However, that's neither here nor there.
"Where did the English language come from?" is the obvious question to ask, as the title of this episode is called The Mother Tongue. Now, I've always wondered why a lot of words were similar all across the world, no matter how weird it seemed. Using this, people were able to track back the history of the language. Or something.
Anglo-Saxons. Freesians. Celts.
India. Denmark. Ireland.
As far as I can tell, English has been around in a bunch of places and not just the British Isles. This is pretty interesting, since languages keep changing. Through these different places English has come through, we can sometimes see glimpses of how English used to be and how it came to be. If I were to go back a couple hundred years and talk to various people, I would probably be made fun of for talking like their standard exotic dancers. I'm thinking so much has changed since then, and I'm pretty sure the language will continue to change. That's another thing. At what point in the past was English not English?
Anyway, seeing all the plastic wrappers English has scattered and littered all around the world, it isn't surprising to see all the different influences all over and the bacteria the candy itself has collected. I'm not saying that the bacteria is bad though. I just couldn't think of a better metaphor. Don't judge.
Oh, and just as a random thought, I found a reason for which English shouldn't become de-globalized:
The Story of English. Dir. Robert MacNeil, Robert McCrum, and William Cran. BBC, 1986. 27 Aug. 2009. Web. 13 Jan. 2013.
When watching the second episode of The Story of English I also reflected on the type of English that we know as “English”. When did archaic English start being something else?
ReplyDeleteAs time goes by and the language evolves, the resulting product will probably not sound like the original at all. I believe that the answer can be found in the way words are structured, the syllables, prefixes and suffixes. If all these traits are shared then different types of English can be found to be part of the same.
Although your metaphor couldn't be a better way of explaining what English (the candy) has done by going all over the world, i don't think that it is either good bacteria or bad bacteria, it just more newer candy. After some time the new words or styles it acquires from other countries and languages turn into what could be called standard English, not separate mixes of dialects or aggregates of the language. Also, English has always been English, it just becomes archaic and unpopular but it has been English the whole time.
ReplyDelete