| tacticslion |
05-26-2010 05:41 PM |
The Language of ... something.
I hereby* do not certify that every word that follows is the true, complete, and unbiased history of the English language:
First there was this island covered in rain and fog and generally kind of unpleasant and ignored by the more civilized world. After a long time of feuds and fighting amongst themselves, some weird German blokes decided to settle in for a while, bringing their language with them. Pushed a lot of the people who lived there up north and west. In fact, not one set of German guys, but two! Anyway, they mixed it up with some of the left over locals, created a hybrid language (primarily the German, though), and reverted to general barbarism. Good times, really.
Then the Romans had to all get up in their grill*. Impose "civilization" or whatever. Pffff, losers. So the "Romans" did their thing, let the people who submitted and/or were conquered generally stay the same, but with a few who learned Greek (oh, and Roman Latin, too) and killed or drove out those who didn't submit/weren't conquered. So people eventually adopted some of their words. Eventually the Romans got tired of that holeBritainOnrac and left.
So after they left, these French dudes were all like "hey, you know, that place must've been valuable, or the Romans wouldn't'a stayed for so long, so let's conquer it!" So they did, though it took a while. Took their language with them. They proceeded to try their darndest to civilize the cretins, but it just couldn't be done... not really. Seriously, the lousy peasants kept using their own language when outside, only using the French for things like food (served to their new masters) and stuff. Eventually, of course, Barbarism won, as it should. Civilization is for losers, after all. And their kids began to learn all the naughty words from the other, native kids. Then those kids grew up in "the hole"BritainOnrac, and thought of themselves as natives... they knew all the dirty words, after all. So the once-French people stopped considering themselves so French.
So these "English" people spoke a strange mixture of Welshvague old tribal languages as a foundation with German overlays buttressed by Greek (and Roman-Latin) elements, and topped with a heavy layer of French. Several invasions, generations, and wars, and other boring stuff later, a singular language kind of emerged. During that period of time several people tried to clarify, streamline, and regulate the language, some with more success than others (we can thank several these people for such things as no longer saying "k'nig'-it" or "k'nif-ee" instead of "knight" or "knife") however they were universally bad at taking notes and communicating with each other (I know, ironic, right?) and spellings continued in general chaos from five different contradictory languages.
Eventually, the printing presses came along, and people couldn't afford to carve that many variations into little wooden blocks - it was too expensive, and wood-carving took time. So someone said "let's do it this way", and because he had money and time, they did. Some didn't, but who cares about them, because they're losers and thus the villains of the story.
And that's how we got English. Also, Shakespeare. That creep just had to keep creating fake words! What a jerk!
*Romans with their Latin language weren't the linguistic geniuses we make them out to be now. They relied on Greek** a great deal.
**The Greeks with their Greek language weren't the linguistic geniuses we make them out to be now. They relied... you know what? Let's simplify: it was the Sumerians. Okay? The Sumerians were linguistic geniuses. Also, jerks.
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