A Bit About Languages

Language fascinates me!  I recently was talking to a friend who studies French (*waves*) and was surprised to find he didn't know some of the boring stuff about the origins of English that I was spouting at him.  So I've decided to put it in a blog so you can ALL be bored.

A Little Acorn

Right.. we probably all have some vague idea about "language families".  I like to think of them literally as a tree.  Imagine an acorn: as it pops up from the ground it is basically a single shoot.  As the oak tree grows up, so it starts branching out and splitting off.  This is exactly what happens to languages.  A good 4000 years ago the languages of around 3 billion people came from the same acorn, a language called "Proto Indo-European" that was spoken on the shores of the Black Sea.  It was a first a single shoot coming out of the earth; then it grew.

This is Indo-European when it was a baby

As time went on and people moved further afield, our parent language started branching off into different related languages.  How and why did this happen?  Well if you think about US and British English, we speak essentially the same thing (Churchill called us "two nations divided by a common language").  300 years ago we spoke *exactly* the same thing however, and over this time we have grown a little apart.  Nowadays we say "dived" and the Americans say "dove".  We refer to a car "bonnet" and they say "hood".  We also spell it "colour" whereas they spell it "color".  When Americans say they "landed flat on their fanny" or talk about putting their passport into their "fanny packs" we explode into uncontrollable laughter because a fanny is a girl's private parts and we have mental ages of 4 year olds.  I could go on and on.  Through time and geographical distance the English language is splitting and gradually growing apart.

Back to the acorn.   We all spoke Proto Indo-European in 2000 BC.  Our language divided up as its speakers moved apart.  Imagine a mighty oak tree with lots of branches, plenty of twigs coming off those branches, and several hundred leaves.  That is our language "family" today.  Proto Indo-European is right at the very base.  There is a branch called the "Germanic branch" and right at the end of it there is a leaf called English.  There are other branches: the Latin branch, the Slavic branch, the Hellenic branch, the Celtic branch etc.  They have all come from the trunk and they all have their own twigs and end up in leaves such as Spanish, Polish, Modern Greek and Welsh.

English is related to every one of these languages I mentioned: just go down from our leaf back along the branch, onto the trunk, and back up another branch and you find the other language.  Ukranian might sound very foreign to us, but it shares our DNA.  Some features of the language, some vocabulary and some structures are the same in both languages.  Okay, Russian is far closer to it, but we are definitely related. We are both part of the same tree and if we go right down to the base, where the acorn came out of the ground, we came from the same place.

Think of our language family exactly like this: a mighty oak

Everyone knows that French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Romanian came from Latin.  The way to think of it, using the tree analogy, is the current day languages are the leaves at the tips.  Latin (now dead) used to be a leaf when the Latin branch was just leaving the trunk.  It grew into a branch of its own and divided up to produce all these leaves we have today.  Other languages used to be on the tree but they either grew into whole branches, or they died.

Even Persian, Hindi, Bengali or Romani ("Gypsy") are on our tree: it is just they branched off early when the tree was first coming out of the ground.  Persian is related to English and we have words in common that go an awful long way back: for example, the Persian word for daughter is "doxtar".

English: on the Germanic Branch

Now let's look at where exactly English is.  We are on the Germanic branch of the oak tree.  The branch has an exact equivalent of Latin called "Proto Germanic" or Old Germanic.  From that now dead language the branch grew out that resulted in all the Germanic languages, including English.

We are a leaf on a twig with 4 other languages or leaves right next to us.  They are:

ENGLISH - FRISIAN - DUTCH - LOW GERMAN - HIGH GERMAN*

The closest language on earth to ours is therefore Frisian.  It's almost touching our leaf.  A sentence of Frisian (it is spoken mainly in the north of the Netherlands) is "Brea, bûter en griene tsiis is goed Ingelsk en goed Frysk." This handy holiday phrase means "Bread, butter and green cheese is good English and good Frisian."  I use it all the time.

Frisian Speaking Areas

Dutch is also very close to English.  "Doe de deur open" is "open the door".  "Doe de deur toe" is "close the door".  "De man is in het huis" is "the man is in the house".  "De kat zat op de mat" is "the cat sat on the mat" etc etc.  It can sound incredibly similar indeed.  There is in effect a huge amount of common vocabulary and language structure because we did not split off that long ago.  It's sometimes said that a Dutchman could stand on the stage in Shakespeare's time and be understood as a comedy figure.  I'm not sure that's true, having studied Medieval Dutch, but it's not that far off.

