Birth of a Language - BBC Documentary | Ep.1 The Adventure Of English

[Music] this is the South Bank in London 2,000 years ago if you'd heard a human voice around here the language would have been incomprehensible a thousand years ago the English language had established its first base camp today English circles the globe it inhabits the air we breathe what started as a gutal tribal dialect seemingly isolated in a small island is now the language of well over a thousand million people around the world [Music] the story of the English language is an extraordinary one it has the characteristics of a bold and successful Adventure tenacity luck near

Extinction on more than one occasion dazzling flexibility and an extraordinary power to absorb and it's still going on new dialects new englishes are evolving all the time all over the world successive invasions introduced then threatened to destroy our language our first program tells that story for 300 years English was forced underground our second program tells how it survived and how it fought back our third program will tell how the English language took on the power blocks of church and state our fourth how it became the language of Shakespeare in later programs we're going to leave

these shores as English did to tell the story of how in America the language of one great Empire became that of another we'll go to the Caribbean where a variety of new part English dialects took root India where English became a commanding unifying language in a country of a thousand tongues and Australia where a confident new English was invented by a people many of whom had been expelled from their mother country we'll travel through time too to explore how English in the 21st century has become the international language of business the language in which the

world's citizens [Music] communicate over the last 1500 years these small Islands have achieved much that is remarkable but in my view England's greatest success story of all is the English language these programs are about the words we think in talking writing singing the words that describe the life we [Music] live this is where we can begin just after Dawn in a foreign country on a flat Shore by the North Sea in what we now call the Netherlands this is freezeland and it's in this part of the world that we can still hear the modern language

that we believe sounds closest to what the ancestor of English sounded like 1500 years [Music] ago Inland many people start their day listening to the weather forecast from popular weatherman Pete Palma some of his words might sound familiar like three and four Frost and freeze and blue the reason we can recognize these words is that modern frian and Modern English can both be traced back to the same family the Germanic family of languages and some words have stayed more or less the same down the centuries butter bread cheese meal sleep boat snow sea storm the

West Germanic tribes who invented these words were a warlike adventurous people they'd been on the move through Europe for the best part of a thousand years and now had settlements in what we would call the lowlands of Northern Europe Holland Germany and Denmark but they were still greedy for land ready to move on this is the island of telik the English Coast is about 250 Mi to the Southwest behind me it was from these islands and the low-lying frisan mainland that in the fifth century a Germanic tribe part of the family that also contained Judes

Angles and Saxons made sale to to look for a better life and they took their language our language with [Music] them s wind for D the Germanic tribe tries weren't the first to invade our Shores more than 500 years before the Romans had also come by sea to impose their will now their empire had crumbled and they'd abandoned these islands leaving the native tribes the Britain or Kelts to their fate this is p Castle an ancient Roman Fort that used to stand on the very Shoreline of the South Coast the chronicle of the period reported

that in the year 491 Germanic Invaders laid Siege and slaughtered the Kelts who' taken Refuge here not one of them was Left Alive other Kelts did survive the invasion a million or more of them in England but they were a broken people the clue to their fate lies in the word the Germanic tribes used to describe them it was willas a name that lives on in our modern language as Welsh 1500 years ago it meant both Foreigner and slave the Cults became servants and followers second class citizens the only way up was to be become

part of the Invaders tribes to adopt their culture and their language the Kelts and their language were pushed to the [Music] margins only a handful of words from the Celtic languages survive into Modern English in the north where I come from we have Crag meaning Rock Kum meaning deep valley and dialect words like brat and Brock for [Music] Badger there are traces in place names the tour in traena spelled as Toren how a neighboring Village to my own that comes from the Celtic for Peak the car of carile means a fortified place in the South

they left us the names of TS and aan Dover and London but these were fragments the language that prevailed was that of the [Music] victors by the end of the 6th Century these Germanic tribes occupied half of Mainland Britain they had divided into a number of Kingdoms Kent susex Essex and Wessex denoting the settlements of Southern eastern and western Saxon tribes East Anglia named after the angles who gave England its name meria in the Midlands North Umbria in the north throughout these areas many modern place names come from that settlement or use the words they

