Anglo-Saxon
The English language begins with the phrase ‘Up Yours Caesar!’ as the Romans leave Britain and a lot of Germanic tribes start flooding in, tribes such as the Angles and the Saxons – who together gave us the term Anglo-Saxon, and the Jutes – who didn’t.
The Romans left some very straight roads behind, but not much of their Latin language.
The Anglo-Saxon vocab was much more useful as it was mainly words for simple everyday things like ‘house’, ‘woman’, ‘loaf’ and ‘werewolf’.
Four of our days of the week - Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were named in honour of Anglo-Saxon gods, but they didn’t bother with Saturday, Sunday and Monday as they had all gone off for a long weekend.
While they were away, Christian missionaries stole in bringing with them leaflets about jumble sales and more Latin. Christianity was a hit with the locals and made them much happier to take on funky new words like ‘martyr’, ‘bishop’ and ‘font’.
Along came the Vikings, with their action-man words like ‘drag’, ‘ransack’, thrust’ and ‘die’, and a love of pickled herring. They may have raped and pillaged but there were also into ‘give’ and ‘take’ – two of around 2000 words that they gave English, as well as the phrase ‘watch out for that man with the enormous axe.
M3 R3: The Normans in England
M3 R4: Link to an online etymological dictionary
Part 1:
Part 2:
M3 R6: Shakespeare's Linguistic Legacy
M3 R7: The History of English in ten minutes: Shakespeare
M3 R8: How is the Internet changing Language today? By Prof. David Crystal
M3 R9: Link to an online etymological dictionary
M3 R10: Paintings of the Neoclassical period
Jacques-Louis David's Oath of the Horatii
William Hogarth's Marriage à-la-mode, Shortly after the Marriage
Thomas Gainsborough's The Painter's Daughters Chasing a Butterfly
M3 R11: The Daffodils read by Jeremy Irons
M3 R12: Little Red Riding Hood, the versions of the classical tale
http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0333.html
No comments:
Post a Comment