Dutch is literally the language smack bang in the middle between English and German.  Over the centuries, German has been through some "sound shifts", as has English, that have taken it further away from our Latin equivalent, Old Germanic.  For example, the "d" sound in Old Germanic changed into a "th" in many cases in English.  The "t" sound in changed into a "s" sound in German.  Look at these three sentences and compare:

ENGLISH "That is water" << DUTCH "Dat is water" >> GERMAN "Das ist Wasser"

The Dutch is the "purest" form of Germanic.   Dutch "dat" changes to "that" in English.  The same word changes to "das" in German.  Dutch "water" also changes to "Wasser" in German.  It takes a little bit of work to get from English on the far left to German on the far right, but if you look at Dutch in the middle you can see how it works.

If you know the patterns that all of these so-called sound shifts follow, you can instantly work out that the English word "thoroughfare" is in fact, for example, the same word as "Durchfahrt" in German.  The sign below therefore simply says "thoroughfare forbidden" in English.

Let's Blame the French

What happened to our lovely language then to ruin it and take it truly far away from its Old Germanic roots?  Of course we have to blame the French.  They invaded in 1066 and brought with them that thing known as Norman French.  Its parent is Latin, so it's on a branch right next to our Germanic branch and of course we both came from Proto Indo-European.  However, it was sufficiently different to bring a very different influence to our language.  Something extremely odd happened to English: in the hundreds of years after 1066 our leaf touched a leaf on another branch and they fused together.  English is still Germanic in structure and our vocabulary is still more Germanic than Latin based, but French had a huge effect on our language.

They didn't just bring Renaults & Croissants: they RUINED English!

What is fascinating is how the two languages (Old English/Anglo-Saxon and Norman French) merged.  Essentially most "peasant" words in English remain Germanic: we have stuck with the Old English vocabularly.  You'll recognise many basic words in German or Dutch: man, house, live, eat, sit etc.

Any noun that you think of "irregular" in the plural because it changes its vowel is in fact almost certainly a good hearty Germanic peasant word.  Consider, for example, goose (geese), mouse (mice), man (men) etc.  This is what Germanic languages often do to form the plural: they don't just shove an "s" on like French does, but instead change the vowel.  The same goes for verbs that change their vowel in the past tense: I ride (I rode), I sit (I sat), I swim (I swam) etc.  They are basic words of Germanic origin that survived the onslaught of the French invader.

Looked after by Germanic peasants, eaten by French nobles

Think also of a sheep (the word is schaap in Dutch; or Schaf in German).  This is clearly a word that came from Old English, as you can see from its relatives in our Germanic siblings.  The peasants looked after the animal when it was still alive.  When it gets served up on the table it becomes mutton, however.  It is the greedy French nobles gobbling it up ("mouton" is French for sheep).  The same applies to cow (Dutch "koe" and German "Kuh") which becomes "beef" on the table ("boeuf" in French); and to swine (Dutch "zwijn" and German "Schwein") that becomes "pork" (French "porc") when it is eaten.

Other Language Families

Now obviously Indo-European (the Oak Tree) is a big language family.  It has 3 billion speakers around the world.   There are, however, other language families which are not at all related to us.  This comes about because when humans climbed down from the trees and started speaking to one another, they did so in multiple places in the world at the same time.  Linguists used to think there was one parent language: they now believe there is not.  All that stuff about the Tower of Babel in the Bible?  Nope, sorry.

If we are a leaf on the oak tree, take a look at the beautiful olive tree over there.  It is the Semitic family and it includes Hebrew and Arabic.  Oh the irony: these two languages are very closely related.  Imagine a beautiful cherry tree: it is the Japonic family.  The bamboo tree could be said to represent the Sino-Tibetan family, with 21% of the world's speakers.  This is where we find Mandarin, Cantonese, Burmish and Tibetan.  There is the Niger-Congo family from Africa with other 1500 languages; the Eskimo family of languages etc.  In each case think of a tree, but not a tree that is related to our oak tree.

Hebrew and Arabic: right together on the same tree

Within Europe we have a couple of really interesting non-Indo European examples.  Finnish, Estonian and Hungarian are together in one family, not related to us at all.  They have come from somewhere deep inside Asia (the family is called "Ugric".)  The language of the Basques, spoken down in the south of France and north of Spain is also not related to any other language in Europe.  It is all on its own in its own family and is amazingly ancient: it is the only survivor of the pre-Indo European languages that were once spoken across Europe many thousands of years ago.

This brings us to the end of my little explanation of where English comes from and where it belongs.  If you're a language historian and think this was all complete shite, ooops sorry.  I've tried to explain it in a non-technical way with what I can remember from university.  If you're not a language historian and it has explained or taught you anything, huzzah!

Many thanks for reading.





[A far better name for High German is "Standard German" by the way: long story but what even the Germans themselves call Hochdeutsch is actually East Middle German.  High German is in fact a collection of dialects in the high mountain areas of the south, which interestingly include Yiddish, Bavarian, Alsatian and Austrian German.]