Welcome to the History of English Podcasts, a podcast about the history of the English

language.

This is episode 33, Missionaries and Manuscripts.

Last time we looked at the first kingdoms established by the Anglo-Saxons and the earliest

English dialects.

But up to this point in our story, those early versions of English weren't actually

written down, except for an occasional runic inscription.

But a series of events took place at the end of the 6th century and early in the 7th century

which changed all of that, and as a result for the first time documents were written down

into the language of the Anglo-Saxons, so in this episode we'll explore those events

and we'll see the very beginning of English as a written language.

But before I begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com

and my email address is kevinathistoryofenglishpodcast.com and you can follow me on Twitter at EnglishHistPod.

So let's look at the advent of English writing.

Now way back when I began this podcast, I began the story in India with the discovery of

the original Indo-European language.

And we saw how the ultimate roots of English could actually be traced to far away places.

So it might not be surprising that I'm going to begin this episode about English writing

in another distant place, in this case Egypt.

And Egypt is a good starting point for two reasons.

First, as we already know, that's where the alphabet began sometime around 2000 BC.

But I'm not going to go back that far.

...