Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: History of English

Episode Date: August 9, 2023

Who spoke English first and what was it like? Nothing like it is today. Listen in to learn all about it. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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or wherever you get your podcasts and start your morning with me. Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, there's Chuck Jerry's here and if you'd never know us before we're speaking English. So we're going to talk about the history of the English language because that's the one we use right now. Yeah, the briefest history because we certainly could have done like a really robust full episode on this. Yeah. But I like this short version. And we want to thank Englishclub.com and a particular, the conversation.com and a professor

of lit at the University of Bristol name ad putter. Go fighting Abbey's. Is that what it is? He got me again. But anyway, putter really get article that helped out with this one, but we're talking about the history of the English language briefly. Because I was just kind of curious, like who are the first people to speak English? And the first English is what you have to talk about first, which is of course old English, which came about right after the Romans left Britain. This is a very long time ago. They colonized Britain, but things aren't going so great in the Roman Empire, so we're going to leave.

Yeah, so it's just interesting that Romans spoke Latin, but the Brit spoke Celtic. And then after the Romans left, because their empire was crumbling all around them, the Brits still kept speaking Celtic, but not for very long, because the Romans had basically been occupying Britain, but they had also been in turn protecting it. But as the Roman Empire crumbled, it left Britain totally vulnerable and open to invasion, and in very short order, that's exactly what happened. Three Germanic tribes, the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes, all basically came down from northern Germany, Denmark area, and said, we own this place now. You guys are going to start speaking like us.

Yeah, they spoke what's called North Sea Germanic. And those Celtic speakers were kind of, they ended up where they ended up, which was North and West, in what we now call Ireland and Scotland and Wales. So the Angles, which was one of those Germanic tribes, like you've ever heard Anglo-Saxon, that was because they were the angles and the Saxons

in the Jutes, two of the three of those tribes were the angles and the Saxons. And once they got to Britain, their language was referred to as what we would call old English or Anglo-Saxon. And it is the original form of English, and this was used in the early Middle Ages, but this is not anything that you would recognize as English as we know it today, except for just a few words here and there. Yeah, like his, he, some of these really, really old words, and remember he, they think, as possibly, as old as humanity, as far as words go. That was already in use.

But yeah, it didn't bear much of a resemblance. And so Old English Chuck was in use, I think from about 452, 1,100 CE. Yeah, and you know, the original thing that got me looking for this was if they could pinpoint like, not necessarily the people, but who the first English speakers were. But our friend, Professor Putter here actually does name a couple of people. And this

is, you know, this is sort of as legend goes. But when the Germanic tribes came through, they asked a couple of those leaders, Hingist and Horsa, to come in and help protect the country they showed up they and of course again this is this is as the story goes we really don't know if it's true or not but they would have been the ones that brought in this old english so technically you could say that they were maybe the first english speakers as we know it as old english

that's so fascinating like if these guys aren't legendary, they are the first English speakers in England or Britain. Yeah. So Old English stuck around until the Normans came along. So in 1066, William the Conqueror, the head of the Normans, he was the Duke of Normandy, which is in France today, showed up in England and said, hangast, horse, you guys are a few hundred years old it's time for you to hand over the reins to me, William the Conqueror. And it just so happens since he was from what's today part of modern France, he spoke what

you would kind of recognize as a type of French. And so the Normans brought French to England. But rather than it becoming totally widespread, it actually became part of what Professor Putter calls a linguistic class division, where the royal court and the upper classes spoke the King's French, and then the lower classes continued to speak Old English. Yeah. And what's going to happen here, of course. And as we'll see, as England got to conquering for hundreds of years, you pick up on words as you move about the earth. And in this case, a lot of French words were added to what was now known as middle English. Do you want

to hear one that I guessed was right? Yeah. Sausage. Oh yeah. Sausage. Yeah. Let's take a break. When we come back, we'll talk about a big change that happened in Middle English pronunciation that linguists are still trying to figure out right after this. So this is like if you've ever read Chaucacer, which I did in college, like the Canterbury Tales, this is, I thought like we read Old English, some in college, but there's no way, because when I saw examples of Old English, it's not even discipleable, hardly.

