The history of the English language

1
The history of the English language
Where on Earth did it come from?
2
Indo-European languages

• Are all these languages related?

3
Proto Indo-European

• Balto-Slavic Germanic Hellenic Italic Indo-Iranian

Baltic Slavic
North Germanic East Germanic West Germanic
Indic Iranian
Umbrian Oscan Latin
Old English Middle English New English
French Italian Portuguese Spanish
4
Do these words sound similar?
5
The Indo-Europeans

• Who were they?
• They were a nomadic people who ventured westward
  into Europe, southward into Persia and India
• How long ago did they live?
• About 5,500 years ago
• What was their language like?
• There is no documented evidence of it, although
  similarities between words make it seem probable
• As they became isolated, the language of each
  group consequently evolved independent of the
  rest

6
What is a dead language?

• Sanskrit and Latin are dead languages
• They are no longer spoken as a primary language,
  they havent changed
• They do not evolve like English or Italian

7
What is a living language?

• It evolves every day
• Words that were common in 1950s may no longer be
  used today
• Or they have different meanings than they used to
  have
• Would Shakespeare know what H-to-the-Izzo means?

8
What is the difference between human speech and
animal noises?

• Animal cries are not articulate
• They lack, for example, the kind of structure
  given by the contrast between vowels and
  consonants
• And they lack the kind of structure that enables
  us to divide a human utterance into words
• We can change an utterance by replacing one word
  by another

9
Voiced sounds

• The sounds in which voice is used are called
  voiced sounds, but some speech-sounds are made
  with the vocal cords in the wide open position,
  and are therefore voiceless (or breathed)
• In fact the English v and f are made in exactly
  the same way, except that one is voiced and the
  other voiceless
• Cover your ears and utter a v, then an f

10
Nasal sounds

• In a vowel sound voice is switched on and the
  mouth cavity is left unobstructed, so that the
  air passes out freely
• Try saying the vowels with your mouth open
• Now try saying the consanants with your mouth
  open
• If the nasal passage is also opened, we get a
  nasal sound like those of French bon, good, and
  brun brown, but for English vowels the nasal
  passage is normally closed, though some American
  speakers habitually leave the door ajar and speak
  with a nasal twang

11
The tongue

• The quality of a vowel is determined by the
  position of the tongue, lower jaw and lips,
  because these can change the shape of the cavity
  that the air passes through and different shapes
  give different resonances
• The tongue is the most important
• If we raise part of our tongue, we divide the
  mouth passage into two cavities of different
  sizes, one at the back and one at the front

12
The position of the tongue

• To describe any vowel, we specify the position of
  the highest part of the tongue we can do this in
  terms of its height
• Three categories open, half-open and closed

13
Glides

• Glides occur when there are vowels in which the
  speech organs change their position in the course
  of the sound
• They are also know as diphthongs
• GRAPHIC on page 7
• In all vowels, the mouth passage is unobstructed
• If it is obstructed at any time during the
  production of a speech sound the resulting sound
  will be a consonant

14
Vocal sounds

• Any language selects a small number of vocal
  sounds out of all those which human beings are
  able to make, and uses them as its building
  bricks
• The selection is different for every language

15
Vowels

• Italian uses only seven different vowels, and
  manages with 27 basic sounds
• Hawaiian is said to manage with only 13
• Some languages, on the other hand, use 60 or
  more
• There are 45 basic sounds in English

16
Intonation

• In English, we use intonation to distinguish
  between different sentences, but not between
  different words
• In some languages, like Chinese and Thai, musical
  pitch is a distinguishing feature of the single
  word if you change the intonation it becomes a
  different word
• Such languages are called tone languages

17
Pronouns

• The system of pronouns changes with time four
  hundred years ago there were the forms thou,
  thee, thy and thine, and there was no form its
• This is a long-term process individuals cannot
  just invent a new pronoun

18
Syntax

• We say the good old times, not the old good
  times and A beautiful young American girl, not
  an American young beautiful girl. There is a
  complicated set of rules regulating the way a
  phrase of this kind is put together in English
  (rules which English speakers have obviously
  internalized).