brought we live with them we live in them every day the in in modern place names means the people [Music] of ton as in witon where I come from means enclosure or Village ham means Farm which might surprise one or two Tottenham supporters glor [Music] Glory [Music] the Germanic tribes now settled around the country all spoke their own dialects from among them would emerge one language Anglo-Saxon or Old English and we all speak it every day without far sters none of them can really finish Armstrong we just need some youth really examine the language you

use today and you'll still find hundreds of words from a language over 1500 years old key wordss ranging from the names we give family members to numbers G also we today I think we'll win two on today so I'll drink today I live in like a West Ham sort of area and I've got a lot West Ham friends um but for this game we'll be enemies for the home games I would go with the guys we meet up from the top SPS website or with my daughter to other games and she's five at the moment

um loves it she loves singing the songs nice ones anyway I was coming with my son so we just go and get something to eat first um going into the ground save the atmosphere and watch the game there has been a few high scoring games over the years I think the highest we ever beat them was 6'1 um repeat today wouldn't go Miss most of those words were from Old English nouns like youth son daughter field friend home and ground prepositions like in and on into by and from and and the are from Old English

all the numbers and verbs like drink Come and Go sing like and love but would these words have sounded different all those years ago in a slightly quieter Pub I ask language expert Katy L they sound a little different I mean the old English for son is sunu that's not so very different game is Garman uh ground is grun um and I know notice that Steve says his his daughter loves uh singing songs if you said that in Old English it would be his doctor l s singing and you can see that that sounds pretty

much like Modern English so in fact you can have a good conversation in Old English oh yes you can indeed I mean each each word I'm saying now is from Old English have you any estimate how many words there were swirling around compared with how many words we have now we think it was in the region of 25,000 words and compare that with an average Des diction which maybe contain something like 100,000 words it sounds pretty small but if you think about the fact that an averagely educated person will probably have about 10,000 words in

their active vocabulary there are plenty of words to go [Music] round English took its first steps away from its tribal roots with the Revival of Christianity he often reaches we met M and his MTH Let Us Praise the king of Heaven the power of the Creator and his conception the work of the Glorious father who created every wonder the Eternal Lord har shpend in 597 the Monk and prior Augustine led a mission from Rome to Kent around the same time Irish monks of the Celtic Church were establishing a presence in the north within a century

Christians built churches and monasteries this is St Pauls in jro parts of which date from the 7th [Music] Century faith and stone weren't the only things the Christian missionaries brought to the country they brought the international language of the Christian religion Latin Latin terms became part of the English word horde altar became alter apostas became Apostle Mass Monk and verse and many others all come from the Latin this would become a pattern of English the layering of words taken from different Source languages and from Latin too the English took their script the angles Saxons friisans

and Judes who had become the English hadn't brought script as we know it with them but [Music] runes the runic alphabet was made up of symbols formed mainly of straight lines so that the letters could be carved into stone or wood those were their media rather than parchment or paper though this is a short poem most examples of runic writing that survive suggest runes were mainly used for short practical messages or [Music] graffiti the Latin alphabet was different with its curves and Bows it allowed words to be easily written using pen and ink onto pages

of parchment or Vellum which gathered together into a book could be widely [Music] [Music] circulated Christianity brought the book to these Shores verbum the word [Music] soon a native culture of scholarship began to flower a culture based on Latin and on [Music] writing the Magnificent lindis fan gospels were created in the 8th Century on the island of lindis fan just off the Northeast Coast a few miles south at the monastery of St Paul's in garro the Great English Monk and Scholar bead born and educated in North Umbria began writing the first ever history of the

English-speaking people he wrote Of course in Latin the language of scholarship the prevailing language among the people was still Old English but Latin this powerful medium was now amongst them now Old English was written down using the Latin alphabet while retaining some of the old runes as letters from the 7th Century we find English itself written on parchment in a language and a script which we just about recognize as our [Music] own father in he of and inor ofos today and [Music] for and with writing Old English stole a march on other languages spoken in

