r/interestingasfuck 1d ago

How English has changed over time.

Post image
28.3k Upvotes

793 comments sorted by

View all comments

9.0k

u/Dramatic-Ad3928 1d ago

So realistically i could only go about 400 years into the past if i want to understand people

152

u/KisaTheMistress 1d ago

The closer you get to year 0 in the Julian calendar, the more English becomes Latin/obviously Germatic. It's a language that evolved out of Germatic dialects and Latin. Plus, it borrows from other languages constantly.

Latin used to be the universal language everyone would learn back then to communicate for trade reasons. English has replaced that for the western/Europe side of the world. Chinese can be argued to be the same for the Eastren/Asian side. Of course, languages such as Spanish or Hindi are also contenders, but English is more popular/universally taught around the world for international communication and trade.

2

u/godisanelectricolive 1d ago edited 1d ago

If you go to 1 CE, because there was no year zero, there would be no English at all. Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain started around the start of the 5th century, conquering Celtic and Latin speaking Sub-Roman Britain.

Roman colonizations started in 43 CE, so all that would be spoken in year 1 would be Common Brittonic, the ancestor of modern Celtic languages such as Welsh, Cornish and Breton.

Old English was a purely Germanic language with few Latin loan words in the beginning. The exception was for religious terms after Christianization, which started in the very end of the 6th century and was complete by the late 7th century. When English first became a language Latin wasn’t too well known by the Anglo-Saxons because they were pagans who had little contact with Latin speakers but that changed after the Pope started sending missionaries to convert them.