Birth Of Language Flashcards
The closest language to Old English is currently spoken in
Friesland
When was Old English spoken?
450 TO 1066 CE
With whom did Old English (replaced celts) begin?
- The Angles, Saxon, and Jutes (Germanic people)
- tribes who lived along the North Sea
- 450 CE (post Roman), they began to invade the islands (known as Britannia)
Where did Celts go when Angles, Saxons and Jutes invaded Britannia?
Celts, (lived in Britannia for about 1000 years) fled to what is now Wales, Ireland and Scotland and northern France
What did the invaders (from North Sea) bring?
A German language that in its new setting became Anglo-Saxon or Old English
When was Beowulf written?
It was passed along orally, until scribes recorded it in the 8th century.
How many words were spoken in Old English?
25,000
When did Christian missionaries come to England?
They came in 597 CE
Why was Christianity’s arrival important?
Priests, monks and nuns were the first to write in Old English (used the Roman alphabet and added extra symbols to stand for sounds that did not exist in Latin)
What happened 850 CE? What did they do?
An Invasion From Norseman (Scandinavia.). Vikings introduced elements of the Old Norse language into English (ex. pronouns)
When was Middle English spoken?
1066 TO 1485 CE
How did the French language come to England?
The French conquered England in 1066 at Battle of
Hastings. New conquerors came from Normandy, a
province of France across the English Channel
How did French words come to English language?
300 years after the invasion of Normans, French was the official language of the English court, of
government of art, society and literature
French words flooded into the English language -
many dealing with government, feudalism and the
church
Who wrote the Canterbury Tales?
Poet Geoffrey Chaucer
What was Middle English?
Mixture of Old English and French
When was the printing press invented and by whom?
1456 by Johann Gutenberg of Germany
Why was the invention of the printing press important?
- signifies the beginning of Renaissance
- made books available and cheaper - and more people learned to read
Who brought the printing press to England?
William Caxton brought printing to
England in 1474
What happened during the Renaissance with Latin and Greek?
Greek and Latin texts began to be translated into English, but there were no English words to express the Greek and Latin words - therefore the translators
added words. Many were created by adding prefixes and suffixes to Latin Stems.
What percentage of words in modern English are from Latin and Greek origin
about 65%
How many people speak English worldwide as their first language?
400 million
For how many people is English a second language?
375 million
English is an official language of ___ countries
75 countries Also the language of trade and commerce
Runic was written in straight lines so it could be _____
Carved into stone or wood
Who threatened the existence of Old English in the 800s
?
The Vikings
People living in north-eastern Europe spoke a language or group of languages at the time ____ that historians call:
Proto-Indo-European (6000 years ago)
