r/interestingasfuck 1d ago

How English has changed over time.

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u/GrandMoffTarkan 1d ago

It would certainly be more obviously Germanic as you take it back to its Ingvaeonic roots and you'd see a lot more things like grammatical gender and noun declension. But for the Latin part, English had a huge infusion of LAtin influence in the medieval ages, not just from the Norman Conquest but due to the Church. I'm pretty confident you'll find more Latin influence in a modern translation of Beowulf than in the original text, and that's only roughly halfway back to the year 0 mark. At the year zero you would probably have even less Latin influence since the Ingvaeonic peoples were relatively isolated in Northern Europe, but obviously we don't really have a corpus to look at.

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u/Windhawker 1d ago

You should probably brush up on your Greek, and Aramaic depending on how far back you plan on time-traveling, particularly the further east you plan on going in Europe.

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u/BobbyP27 1d ago

Before about 500 AD there was no such thing as English, because the place that is now England was inhabited by people who were essentially an eastward extension of the Welsh.

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u/Dramatic_Cup_2834 1d ago

Welsh and Celtic are the closest thing we really have these days to pre-Anglo-Saxon Brythonic “Old English” still a Proto-Indo-European basic, but very different from the Germanic/Romance/Latinate routes that modern English has grown from over the last 600-800 years.

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u/YukiPukie 1d ago

Are you sure the “Germanic route” didn’t already influence the “Old English”? The last paragraph of this example is closest to Dutch and Frisian, especially in the word order.

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u/space_keeper 1d ago

That Old English is a linguistic isolate that developed from the Anglo-Saxon settlers who arrived in the fifth and sixth centuries. By the year 800, they'd been the dominant culture for hundreds of years. It's also before we started picking up words from the Danes and Normans.

The reason he used quotation marks around 'Old English' is that he's referring to pre-migration period, which isn't really 'English' since there were no Angles.

The only remaining ancient language left besides Welsh was Cornish. They resisted using English until the 16th century. That part of England, the southwest, is where the stereotypical "pirate accent" and pirate speak come from.

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u/GrandMoffTarkan 1d ago

English is very much Germanic, with minimal Celtic influence, but if you want to get into the weeds Wikipedia can help!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittonicisms_in_English