19
Subject-Verb-Object

• Example The dog (subject) bit (verb) John
  (object)
• In normal English, the Subject (The Dog) comes
  before the Verb (bit) which itself comes before
  the Direct Object (John), and it is this
  word-orderwhich tells us which is the bitter and
  which the bitten
• But this Subject-Verb-Order is not found in all
  languages. Many languages, like Turkish and
  classical Latin, have the equivalent of The dog
  bit John
• Welsh, for example, has the equivalent of Bit
  the dog John
• One of the major syntactic changes in the English
  language since Anglo-Saxon times has been the
  disappearance of the S-O-V and VSO types of
  word-order, and the establishment of the SVO type
  as normal

20
English vs. French

• In English, an adjective normally precedes its
  noun, as in white socks, but in some languages
  such as French it usually follows it, socks
  white
• In French, the possessive also follows the noun,
  as in la mort de mon oncle, but in this case
  English has a choice
• The possessive can come before the noun (my
  uncles death) or after it (the death of my uncle)

21
Speech dialect

• Language belongs to a group of people, not to an
  individual
• The group that use any given language is called
  the speech community
• In the United States, we speak English. But
  within this country, there are several dialects

22
The Romans

• Conquered a large portion of Europe, including
  England
• Latin, the language of the Romans, was the root
  of Spanish, French, Portugese and Italian
• Latin influences on England fade away as Roman
  Empire collapses in the fourth century

23
The Barbarians

• Barbarians from Germany and surrounding lands
  invade England
• English evolved from their language

24
The evolution of English

• The English language has changed enormously in
  the last thousand years
• New words have appeared and some of the old ones
  disappeared
• Words have changed in meaning
• There have been changes in word order, the
  permissible ways in which words can be arranged
  to make meaningful utterances

25
The three stages of English

• The 12th and 15th centuries were periods of
  particularly rapid changes in English
• This makes it convenient to divide the history of
  the English language into three broad periods,
  which are usually called Old English, Middle
  English and Modern English
• No exact dates can be drawn, but Old English
  covers from the first Anglo-Saxon settlements in
  England to about 1100, Middle English from about
  1100 to about 1500 and Modern English from about
  1500 to the present day

26
Old English

• Beowulf is the most famous work of literature
  from this time, although its origins probably
  precedes Old English
• There is some archeological evidence that Saxons
  settled in East Anglia and the Vale of York while
  Britain was still a Roman province, but the main
  settlements were made after the Roman legions had
  withdrawn from Britain in AD 410
• The traditional accounts of the landing of
  Hengest and Horsa in Kent place it in the year
  449
• This was around the time that English was born

27
Germanic influences on English

• The English language has its foundation in the
  West German dialects
• From them derive native suffixes and prefixes
  which are used on words to denote special
  relationships such as the y in holy or the en
  in golden or the ish in childish or the like
  in childlike

28
Old English vs. Modern English

• The pronouns of modern English are essentially
  the same as those of Old English I, we, you, he,
  it, the, this, that, who, what, mine, your, each,
  and any
• Our numbers were their numbers too, including
  words such as twin and other, meaning the second
  in Old English

29
What words remain unchanged

• Our system of comparison is ancient good,
  better, best and evil, worse, worst were Saxon.
  The way our verbs are conjugated comes from those
  dialects bid, bade, bidden or sing, sang, sung
• The basic vocabulary of modern English comes
  through the ages unchanged from Old English
  love, say, live, have, own, do, be, will, bury,
  name, reach, long, strong, high, quick, sun,
  food, hand, finger, friend, brother, father,
  mother, stone, earth

