Loading...English is quite possibly the most dynamic language in the world today. This is due in part to the immigration into Anglophone countries, which has introduced countless new words, and partly to the Norman conquest of England in 1066, which altered English to make it a little bit more like the Romance languages (especially French). Nowadays, this hybrid of Germanic, Norse and Romance languages is the first language of over 300 million people worldwide.
An example of the evolution of English can be seen in the spellings of words in Anglo-Saxon, also called Old English. The following passage from the epic poem Beowulf is an example:
Hwæt! wē Gār-Dena in ġeār-dagum,
þēod-cyninga, þrym ġefrūnon
The words hwæt, dagum and cyninga translate to the Modern English words what, day and king, except that certain letters of course changed. In fact, there are letters that disappeared entirely from English. Two such letters in the passage above are æ (ash) and þ (thorn), but others include ð (eth) and ƿ (wynn). Over time, these letters were replaced with other letters. For example, “th” represents all interdental sounds in English.
Another notable change in English occurred in verb conjugations. Until the 1600s, the second-person singular pronoun was thou, with the verb conjugation –(e)st, as in thou knowest. Then, the pronoun and its conjugation were dropped from English and replaced by you, although it still appears in religious texts and in the works of Shakespeare.
English has evolved since it first arose. It is classified as a Germanic language, and of course maintains a number of Germanic root words, like gold. But the language also acquired words like happy from Norse, words like nation from Latin, words like hyperbole from Greek, and words like algebra from Arabic. During the 20th century, the language added Bolshevik from Russian and mahatma from Sanskrit, in addition to the names of numerous kinds of foods from different cultures.
A few years back, The New York Times had an article about a number of phrases that we use almost every day that come from Ireland.