Europe at the time prayers were recorded and books of the Bible translated the laws of the land were written down and the language soon became capable of recording and expressing an increasingly wide and subtle range of human experience and in the right Hands Old English was now powerful and supple enough to take you to imaginary worlds fire the blood be [Music] poetry so the spear Dan and days gone by and the Kings who rulle them had courage and greatness we have heard of those princes heroic campaigns no one knows who composed the Epic be wolf

sometime between the mid 7th and end of the 10th Century it's the first great poem in the English language the beginning of a glorious tradition which will lead to Cha Shakespeare and Beyond the poem celebrates the Glory Days of the Germanic tribes epitomizing the heroic Warrior who gives the poem its name the power of the language can be heard In this passage which introduces bol's Archen enemy The Monster grindle [Music] the of MOA under M leam gel Gan G in off the Moes down through the Mist bands God cursed grindle came greedily looping the bane

of the race of men roamed forth hunting for a prey in the high Hall rink spurned and joyless he journeyed on ahead and arrived at the B on the the was then his rage boiled over he ripped open the mouth of the building maddening for blood he grabbed and mauled a man on his bench bit into his bone lapping bolted down his blood and gorged on him in lumps leaving the body utterly lifeless eaten up hand and foot what does that tell us about English at that time Sheamus what sort of language was it when

you came to it do you think this is a fully developed poetic language it's certainly fully developed poetic language uh it's it's very it's capable of great elaboration but what uh struck me generally about Old English from the moment I read the bits of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle right through to bearwolf is it's terrific for telling what happened it's a a wonderful sense of the indicative mood all through it it's terrific for action iic for description there's a wonderful forthright capacity to make up extra language in anglosaxon the words are are very clear and direct bone

and house for example bone house there you have the house for the body a word for the [Music] body beautiful words for instruments uh the harp is called uh GL beam the Glee beam The Happy The Happy wood or else um the joywood uh I think so guman [Music] woodo swords are or Shield The Shield is the war board Weg board that is a specific poetic energy that's in the language uh the the ability to make compound which are still in German I guess gives it a great Beauty how extensive is the vocabulary I think

there are 40,000 words recorded in in bolf but a lot of the words repeat themselves in know probably this is in poetry more than in the pros if we heard an Anglo-Saxon speaker speaking uh under his roof to His companion we'd probably hear a very a quicker a different less elaborate language from Bol would you say was it is very clearly written to be read aloud it's certainly written to be read aloud the question that that agitate some Scholars is whether it was written you know but I think the general uh consensus now is that

by the time you get to bearwolf you have a a writer um dealing with the traditional oral language what we who Luther Aus Ellen frodon certainly you you open the book what way Gardena and yment asks to be uttered and there are many speeches in it and it comes off the tongue with with terrific directness I [Music] think Latin and Greek had created great bodies of literature in the classical past in the East Arabic and Chinese were being used in the 8th and 99th Century as languages of poetry but at that time no other language

in the Christian world could match the achievement of the bearwolf poet and his Anonymous contempories Old English was flourishing the adventure was underway but while the seeds of English had come from these frisan Shores in the fifth century so now in the late 8th Century a potential Destroyer was prepairing his battle Fleet 500 miles or so to the north [Music] in the late 8th Century the latin-based culture of scholarship which had grown up in places like lindis far and which had also been the Cradle of Old English faced Extinction from across the [Music] sea these

ruins are of the medieval Monastery that stood on the island of lindan it was the Vikings who sacked and burned the religious Center that stood here before to these Pagan Pirates rampaging out of their longships in 793 this great Center of Christian piety and scholarship a pivotal place in the survival of the word and the gospels was no more than an undefended Treasure House the jewels that graced the books of the church became bobles around a Viking's neck [Music] today the Vikings may seem romantic reenacting their rituals a good day out over 12 centuries ago

their arrival was not so cheerful to many it seemed to Signal the end for civilization a year after raising lindis fan the Vikings returned and sacked jarro The Abbey where beid had been the greatest scholar in one of the finest libraries in Christendom this stronghold of the Latin word where English was also being written down uniquely among European dialects was burned to the ground it's books with [Music] it [Music] it was the start of 70 years of attack during which the Vikings Savaged this eastern half of the country few stories survive of exactly where and

when they attacked perhaps chillingly because few were left to tell the tail at first the Raiders went home with their plunder then they decided to take the land itself in 1865 the Vikings landed a great Army south of here in East Anglia within 5 years the Viking Invaders who are now called Danes controlled the north and east of the country of the old Anglo-Saxon kingdoms only Wessex still held out old nor the language of the conquerors was spreading throughout the land Old English potentially faced the same fate as the Celtic language it had supplanted virtual