30
Anglo-Saxon settlements

• The Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain must not be
  thought of as the arrival of a unified invading
  army, but rather as the arrival and penetration
  of various uncoordinated bands of adventurers in
  different parts of the country, beginning in the
  middle of fifth century and going all the way
  through the sixth
• The struggle with the Romano-Celtic population
  was a long one, and Anglo-Saxon domination in
  England was not assured until late in the sixth
  century

31
The period of King Arthur

• We know little about this struggle it was the
  age of King Arthur and there are more legends
  than hard facts
• By about 700, the Anglo-Saxons had occupied most
  of England and also a considerable part of
  southern Scotland

32
Differences between English and Scandinavian
during Old English

• Scandinavian has sk where English sh. Hence,
  there are many pairs of words in English with
  these phonetic differences which originally had
  the same meaning skirt and shirt raise and
  rear screech and shriek

33
Anglo-Saxons and the Celts

• The Anglo-Saxon conquest was not just the arrival
  of a ruling minority, but the settlement of a
  whole people
• Their language remained the dominant one and
  there are few traces of Celtic influence on Old
  English
• The names of some English towns were taken over
  from the Celts such as London and Leeds

34
Celtic influence on Old English

• The failure of Celtic to influence Old English to
  any great extent does not mean that the Britons
  were all killed or driven out
• There is in fact evidence that a considerable
  number of Britons lived among the Anglo-Saxons,
  but they were a defeated people whose language
  had no prestige compared with that of the
  conquerors

35
West Saxon

• Four dialects immerged on the island of Britain
• The unification of England under the West Saxon
  kings led to the recognition of the West Saxon
  dialect as a literary standard
• The surviving texts from the Old English period
  are in four main dialects West Saxon, Kentish,
  Mercian and Northumbrian
• Mercian and Northumbrian, which are grouped
  together as Anglican, form the link between Old
  English and Modern English
• SEE PAGE 105.

36
The West Saxon dialect

• Although West Saxon became the literary standard
  of a united England in the late Anglo-Saxon
  period, it is not the direct ancestor of modern
  standard English, which is mainly derived an
  Anglican dialect

37
Christianity and its affects

• We know little about the Anglo Saxons until
  Christianity came, introducing writing to them
• The conversion of the English to Christianity
  began in about the year 600 and took a century to
  complete
• It was carried out from two directions, the
  Celtic church penetrating from the Northwest and
  the Roman church from the Southeast

38
Assimilation

• Assimilation is the changing of a sound under the
  influence of a neighboring one
• Until about 1700, words like swan and wash
  rhymed with words like man and wash
• At one time, the T in castle and Christmas was
  pronounced
• In addition, the K in knight and know were also
  pronounced

39
Pagan Gods

• Although Christianity was widely embraced, some
  vestiges of the pagan times survived
• Tiw, Woden and Thunor (thunder), corresponding to
  the Scandinavian god Thor, have given their names
  to Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, while Wodens
  consort Frig (Love) has given her name to Friday
• More remarkably, the goddess of spring, Eastre,
  has probably given her name to the Christian
  festival of Easter

40
Norsemen and Normans

• During the later part of the Old English period,
  two different groups of Non-English speakers
  invaded the country
• Both groups were Scandinavian in origin, but
  whereas the first had retained its Scandinavian
  speech, the second had settled in northern France
  and become French-speaking
• Both of their languages, Old Norse and Old
  French, had a considerable influence on English

41
The Vikings in England

• The invasion of Europe by the Scandinavian
  Vikings, which took place between about 750 and
  1050, was the last phase of the expansion of the
  early Germanic peoples
• Its basic cause was perhaps overpopulation in a
  region of poor natural resources, but there were
  other contributory causes
• The custom of leaving inheritance to the eldest
  son meant that there were always younger sons
  wanting to carve out inheritances for themselves

