The Evolution of English

The Evolution of English

In the most printed book in the history of mankind, there is a story about a people, who, with much collaboration, communication and effort, set forth to build a tower of epic proportion. Its purpose was to reach the heavens, and make a name for those who built it. Until one day, their language, the basis of their society and the building block of the tower, was confused, and the language was divided into many languages so they could no longer understand one another. Their hopes for the tower crumbled with their communication and the people dispersed to the four corners of the earth. (Bertman 2003) Webster defines language as: “the system of words or signs that people use to express thoughts and feelings to each other”. When the language of the people was confused, understanding one another was impossible, thoughts could not be conveyed and feelings could not be expressed. Language is the glue that binds people together by allowing them to convey thoughts and collaborate. English has come a long way from its root, Latin, which was highly inflexive and required context based interpretation which hindered communication. English has become less complex yet more advanced than Latin allowing thoughts to be clearly transferred between people.

One improvement English has made from its origins, has been the removal of inflective endings, which lowered the complexity of the language. “Nemo sine vitio est” is Latin for “No one is without fault”, this is an example of inflection. Webster defines the word “Inflection” as, “The change of form that words undergo to mark such distinctions as those of case, gender, number, tense, person, mood or voice”. In the case of a person or object words in Latin and Old English had suffixes that indicated the gender of the noun such as nemo (Latin for “no one”), which has the ending -o to show it is a masculine, singular noun (Adkins 2004 & Ruud 2006). In contrast English does not have an ending that denotes the gender of the noun. Instead gender is indicated by the pronoun that could be put in place of that noun. In the translation above, “No one” would be a neuter noun, and since there is no ending to indicate the gender the pronoun that replaces “no one” would do so. “They”, the replacing pronoun of “No one”, has no gender so it is gender neutral, and hence neuter. (“No one is without” is a double negative; it would also be translated “everyone is with”, which also would have “they” as the replacing pronoun). Nouns and adjectives are also conjugated to indicate differences in number (singular object or plural objects). sine, the Latin adjective meaning “without”, has the suffix -e showing that it is being applied to a singular noun (in this instance nemo)(Adkins 2004). Similarly, in English, words usually have an “s” or “es” as a suffix, when the plural of a noun or adjective is being expressed. In Latin all verbs have suffixes that point towards the noun type they modify. In the sentence from above, est (meaning “to be”) refers to a singular noun falling under he, she or it (not I or you, in this case “No one”). In other words est states the inexistence of one without fault. On the other hand English does not have suffixes that point towards the noun type they modify, but instead rely on word order to clarify the intended meaning. Another improvement English has made is