, the common english people still talked in English, but they absorbed about 10,000 new words from the normans -
Period: 1337 to 1453
The Hundred Years War
At this period, English nation took their new war - like lingo. The war lasted 116 years -
Period: 1564 to
William Shakespeare
He gave about 2,000 new words and phrases. Some examples are: "eyeball", "puppy dog", and "anchovy". It is possible that some of these words were used before Shakespeare, but his poetry showed the world that English was a rich and a vibrant language. -
American English
When British People arrived to America they instatly started to borrow word from the native american to name some plants and animals they met there. -
The King James Bible
A team of Scribes created a new translation of the Bible. This language was adopted by strenght to strenght making it's way to the linguistic roots. English adopted a lot of words frome this Bible version -
Period: to
English and Empire
Britains started to Travel taking lands, looking for wealth, natural resources an total obedience to the crown. With this, they got some new words and culture:
- In the caribbean: Barbecue and Canoe (c.1650 and c.1550)
- In India: Yoga and Cummerbund (1820 and c.1610)
- And some words from África (c.1670) and Australia (1852) -
The English of Science
Suddenly, Britain was full of physicists. The Royal Society was created from nowhere working at first, in latin, but by the time, working in English. Some of the Physicists in Britain:
- Robert Hooke (b.1635 - d.1703)
- Robert Boyle (b.1627 - d.1691)
- Isaac Newton (b.1643 - d.1727) -
Period: to
British Empire
It globbed up around 10 million square miles, 400 million people and nearly a hundred thousand gin and tonics leaving varieties of English to develop all over the globe. -
The Age of the Dictionary
A new beed of men called lexicographers tried to put on end to the creation of more english words that people spell slightly different.
Dr. Johnson, created the first dictionary that took 9 years to create. This book contained 42,773 meanings
But there were more words created
In 1857 The Oxford English Dictionary was invented and it is revised since 1928 tht it was finished -
Internet English
The first E- mail was sent in 1972, and with the creation of the internet (1991) There were invented more words with it, such as: Download (1980), Fire wall (1990), blog (1998) and reboot (1982) and also there were were created a lot of abbreviations like: LOL, TGIF, etc. -
Global English
We have seen how English absorbs, evolve an Invades over other languages and cultures.
At the moment, there are around 1.5 billion people speaking English. From these:
- About a quarter are native speakers,
- Another quarter talk English as their second language
- And the other half Know how to communicate by these language