42
The Vikings and their search for new lands

• Political conflicts drove many noblemen into
  exile
• And then, in the late eighth century, Charlemagne
  destroyed the power of the Frisians, who had
  hitherto been the greatest maritime power of
  Northwest Europe, and thereby left open the
  sea-route southward for the Vikings
• At about the same date, the ancient craft of boat
  building in Scandinavia reached the stage at
  which it could produce the magnificent ocean
  going sailing ships which served the Vikings for
  trade, piracy and colonization. The Vikings, by
  the way, are believed to have visited America 450
  years before Columbus

43
The Battle of Hastings 1066

• William the Conqueror sails from Normandy
  (France) to England, where he becomes ruler
• Commoners still speak English, although French is
  the official language
• The Norman Conquest of 1066, known as the Battle
  of Hastings, had a profound influence on the
  English language
• For some centuries, English ceased to be the
  language of the governing class
• There was no such thing as a standard literary
  English
• When English did once again become the language
  of the whole country it had changed a good deal
  under the influence of the conquerors

44
Norman rule

• The rulers of Normandy had originally been
  Scandinavian Vikings, who occupied parts of
  northern France and were eventually recognized by
  the French crown
• By the middle of the 11th century, the Normans
  had long lost their Scandinavian speech
• They spoke French and were essentially French in
  culture
• Had the French continued to dominate, this
  process might have been carried to completion
• Since it did not happen, we have a redundancy in
  the English vocabulary pairs of synonyms, one
  French and the other native English hog, swine,
  pig, farrow, sow, and board are all terms to do
  with raising pigs, but beside them we place the
  French word pork
• Other examples are hut (Eng) vs. cottage (Fre).

45
French takes over

• French became the language of the upper classes
  in England simply because it was the language of
  the conquerors, not because of any cultural
  superiority on their part
• What happened was that the native aristocracy was
  largely destroyed and their lands were
  distributed to Williams Norman followers
• Anybody whose native language was English who
  wanted to get on in the world had to learn French

46
French loan words

• French loan words first appeared mostly around
  London, the center of fashion and administration,
  and spread northwards and westwards from there
• Latin was the language of the church, of
  scholarship, and of international communication.

47
Language of the people?

• Although French was for a long time the prestige
  language in England, it was never the other
  tongue of the majority of the population
• An event which contributed to the triumph of
  English was King Johns loss of Normandy to the
  French crown in the opening years of the 13th
  century
• The ties with Normandy were severed and the
  Norman nobility gradually became English

48
English triumphs

• The fourteenth century sees the definitive
  triumph of English
• French was now rapidly ceasing to be the mother
  tongue of even the nobility and those who wanted
  to speak French had to learn it
• When King Henry IV seized the throne in 1399,
  England for the first time since the Norman
  conquest had a king whose mother tongue was
  English

49
Two Forms of English

• There were two standard forms of English, that of
  England and that of Scotland
• Scotland was an independent kingdom and the
  language of the lowlands and of the royal court
  was what they called Inglis
• The Highlands were still Gaelic-speaking

50
And the winner is

• The English that we speak today evolved from the
  East Midland dialect of Middle English
• This was probably due to the importance of the
  East Midlands in English cultural, economic and
  administrative life
• This is where Cambridge University is located

51
French loan words

• In the 13th and 14th centuries there was a flood
  of loan words from French
• This was no surprise as when bilingual speakers
  were changing over to English for such purposes
  as government and literature, they felt the need
  for the specialized terms that they were
  accustomed to in those fields and brought them
  over from French

52
Differences between French and English

• If you know Modern French, you may sometimes be
  puzzled by the difference between an English word
  and the corresponding French word
• Sometimes these differences are due to changes
  that have taken place in the pronunciation of
  both languages since Medieval times
• Standard Modern French is descended from a
  central French dialect of Old French, but the
  Normans spoke a Northern French dialect, which
  differed from it in a number of ways

53
Loan words blend into English

• The early French loan words were so well
  assimilated into English that they were soon felt
  as not in any way foreign
• This made it easier for the language to accept
  later Romance and Latin loans.