Oblivion English was in need of a champion and it found one king Alfred's statue stands here in Winchester the capital of his ancient Kingdom of Wessex he's the only monarch in our history to be known as The Great and he's often been hailed as the savior of England that may be debatable as the idea of a single unified England didn't really exist in Alfred's day what is certain is that he was a great defender of the English language it was the victorians who dubbed Alfred the Great he was one of their Darlings an English hero

whose exploits were enthusiastically woven into the fabric of national myth but he very nearly didn't make [Music] it he'd come to the throne of Wessex within a year of the first Danish attacks in the Southeast and first he could hardly hold them back in 878 the Danes were on what appeared to be a decisive battle at chiam in [Music] Wilshire Alfred with only a few followers went on the run into the marshes of Somerset moving as a contemporary wrote Under difficulties through woods and into inaccessible places Legend has Alfred unrecognized taking shelter in a poor

woman's Cottage and being scolded for burning the wheat and cakes he'd been set to mind but the reality was less cozy his situation was desperate and if Alfred's Kingdom fell the whole country would be controlled and settled by conquerors whose language would inevitably Crush English but Alfred proved to be an enterprising Warrior and strategist running free in the somerset levels he discovered the Arts of irregular warfare and mounted Guerilla attacks against the occupying forces of guon the Danish Invader but he knew that wasn't going to be enough for westex to be regained the Danes had

to be brought to battle and defeated the fighting men of westex had been scattered but in the spring of 878 Alfred sent out a call for the men of the sherds the county armies to join him around 4,000 men mainly from Wilshire and Somerset armed only with battle axes and throwing Spears responded to the call they mustered at Eggbert Stone where trackways and ridgeways met 48 hours later they Advanced Shields drumming against the Danish Army of 5,000 holding High Ground at ethn June on the western edge of sorer plan contemporary English accounts describ the battle

that followed as a Slaughter and a route of the Danes by the West Saxons modern historians question that but there's no doubt that Alfred prevailed his crown and his kingdom were secured and more importantly for our story so is the English [Music] language the Dame surrendered the leader was baptized as a Christian and Alfred's crucial victory was memorialized here in Wilshire in an earlier version of a Great White Horse carved into the land he'd saved Alfred left an even more significant mark on the country he signed a peace treaty with the Danes which established a

border running up through the country from the TS to the old Roman Road of Watling Street the land to the north and east to be known as The Dan Law would be under Danish rule the land to the South and West would be for the English no one was to cross the line unless to trade in the course of time because of Alfred's peace treaty when Dan and English met they didn't do so to fight but to do business even to intermar oh yes communities mixed and so did the languages in English rather than being

engulfed by the Dan's language began to absorb it I'm in the market town of Hexum in the northeast of England maps of the area show just how widespread the Danish settlement was place names ending in by reveal the Danish name for Farm Thorp denotes a village thit a portion of [Music] land the births marriages and deaths pages of the local paper feature lots of names ending in Sun that was a Danish way of making a name by adding to the name of the father just on this page I can see Harrison Gibson Hudson Robson Sanderson

Dickinson Simpson Dickinson again and Watson and school where I was just across the country there was a Patterson a Johnson a rollinson and another Dixon outside in the street you can see the same thing on shop signs everywhere even given centuries of people moving around the country names ending in Sun are still far more common in what were the Danish territories of the north and west than they are in the south and east Above All You Can Hear The Echoes of the Dan's old nose language in the way people speak what is charl Char of

Sailor and Li Co it's a little field on its own as will says there's a back down by the side of it looks down through a little wood such a lovely setting down by the uh you know down by in G isn't it it's like a little isolation field it's only it's only a couple of Acres the whole field be interesting to see a few sheep sold with Lambs suppos to be today are they allowed to be SW tonight some old Norse words stayed in the local dialect of the north words like Beck for stream

and GTH for Paddock as a boy in witon I remember hearing and using dialect words like Slattery for shower slape for slippery yet for gate L for leap y for Oak and yam for home as in as gang and yam pure no heard in witon every night of the week and there were many others but the influence of old no wasn't just local all around the country over time hundreds of nor words entered the mainstream of English and we still use them every day the SK sound is a characteristic of old no and English borrowed