What I was reading was Middle English, and that's Chaucer was and that was, you know, that's a challenge as well. But it definitely wasn't old English. And actually toward the latter part of middle English is when something called the great vowel shift happened, which basically shortened vowel sounds like a lot. And it happened pretty quickly, apparently. Yeah, they used to say for sheep, they would shape. Oh I thought you were gonna say they said shhhhhh. No, no. And I didn't understand how he said that. Shorten from shape to sheep, sheep sounds like it's longer than shape, but there was a huge change in vowel pronunciation in English around this time. And from what I saw there totally

baffled as to why this happened. They just know that it did around this time. And that actually contributed to another huge change in the English language, at least spoken English with this huge great vowel shift. Yeah, and then from there the changes were much more subtle. It was like I said, England was conquering from all over the world. So little words got added here and there. Printing was a thing now. So they're like, you know, we need to kind of standardize everything because people are

reading for the first time and books are kind of cheap. And they're more available. So the dialect of London, which is where the printing industry was sort of lodged at first, became the dialect of the English language in the basis of the first English dictionary. This is what we would call basically early modern English. And it's the English as we know it. The difference between early modern and late modern is just a lot more words because as the world evolved and technology evolved and things like that, you just needed more words. Well, plus also, the Brits were pretty firmly in charge of the world

for a while, and they picked up a lot of words from different corners of the British Empire. So, for example, the word bandana comes from India. Did you know that? I did not know that. That's considered an English word, even though it wasn't originally an English word. It just got absorbed into the English language and it became a further addition to the modern, late modern English vocabulary. When you look at the word though, it totally looks like an Indian word. Yeah, it totally.

Bandana was probably, I imagine, the A was imagine the a was changed right and there's probably a Y in there somewhere that really found shift just it up One and more person we should shout out though, and this was I just thought was sort of an interesting addendum that Dr. Putter had found was kind of shouting out the first poet As far as English poet and this was someone named Cadm on C A E D-E-D-M-O-N. Hail, Cadmone. And there was a historian monk named B-E-D-E.

I don't know if that's Bede or... It's just Bede. Oh, it is Bede. Isn't that cute? That's so cute. But I think Bede is the one who committed Cadmone's story to history, which is pretty great, because Cadmone was someone who was illiterate basically. And as the story goes, I got this gift of poetry from God, and was the first English poet as we know it,

which means it's Old English, which means looking at these words is impossible. It looks like someone was typing and like passed out or something. It does. You're going to take a shot at it. I mean, I'll try. Okay. These are the first lines of a poem which translated would mean now we must praise the guardian of the heavenly kingdom, the rulers might and his plan, but it's written in Old English as a poem. It was new, as in you. New Skolon Haryon,

heel fond, russes, weird, metotus, mit, and his, and his, and I got that part, and his much, much a punk. So, yeah, much, is it that weird B, is that how do you pronounce the B? I don't even know. It's the thing that's it's like am I a B or am I a P? I can't decide so I'll just I'll be both for all right it so it's confusing

I'm not sure what that even is but Modge will say bonk Modge bonk means plan Yeah, I'm old English so from now on I'm gonna say don't worry. I have a Modge bonk Old English. So from now on I'm going to say don't worry. I have a Modjbong. Oh, I hope you remember that. I want to say Modjbong from now on on the show. All right. We'll try to remember. All right. All right. So that's the Modjbong. That's what we're going to do. That's right. Okay. First. You just cemented it. But it is interesting to say that A&N and his were both, I mean, this is a thousand or almost two thousand years ago, this guy wrote this and you can look both, I mean, this is a thousand, or almost 2,000 years ago, this guy wrote this,

and you can look at it and say, oh, I noticed those two at least, and in his. I don't know what the rest says, but in his is in there. Right. So that was it. And we take our hats off to Professor Putter and the University of Bristol,

whose mascot I still could not find, even though I kind of looked it up while we were recording. it you have mascots if you don't have sports teams? Yeah, I think just to kind of create general goodwill among the student population That's the real function of a mascot. I just didn't know if that was an American thing or what? I don't know. Well find out if you go to University of Bristol or even just know what their mascot is right in and let us know, okay? All right good much much, Buck. Yeah. Short stuff is out.

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