54
Middle English

• Canterbury Tales is the most famous work of
  literature from this period

55
Modern English (1550 to present)

• Shakespeare lived during this period, although he
  wrote in a higher form of English

56
Three major developments

• Three great developments mark the advent of
  modern English
• 1) British colonialism
• 2) the Renaissance
• 3) economic and technical development (the
  industrial revolution and the development of
  modern science)

57
A class difference

• The merchant class, who exploited and settled the
  territories opened up by British explorers did
  not belong to the aristocracy which spoke the
  London dialect
• Hence, New England was settled largely by
  speakers of the East Anglican dialect
• Social struggles between the two dialect groups
  were an instrumental cause for the American
  revolution and may have contributed to the
  radical shift in the pronunciation of English in
  modern times

58
The Renaissance

• Greek classics are rediscovered following the
  Dark Ages
• Other languages borrow from Greek
• The Renaissance
• During the peak of the Renaissance, from 1580 to
  1660, a flood of Latin loan words were borrowed
  into English
• We owe the b in our modern spelling of debt and
  doubt to Renaissance etymologizing, for the
  earlier spellings were dette and doute
• The b was inserted through the influence of Latin
  debitum and dubitare

59
English in the Scientific Age

• By about 1700, the main changes in pronunciation
  that made the Great Vowel Shift were all
  completed
• Third person forms like loveth had disappeared
  from ordinary educated speech
• The pronouns thou and thee and the corresponding
  verb-forms like lovest had disappeared from
  standard usage
• The language differed only slightly from present
  day English

60
Spelling

• In Middle English and early Modern English, there
  had been no standard spelling
• Spellings varied from writer to writer
• Even proper names were not fixed
• Shakespeare in the three signatures on his will
  used two spellings of his own surname
• The earliest English dictionary was published in
  1604
• The first one contained 2,500 words, while one
  from 1676 contained about 25,000

61
The Influence of printing

• A powerful force for standardization was the
  introduction of printing
• By the middle of the sixteenth century, although
  there was still no standard system, there were
  quite a number of widely accepted conventions

62
The standard spelling system

• The standard spelling system which became
  established by the end of the seventeenth century
  was already an archaic one and broadly speaking,
  represents the pronunciation of English before
  the Great Vowel Shift
• This explains many of the oddities of present day
  English spelling
• We still preserve letters in our spelling which
  represent sounds which long ago ceased to be
  pronounced like the k and gh of knight, the t in
  castle, w in wrong
• Distinctions are made in spelling where there is
  no longer any distinction in pronunciation, as in
  meat/meet and sea/see

63
English as a world language

• The spread of English was encouraged by
  deliberate government policy
• After the 1745 Jacobite rebellion in Scotland,
  many schools were established in the Scottish
  highlands
• The language used was English Gaelic was
  forbidden

64
British colonialism

• The spread of English beyond the United Kingdom
  started with the English settlements in North
  America in the 17th and 18th centuries
• By the early 19th century, Britain had firm
  control of a number of islands in the Caribbean
  Antigua, Barbados, Jamaica, St Kitts, Trinidad
  and Tobago
• British domination of the Indian subcontinent
  dates from the second half of the 18th century
• In the late 18th century Britain began
  settlements in Australia
• In the 19th century, the British took control
  over South Africa from the Dutch
• They also controlled Singapore, New Zealand and
  Hong Kong

65
American English

• After the American Revolution, contact between
  two countries was severed for more than a century
• Americans make a conscious effort to de-Anglicize
  English
• We still understand each other, but there are
  noticeable differences

66
British English

• The changes were both intentional and incidental.
  Many of our founding fathers, including George
  Washington, had considered themselves Englishmen
  up until the outbreak of the revolution
• They would have talked like Englishmen and had
  similar habits and mannerisms
• Pronounce schedule, cant and mind the gap