words like score and sky and sky as well as perhaps a thousand others including anger ball Freckle knife neck root scowl and window sometimes where both Old Norse and Old English had a word for the same thing both words lived on in English each taking on a slightly different meaning where Old English said craft Old North said skill for an English hide the north said skin in Old English you were sick in nor you were ill here was another example of English has extraordinary ability to absorb to take in words from other languages adding them

to its word horde increasing the richness and flexibility of the vocabulary I think the the point about vocabulary is how much it astonishes by its ordinary nature words like law egg husband leg ill D ugly all these words are from Old Norse and yet you wouldn't necessarily think they were foreign at all most astounding of all I think are the pronouns they their and them those are also from Old Norse and in terms of grammar in a way they simplified English is they took it away from its Germanic Roots I think it's probably true to

say that Old Norse affects English Lang anguage more than any other because it actually leads to a restructuring of the language Old English uh forms sentences and not by word order as we do but by tacking on endings onto the ends of things like articles and pronouns and nouns um what happens is through contact with a a pretty similar language um a lot of these inflectional endings start to lose their distinctive nature and actually this is a proess we can see happening fairly early on in the Anglo-Saxon period so the language is Pro to do

that but contact with North langu just speeded it up gave it a shove towards modernity can you give us a very simple example of that yes let's take a simple sentence like um the king gave horses to his men that would be something like in Old English seing G blank his now in Old English you didn't tend to have a preposition like to instead you could use a special ending which kind of meant to his men and that was be um a um ending and you just tack that onto the end of the noun for

man so you'd had gum U ending now the plural for the word for horse you want to say gave horses to his men would be have an n on it so it' be blanan unfortunately towards the end of the Old English period we start to see that um ending becoming more and more indistinct and we see spellings like Goan aen just the same as blanan a and it's obvious that the king is more likely to give um horses to his men and then to his horses but you can see that there's a potential there uh

for difficulties and so we start to see um prepositions being used in place of those endings which had become indistinct spoken English survived the Danish Invasion but as the 9th century Drew to a close the written culture was in a ruinous State and King Alfred was concerned when Alfred looked at the state of his kingdom he was appalled the scholars in the monasteries had once made England the greatest Powerhouse of Christian teaching in Europe but 150 years had passed since the high days of beid and the scholarly tradition had declined hastened on its way by

A Century of Viking rigns in all the country Alfred could barely find a handful of priests who could read and understand Latin and if they couldn't understand Latin they couldn't pass on the teachings of the religious books that told people how to lead virtuous lives they couldn't save Souls where the written word had once flourished Alfred now found only chronic spiritual sickness he looked for a cure one way was to educate more clergy in Latin but that wasn't enough he hit on a more radical solution a solution that hinged not on Latin but on English

and he took English to new heights of achievement in the preface to his own translation of Pope Gregory's pastoral care Alfred wrote I remembered how before it was all ravaged and burned I'd seen how the churches throughout all England stood filled with treasures and books and there was also a multitude of God's servants who had very little benefit from those books because they couldn't understand anything of them since they were not written in their own language their own language was of course English Alfred didn't want to do away with Latin but he realized that it

would be far easier to teach people to read books written in the language they spoke the best Scholars could then go on to learn Latin and join holy orders the rest would still have access to scholarship and spiritual guidance but it would be written in [Music] English here in his capital city of Winchester Alfred Drew up a plan it was an extraordinarily imaginative project to promote literacy and restore the English [Music] language we should he wrote translate certain books which are most necessary for all men to know into the language that we could all understand

and also arrange it as with God's help we very easily can if we have peace so that all the youth of free men now among the English people who have the means to be able to divert themselves to it may be set to study for as long as they're of no other use until the time they're able to read English writing well Alfred had five books of religious instruction philosophy and history translated from Latin into English a laborious and costly undertaking copies were sent out to the 12 Bishops of his kingdom for their wisdom to

be spread as widely as [Music] possible to each Bishop to emphasize the importance and value of the project Alfred sent a costly pointer used to underline the text this is the Alfred Jewel many historians believe that it formed the head of one of those pointers crafted in Crystal enamel and gold it was discovered in 1693 in Somerset and is now on show at the Ashan Museum in Oxford it's inscribed Alfred had Meade in English Alfred the Great had made the English language the jewel in his [Music] crown here in Winchester Alfred had established what was

