It occurs to me, anyone who does not believe in the fact of Global Climate Change should get their head examined. Today I went skating, outside, inline skating, in Toronto! (Its January and I am using the bike trail.) I must say I was pleasantly surprised by how fast I could go and how well I could sustain it, evidently the change I did in my training regimen on the Elliptical machine helped. Skating outside on a bike trail beats skating indoors, hands down, no matter what the conditions, which in this case included, rain, hail and near zero (Celsius) temperatures, but at least there wasn't snow!
In any case, that was not the purpose of today's post. (Again I apologize for the delay but it takes quite a bit of effort to research a post like this one.) Before I begin I would like to attribute the inspiration for this post, as well as the major source for what I am writing, to Chapter 4 of the mother tongue english and how it got that way by Bill Bryson. I should also note that since the book's publication in 1990 new discoveries have been made which render some of what Bryson wrote obsolete.
Today I would like to discuss something everyone reading this blog uses, every day. The largest and most distributed language on Earth, English. (I should note, when I say largest, that is speculative, but given that English is so willing to assimilate entire languages, nearly whole, right into its vocabulary it seems reasonable to conclude the OED is a sampling of a truly immense language, I might also note that on my Birthday in 2005 there were over 301 thousand words defined in the OED.)
Now today I do not wish to discuss the entire language, it is far to big, rather I just want to go over some history, for one reason alone, it interests me. In particular, I wanted to have a look back at post Roman England of the 5'th through 11'th Centuries.
You see, towards the end of the 4'th Century the British citizens of the Roman empire were getting frustrated with something many of us can relate to, the taxes were to high. Only unlike us Canadians who can vote the scum out of office and get health care for our taxes, Romans could not vote for Emperor nor was the money being wisely spent, too much was spent on the most bloated bureaucracy in the history of humanity to that time. The British set a precedent in 410 which other British patriots would follow some 1365 years later in Boston harbour. The British revolted against the taxes. Those Roman citizens could not possibly have timed their revolt any worse, you see they didn't actually want to loose the Imperial rule, they just wanted to call attention to the unacceptably high taxes.
Well as we all, should, know, on August 24, 410 the City of Rome was sacked by Alaric of the Visigoths. (This was the second sack of Rome, the first was in 387 BCE when the young Republic was attacked by Brennus who lead the Gauls.) When the English revolted the two Roman legions garrisoned in England were ordered back to the Eternal city to protect her from further attack. After the Roman withdrawal to the continent Saxon's and Jutes entered from what is now Northern Germany and the low countries.
In any case, that was not the purpose of today's post. (Again I apologize for the delay but it takes quite a bit of effort to research a post like this one.) Before I begin I would like to attribute the inspiration for this post, as well as the major source for what I am writing, to Chapter 4 of the mother tongue english and how it got that way by Bill Bryson. I should also note that since the book's publication in 1990 new discoveries have been made which render some of what Bryson wrote obsolete.
Today I would like to discuss something everyone reading this blog uses, every day. The largest and most distributed language on Earth, English. (I should note, when I say largest, that is speculative, but given that English is so willing to assimilate entire languages, nearly whole, right into its vocabulary it seems reasonable to conclude the OED is a sampling of a truly immense language, I might also note that on my Birthday in 2005 there were over 301 thousand words defined in the OED.)
Now today I do not wish to discuss the entire language, it is far to big, rather I just want to go over some history, for one reason alone, it interests me. In particular, I wanted to have a look back at post Roman England of the 5'th through 11'th Centuries.
You see, towards the end of the 4'th Century the British citizens of the Roman empire were getting frustrated with something many of us can relate to, the taxes were to high. Only unlike us Canadians who can vote the scum out of office and get health care for our taxes, Romans could not vote for Emperor nor was the money being wisely spent, too much was spent on the most bloated bureaucracy in the history of humanity to that time. The British set a precedent in 410 which other British patriots would follow some 1365 years later in Boston harbour. The British revolted against the taxes. Those Roman citizens could not possibly have timed their revolt any worse, you see they didn't actually want to loose the Imperial rule, they just wanted to call attention to the unacceptably high taxes.
Well as we all, should, know, on August 24, 410 the City of Rome was sacked by Alaric of the Visigoths. (This was the second sack of Rome, the first was in 387 BCE when the young Republic was attacked by Brennus who lead the Gauls.) When the English revolted the two Roman legions garrisoned in England were ordered back to the Eternal city to protect her from further attack. After the Roman withdrawal to the continent Saxon's and Jutes entered from what is now Northern Germany and the low countries.
Bryson describes the arrival of the Germanic barbarians very nicely on page 47.
That is about as much as we know - and much of that is supposition. We don't know exactly when or where the invasion began or how many people were involved. We don't know why the invaders gave up secure homes to chance their luck in hostile territory. What is known is that although the Saxons continued to flourish on the continent, the Angles and the Jutes are heard of there no more. They simply disappeared.
And although Bryson describes it as an invasion with hostile territory in fact "It was not so much an invasion as a series of opportunistic encroachments taking place over several generations."
There are few records as Bryson explains:
The early Anglo-Saxons left no account of these events for the simple reason that they were, to use the modern phrase, functionally illiterate. They possessed a runic alphabet, which they used to scratch inscriptions on ceremonial stones called runes (hence the term runic) or occasionally as a means of identifying valued items... In 1982, a gold medallion [coin sized] was found in a field in Suffolk... The medallion bears a runic inscription which says (or at least is thought to say): "This she-wolf is a reward to my kinsman." Not perhaps the most profound of statements, but it is the earliest surviving example of Anglo-Saxon writing in Britain. It is, in other words, the first sentence in English.
The medallion is from sometime between 450~480 CE. But as I mentioned earlier there is other old English. Unlike the runic of the Anglo-Saxon's, around 650 other Anglo-Saxons inscribed in a bronze broach, left at what is believed to be a burial ground, the letters N, E, I and M. These letters would represent the first English writing known.
Ironically this young language, survived, what is even more remarkable, as Bryson would note, "by the fifteenth century people in part of England often could not understand people in another part." By the sixteenth century the English spoken in London could be understood not 60 miles from the city, yet this East Midlands dialect as it is formally called, would go on to be the Lingua franca of the World hardly five hundred years later!
It truly astounds me that in five hundred years we have gone from William Shakespeare to John Stewart, from sailing boats to jumbo jets and from a language spoken by just a few thousand souls in the area of London to the most widely understood language, spoken by literally billions of people everywhere, including, of course, you the reader and me the writer of this blog.
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