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Changes in EnglishPart 1

For more detailed instructions, see the Getting Started presentation.

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Changes in English 1

In this presentation we are going to look at the way other

languages have influenced English and at the similarities

and differences between English and other languages.

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The English language has been influenced by many other languages.

This has mainly been the result of invasions by the Romans, the Angles and Saxons and the French.

There have also been influences from words which were acquired through trade and the expansion of the British Empire.

Knowing this can sometimes help you to establish what a word means, even if you don’t know.

History

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Latin and Greek

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England was conquered by the French in 1066. For the next 200 years French was the language of the Court and all the people with power.

French

The Bayeux tapestry depicts the Norman invasion of England.

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French

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How many different languages can you think of?

Make a list of as many as you can.

Languages

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How many did you find? Were these in your list?

Languages

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There over two thousand languages in the world!

We have seen how some have influenced English and how we can sometimes guess what words mean.

Other languages are very different to our own.

Some have completely different alphabets (for example Arabic, Chinese, Polish, Greek, Russian and Hebrew). Some of them read from right to left instead of from left to right.

!werbeH ni olleH

Languages

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Different languages are constructed differently. That’s why we can’t translate from English into another language simply by using a dictionary to convert the words.

Languages have different syntax and grammar.

For example, in English we usually make the past tense by adding the letters ‘–ed’ to a word, no matter who or what we are talking about.For example, I walked, he walked, she walked, we walked etc.

In Spanish words take on a series of different endings depending on the subject of the verb.For example, anduve, anduvo, anduvimos etc.

Language constructions

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In some languages, such as French and Spanish, there is the idea of gender for words. They can be ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’. This affects adjectives that describe them.

Gendered words

German has the idea of ‘neuter’ words as well as masculine and feminine.

For example,

Tengo un nuevo piso.

Tengo una nueva casa.

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In English we might say ‘I missed the bus.’ In Colombia, in South America, they speak Spanish and would say ‘The bus left me.’

Notice how there is a shift in emphasis from my responsibility to that of the bus!

Change in emphasis

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Look it up

Good dictionaries not only tell us the meaning of a word but its origin too.

Look at one page of a dictionary.

Record the origin of each word.

Where do the majority of words originate from?