67
Coming to America

• Once it was no longer a colony of England,
  America received an influx of immigrants from
  Germany, Ireland, France, Italy and China
• The English these people spoke was nothing close
  to the speech of Washington

68
Immigrants adjust to their new home

• While immigrants may have a hard time perfecting
  their new language, their children born there
  will usually have no problem
• Why? Because the influence of the general speech
  environment (friends, school) is stronger than
  that at home
• If a large and closely knot group of people adopt
  a new language, however, then the modifications
  that they make in it may persist among their
  descendants, even if the latter no longer speak
  the original language

69
Three main dialects in the U.S.

• Northern New England, New York, New Jersey
• Midland Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Wisconsin
• Southern Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi

70
Languages of the world

• There are about 6,000 human languages spoken in
  the world today, which all fall under this
  definition of languages
• You can group most of them into two categories
  analytic and synthetic
• An analytic language is one that uses very few
  bound morphemes, such as are seen in English
  prefixes and suffixes (refill and slowly) and in
  the inflections (grammatical endings) of English
  nouns and verbs (boxes, talking, talked).

71
Synthetic languages

• A synthetic language, by contrast, uses large
  numbers of bound morphemes and often combines
  long strings of them to form a single word.
  Examples of highly synthetic languages are the
  Eskimo language.

72
The Romance languages

• Latin is the direct descendent of four major
  languages Italian, Spanish, French and
  Portuguese. Each of these languages has developed
  its own morphology and syntax, but they all bear
  signs of their common origin in Latin. The most
  obvious resemblances are in vocabulary. Each
  language has undergone considerable changes in
  pronunciation, but the Latin origin of large
  numbers of words is quite evident.

73
Semitic languages

• In addition to Latin, another major family of
  languages is the Semitic branch
• At the time of the earliest written records this
  was already a family with many members
• In Mesopotamia, modern Iraq, there was the East
  Semitic branch with Babylonian and Assyrian
• Around the Mediterranean the West Semitic
  languages included Moabite, Phoenician, Aramaic
  and Hebrew
• The east Semitic languages have died out and the
  most successful surviving language is Arabic, a
  south Semitic language
• Also surviving are Syriac, Ethiopian and Hebrew.

74
Semitic languages

• The Semitic languages are themselves an offspring
  of the Hamitic language family
• The Coptic language is a descendent of the
  Hamitic language
• It is now only used in liturgical services of the
  Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt
• Another member of the Hamitic family is the
  Berber language
• The Berbers are a tribe of people who live in
  Morocco
• They survived they Arab conquest of the 8th
  century and still remain a distinct race to this
  day.

75
Hebrew

• Used only for religious purposes by practicing
  Jews, this language was revived with the creation
  of the modern state of Israel in 1948
• Many people who emigrated there, including
  holocaust survivors, had a difficult time
  learning this language
• This is why nearly everyone in Israel speaks
  perfect English
• Aramaic, the native language of Jesus, has died
  out except for a village in Syria
• Why didnt Jews speak Hebrew at that time? Prior
  to Roman control of Palestine, the Assyrian
  Empire had imposed Aramaic as the lingua franca
• By Jesus time, the lingua franca was no longer
  Aramaic but Greek

76
Lingua franca

• The original lingua franca was a tongue actually
  called Lingua Franca (or Sabir) that was employed
  for commerce in the Mediterranean area during the
  Middle Ages
• Now extinct, it had Italian as its base with an
  admixture of words from Spanish, French, Greek,
  and Arabic
• The designation "Lingua Franca" language of the
  Franks came about because the Arabs in the
  medieval period used to refer to Western
  Europeans in general as "Franks
• Occasionally the term lingua franca is applied
  to a fully established formal language thus
  formerly it was said that French was the lingua
  franca of diplomacy

