That it has been spoken for longer than it has been written and is even the oldest language.
Categorized | Affiliate Marketing 101
Is It Possible That English Has Been A Secret Language That Other Languages Grew Towards And Around?
Posted on December 15, 2012.
Way back in the late stone age there was a group of people in central Russia or perhaps in western Asia who spoke a language we have decided to call Indo-European for no better reason that than its speakers eventually migrated all over Europe and southwards as far as the Indian subcontinent. As they dispersed the language they spoke gradually broke up into different dialects and these, over the intervening five or six thousand years into languages that were no longer mutually intelligible. The first of these people who left written records were the ancient Hittites of Anatolia (present-day central Turkey), aroudn 1500 BC. The first word on these records that anyone managed to understand was “wattar” meaning, surprise, surprise, “water.” Those Indo-Europeans reaching North-west Europe were by the time they arrived speaking what has been called by German scholars, “Urgermanisch”. The version spoken in Holland and Germany is known as West Germanic, and the dialect of “Low West Germanic” spoken by the fisher folk (“anglers”) along the coast gave rise to Friesian (still spoken by 500,000 inhabitants of the islands where Denmark meets Germany) and Angle, which was carried from Schleswig-Holstein over the sea to “England” in the sixth century, whence the old jingle “White bread and green cheese is good English and good Fries.” The Angles and their Saxon neighbours were conquered in 1066 by French-speaking Normans, and their language only survived as the “patois” of peasants until society was transformed by the Black Death which allowed some English folk to rise into the middle class. Then in 1476, a printer named William Caxton realised that promoting English as a literary language would give him a niche market safe from imported books in French and Latin. He practically invented modern English for his purely commercial purposes, and the rest, as they say, is history. As the English eventually won out over their Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and French rivals in building up colonial empires, they took Caxton’s language all over the world.
You could say that every language has been spoken for longer than it has been written – that simply depends on the spread of literacy into its territory in the distant past.
English is a Germanic language, descended from Proto-Germanic, just like other Germanic languages – Dutch, German, and all the Scandinavian languages. English developed from a number of Germanic dialects brought to Britain by invading tribes known as the Angles, Jutes and Saxons, about 1,600 years ago. We call that oldest recorded form of English ” Anglo-Saxon” though the oldest written texts are not qjuite that old – even Beowulf was written down long after the poem was known and recited.
For really old languages, you have to look further east, at Sanskrit for example.
In short:
– Yes it is possible that it is the oldest language, but not likely.
– Even if it is the oldest language, the form of English spoken back then would not really be classified as English, even though it would be the direct language-ancestor of modern English.
More at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-…
No, there are 4 variations of English. Old English, Middle English, Shakespeare English and Modern English. Old English being the oldest was spoken since around 400A.D. in England. The language came from the Frisians which lived on the islands off the coast of the Netherlands who then migrated to England. This is why Old Frisian and Old English are mutually intelligible to some extent.
No.
“Is it possible that English has been a secret language”
– No, it has never been a “secret” language (whatever that is supposed to mean).
“… that other languages grew towards and around?”
Again, what does that mean? Since English became the most important lingua franca in the 20th century (esp. after WWII), many other languages have adopted loanwords from English. But that’s about it.
“That it has been spoken for longer than it has been written”
Yes, but that applies to almost all languages.
“and is even the oldest language”
LOL, no. It is a relatively new language – its earliest form (Old English) only emerged in 5th century AD.
well it is the most used language in the world so maybe
no, sorry. i blame the expansion of the british empire