effectively a public in house other projects He undertook included the commissioning of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle detailing hundreds of years of History Alfred died in 899 one of his legacies was an English language which was more prestigious and widely read than ever before there was nothing to compare with this range of written vernacular history philosophy poetry anywhere else in Mainland Europe English was out on its own by the middle of the 11th century English seemed secure but but now other Invaders were waiting in the wings and English was about to face its greatest threat [Music] ever

this place the old Roman Fort at py was a fiful one for the English language it was here among other places that the friisans and other Germanic tribes had made landfall in the fifth century and introduced their own language now in 1066 another wave of Invaders was Landing the Normans when in 1066 William Duke of Normandy sailed with his army to claim the English Throne he was sure he had right on his side the English king Edward the Confessor had spent many years in Normandy and in that time contemporary sources say had come to regard

with will as a brother or even a son and had named him as his successor sensing his impending death and fearing Rebellion at home the childless Edward had dispatched Harold godwinson his wife's brother and his ear of Essex the richest and most powerful of the English Lords to Normandy to pledge loyalty to William this Harold did swearing on two caskets of holy relics but when Edward did die Harold supported by the English nobility had himself crowned in Westminster Abbey on the very day that Edward was laid to rest there to the truculent and ruthless William

this was an affront Invasion with maximum Force the only possible [Music] response [Music] the armies met here near Hastings this is the spot where traditionally Harold fell fatally pierced through the eye with an arrow the site was later named after the engagement but it's named not with an English word like fight but with a word from the language of the Norman Victors [Music] battle Harold would be the last English-speaking King of England for three centuries on Christmas Day 1066 William was crowned in Westminster Abbey in a service conducted in English and Latin William spoke French

[Music] throughout a new king and a new new language were in Authority in England enemy castle castle was one of the first French words to enter the English language the Normans built a chain of them to impose their rule on the country This Magnificent castle at Rochester was one of the first to be fortified in stone by Blood the Normans were from the same stock as the normen who' invaded in earlier centuries but they no longer spoke a Germanic language rather what we'd call old French which had grown from Latin roots many of the words

they spoke would have been very strange to the native English but would quickly become unpleasantly familiar our words Army Archer Soldier Garrison and God all come from the Conquering Norman French French was the language that spelled out the architecture of the new social order Crown throne and Court duuk Baron and nobility peasant vassel servant the word govern comes from French as do Liberty Authority obedience and traitor the Normans took the law into their own hands felony arrest warrant Justice judge and jury all come from French and so do accuse acquit sentence condemn prison and and

jail it's been estimated that in the three centuries after the conquest about 10,000 French words colonized the English language they didn't all come in immediately but the conquest opened a conduit of French vocabulary that remain open on and off ever since today French words are all around us City Market Porter here we are lot one fabulous salmon weighs about 14 it is a fabulous fish we got some fabulous mael they've come out from abine next to them are the oysters they come from the Essex Coast so pork sausage bacon nice bit fruit oranges but juicy

leems grape tart biscuit sugar cream [Music] fry vinegar nearly 500 Words dealing with food cooking and eating alone entered English from French just a fraction of the Imports which would enrich the English word hold in the centuries after the Norman [Music] Conquest within 20 years of taking control of the country William sent his officers out to take stock of his kingdom the monks of Peterborough who were still recording the events of history in English in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle noted disapprovingly then not one piece of land escaped the survey not even an ox or a cow

or a [Music] pig the Doomsday Book there are in fact two volumes show us how complete the Norman takeover of English land was and how widespread their influence and their language the Norman settlement had concentrated the wealth of England more than ever before or since the native ruling class from before the conquest had been slaughtered banished or disinherited in favor of Williams followers half of the country was in the hands of just 190 men half of that was held by just 11 men and not one of these great landowners spoke English gilberti [Music] when this

record of the country was drawn up it was written in Latin not Norman French David and certainly not English rol fit between them French and Latin had become the languages of state law the church and history itself in England the writing of English became in increasingly rare even the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle guttered into silence what we the language of Alfred and the bearwolf poet had lost all the prestige that it had slowly built up in a country of three languages English was now a poor third bottom of the pile the English language had been forced underground

it would take 300 years for it to reemerge and when it did it would have changed [Music] dramatically e