77
Alexander the Great

• Alexander in around 320 B.C. had conquered lands
  stretching from Greece along the Mediterranean to
  Egypt and stretching all the way to modern
  Pakistan
• When the Romans replaced Greece as the new world
  power, they kept Greek as the lingua franca
• Keep in mind that Greek had never been the
  everyday language of the Holy Land
• If you wanted to do business or practice law, you
  almost certainly had to speak Greek

78
Jesus

• It has been documented that Jesus spoke three
  languages
• We know that he spoke Aramaic as that is the
  language he conversed in
• When he lectured at the temple, he would have had
  to have read the Torah in Hebrew
• And we know that when he was tried by Pontius
  Pilot, they conversed in Greek
• Pilot certainly would not have lowered himself to
  learn Aramaic
• Pilot and the Roman soldiers would have spoken
  Latin and Greek

79
Pigdin

• A pigdin is an auxiliary language used in the
  first place for the purposes of trade between
  groups that have no common language. It thus
  arises when two or more languages are in contrast
  and is a simplified form of the dominant one.
• A pigdin lingua franca is a language which is not
  the native language of any of the people
  conversing in it. It is a simplified version of
  the language, often with words borrowed from
  other languages. If you are a businessman from
  China and you do business across southeast Asia,
  English will likely be your second language. To
  learn English is much easier than learning
  Japanese, Thai or Mandarin/Cantonese. In China,
  Mandarin and Cantonese are two distinct languages.

80
Other lingua franca

• Aramaic was the lingua franca of the Persia
  empire from about 500 B.C. to about 330 B.C. as
  mentioned, Greek was the lingua franca of the
  Mediterranean world until the bastardized form of
  Italian known as Lingua Franca came about. With
  the rise of France, French became the lingua
  franca of diplomats. In East Africa, the lingua
  franca is Swahili, a member of the Bantu group of
  African languages. It is spoken by 30 million
  people, chiefly in Tanzania, Kenya, Congo
  (Kinshasa), Burundi, and Uganda. English is now
  the lingua franca of the world. There are
  regional lingua francas, such as Russian, German,
  Arabic, French and the aforementioned Swahili.

81
Creoles

• It sometimes happens that a pidgin becomes the
  first language of a group. The language is then
  called a Creole. There are English-based Creoles
  in the Caribbean, for example in Barbados and
  Jamaica, on the North coast of South America
  (Guyana, Surinam) and even in the United States.
  Creoles probably developed in the Caribbean
  because of the mixing of populations caused by
  the slave trade. The slavers herded together
  speakers of many different West African
  languages. At the ports of embarkation, and on
  the slave ships, the captives probably
  communicated with one another in some kind of
  West African pidgin, which in the Caribbean
  plantations developed in Creoles.

82
Sino-Tibetan Family

• Thai, Tibetan, Burmese and several dialects of
  Chinese come from the Sino-Tibetan family.
  Japanese does not come from this family it may
  be related to Korean

83
Contraction

• There is a big difference between the number of
  known languages and the number of spoken
  languages
• Aramaic, for example, is on the verge of
  extinction
• When I say extinction I mean that no one speaks
  it
• We are actually seeing the number of living
  languages disappear
• Latin was only a number of related languages such
  as Umbrian and Oscan existed in Italy 2,000 years
  ago
• But as the Romans conquered Italy, their
  language conquered too

84
Celtic

• Celtic, once widely diffused over Europe, can be
  divided into three groups Gaulish, Britannic and
  Gaelic
• Gaulish was spoken in France and northern Italy
  in the time of the Roman Republic and was spread
  abroad by Celtic military expeditions to central
  Europe and as far as Asia Minor
• It died out during the early centuries of the
  Christian era and is known only from a few
  inscriptions and from names of people and places
  preserved in Latin texts
• Britannic was the branch of Celtic spoken in most
  of Britain before the Anglo-Saxon invasions

85
English as lingua franca

• English is used everywhere in the world
• Instead of learning four foreign languages, a
  Japanese businessman will learn English
• English is promoted by books, movies and music