“Whan the Aprill with his
shoures shoot/ The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,/ And bathed every veyne in swich licour…”
This passage isn’t a foreign
language. It’s the prologue to one of
the greatest works in English literature, The
Canterbury Tales. Geoffrey Chaucer,
considered to be one of the greatest English authors who was alive and kicking
way back in the 12th century, wrote it. However, his great work is indiscernible now because he wrote in
the English of his time, Middle English.
Middle English is one of
three versions of the English Language.
The other versions are unoriginally named: Old English and New
English.
Old English evolved from
German back around 449 AD. The
Anglo-Saxons, a bunch of Germanic people who lived in huts made from mud and
dung, invaded the British Isles and started speaking Old English around the
same time the marble city of Rome fell and Atilla was winning battles for the
Huns. That was the birth of Old
English.
“It [Old English] looks
pretty foreign and there are very few words that we would recognize today,”
said Ms. Connie Cavel, English teacher.
Old English was mostly an oral language as the hut-dwelling Saxons cared
more about surviving life with no technology and poor agricultural methods than
writing literature. Ironically, the
great English epic, Beowulf, was written during this period.
In the year 1066 AD, a great
thing happened. No, they did not invent
sliced bread; instead, William the Bastard of Normandy successfully defeated
the Saxons, those hut dwelling people, and tastefully changed his name to
William the Conqueror. Now that the
Normans were in charge, it was time to make all of England adapt to them; thus
the language was made much more French, and Middle English was born. “Middle English sounded very pretty. It had a sing-song quality to it. Our
English today is much more twangy and harsh sounding, except for Shakespeare,
who put words together beautifully,” said Cavel.
Around the time of the
Tudors, English changed again. Remember
the Tudors? The family that boasted
Henry the VIII, that short hairy king with umpteen wives, Bloody Mary, the overbearing
Catholic and Elizabeth, the beloved spunky red haired queen. At this time, all
the vowels were changed from the old sounding aw-ay-ee-O-oo to the new groovy
cool ay-ee-eye-O-you. This cool,
new-sounding language was called New English.
Shakespeare wrote some neat stuff in this new language, such as Macbeth and The Twelfth Night.
English, of course, is still
evolving. Shakespeare’s language is
barely recognizable nowadays and it’s considered New English. It appears a newer English is forming from
the influence of technology, Spanish, slang and various other effects of
time. Languages never really stop
evolving, which is pretty cool.
Examine the evolution of the
word “cute.” Way back in Old English, it meant bow-legged. Over the years, babies, of course, were
described as bow-legged since they can’t stand up straight. Babies were also described as being adorable
creatures, and thus the definition of cute changed from bow-legged to
endearing. More recently, people find
cute babies attractive and worthy of coddling as they similarily find
good-looking, potential mates. The
definitions crossed again, and now cute has gone from describing bow-legged
individuals to good-looking and desirable ones. Isn’t that weird?
Just imagine how English
will continue to change. Written and conversational English are starting to
merge because of instant messenger.
That’s a rather startling prospect since conversational English
generally lacks proper grammar and syntax.
What effect will this have on the future of English? Hopefully online acronyms like lol, jk and
OMG won’t become commonplace. No one
can know the future for sure, except may be gypsies, but they don’t speak
English and thus don’t care about its future.
We’ll just have to wait and see.
I’d recommend popping some popcorn, though; evolution’s quite a long wait.