Hello and welcome to Contemplations. This is part two of the origins of the English language

and I'm going to be picking up where we left off with the Vikings. But just a quick recap as it was a week ago.

We talked about the Indo-European origins of most European and Western Asian languages and how that's the reason why there are some commonalities between lots of these languages.

And we went on to talk about the Celtic roots of some words,

although Celtic hasn't really, of course Celtic representing lots of different tribes

with different languages of their own, but it's a blanket term to refer to these tribal societies.

They didn't necessarily contribute nearly as much as the Anglo-Saxons,

and of course that includes the angles, the jutes and of course the Saxons themselves and these languages of course come from

North Germany and southern Denmark and so this sets the basis for what is English and is referred to as Old English.

And this of course has changed over time and one significant thing that the Vikings did was change how it was

spoken to a certain extent. I'm going to be talking a little bit about that, then talking

about the Normans and then talking about middle English and later English as well

as going into words that were introduced to the English language from the colonial time.

So a bit recent.

I'm going to be reading some Chaucer and Shakespeare

to give you examples of middle and early modern English.

So you have a frame of reference.

Hopefully by the end of this you're going to have a good understanding of the sort of loose timeline of the English language.

Of course, I'm not going to be going into any of the sort of

pedantic linguistic terms that you need a dictionary to understand.

I'm going to try and keep it relatively simple and talk about how the language changed

in a meaningful way to an English speaker, be it native or not,

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