![]() None of the early forms of English are easily recognizable as English to modern speakers. Many other vowel sounds also changed in a similar manner. Middle English words like hus and ut came to be pronounced house and out. The other source of change, during the fifteenth and sixteenth-centuries, was a major shift in the pronunciation of many of the vowels. One was the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth-century, which resulted in a deliberate effort to standardize the various dialects of English, mostly in favor of the dialect spoken by the elite. The change to Modern English had two main causes. This was the beginning of Middle English, which lasted another 500 years or so. French is a Latin-based language, and it is by far the greatest source of the Latin-based words in English today almost 10,000 French words were adopted into the English of the time period. ![]() New French rulers brought the French language. In 1066 AD, England was invaded by William the Conqueror from Normandy, France. This form of English, generally referred to as Old English, lasted for about 500 years. At this point, the languages spoken in England included those Germanic languages, which gradually merged as various dialects of English, with a small influence from the Celtic languages, some Latin from the Romans, and a large influence from Viking invaders. These included the languages of the Angles and the Saxons, whose names form the origin of the term Anglo-Saxon and of the name of England itself-Angle-land. When the Roman Empire was defeated in about 500 AD by Germanic speaking tribes from northern Europe (the “barbarians”), a number of those related Germanic languages came to be spoken in various parts of what would become England. ![]() This was the edge of their empire their presence there was not as strong as it was on the European mainland. The Romans invaded the islands in the first-century AD, bringing their Latin language with them. England was originally populated by Celtic peoples, the ancestors of today’s Irish, Scots, and Welsh. Let’s briefly examine the history of the English language as an example of these processes of change. \)Ī system of classification groups of languages classified together based on words that have the same or similar meanings.
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