Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum;
Si þin nama gehalgod
to becume þin rice
gewurþe ðin willa
on eorðan swa swa on heofonum.
urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg
and forgyf us ure gyltas
swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum
and ne gelæd þu us on costnunge
ac alys us of yfele soþlice.
Here's what that sounded like:
Finally, here's what it is in fairly normal-sounding modern English:
Our Father in heaven:
May your holy name be honored;
may your Kingdom come;
may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us today the food we need.
Forgive us the wrongs we have done,
as we forgive the wrongs that others have done to us.
Do not bring us to hard testing,
but keep us safe from the Evil One. Amen.
(There are so many different versions of the Lord's Prayer in modern English that I can't find a recording of this specific one. But to hear it, you can just say it to yourself if you want.)
In the 14th century you can kind of make out what it means if you squint (less if you're just listening to it; spelling changed less than pronunciation in the middle to modern English transition), but the first one is nearly opaque to most people. It's not just that how the words are spelled and pronounced has changed: the grammar has too. Notice the beginning in Old English, "Fæder ure." Word-for-word this is "Father our." In Old English, the possessive pronoun came after the verb here, not before as it does now. Also, look at the endings of some of the words: heofonum, eorðan, gyltas, gyltendum. These endings were important in Old English, because they carried information about who did what to whom. If you wanted to say "That name is pretty," you'd use the word nama for name, since it's the subject of the sentence. But if you wanted to say, "Give him a good name," you'd use naman for name, because it's the direct object of the sentence. We still do this somewhat, but only in two places: with personal pronouns ("She went to the store," but "Give her that") and the possessive (the -'s is a marking for the genitive (possessive) case).
But over time, people stopped pronouncing these case endings, so they dropped out of the language except in the most common situations. Some theorize that this happened due to influence from non-native learners, especially the Norse and the Norman French, who invaded England at various points, which seems probable to me. Case endings are hard for non-natives to pick up, so they stumbled as they learned them. Their kids grew up hearing these non-native speakers fumble these case endings, and so didn't generalize the scant examples they heard into the full system. Over time, this meant that case marking was mostly lost.
Case marking brings with it some advantages that offset its cognitive costs: when you've marked a word with the role it plays in the sentence, you can move it around more. If I know, because of a word's ending, that it's the thing doing the action, and likewise that the other thing is the one being affected by it, then I don't have to put them in a rigid order. Before, we could say either "Fæder ure" (Father our) or "urne gedæghwamlican* hlaf**" (our daily bread) just fine, since the endings did the work. Let's say that "-la" gets added to the subject of a sentence, and "-bo" gets added to the object. So then we'd end up with sentences such as:
"The dogla bites the manbo."
But we could also say:
"The manbo bites the dogla."
"The dogla the manbo bites."
"The manbo the dogla bites."
"Bites the manbo the dogla."
And so on.
Since we've marked who does what to whom with these endings, we're freer to move stuff around for emphasis: do I care more about the biter, or the bite-ee, or the biting? I can put it in front or at the end to leave the listener with a lasting impression or create a first impression. What you'd have to do to change the meaning would be to swap the endings: "The manla bites the dogbo" (you could also put the words in any order, as we did above). Modern English can't do this:
"The dog bites the man."
We can't rephrase this as:
"The man bites the dog."
This isn't a rephrasing of the first sentence, but an entirely new sentence: the first is ho-hum, the second is news. The reason we can't do this is that we now use the order of the words in the sentence to tell us who did what to whom: the thing before the verb is the biter, and the thing after is the bite-ee. No other order is possible (barring very special circumstances), without changing the meaning. We instead use our tone of voice and emphasis to stress things if we want.
So what we've got so far is that Old English was learned by non-native speakers who found the case system difficult. Their kids didn't learn it because of this, and so the case system eventually disappeared from English as more and more children heard incomplete or contradictory input. While this was happening, in order to convey who did what to whom, English speakers started honing in on more fixed word orders to represent meaning, making our syntax much more rigid as our morphology became much simpler.
As these grammatical developments were occurring, the lexicon wasn't staying still either. Since the French set up a new way of government upon conquering England, English speakers adopted their words for referring to the new positions and functions the French implemented, such as the word government itself, but also attorney, jury, guard, and treaty among many others. It was easier, after all, to just use the new words rather than try to come up with an Old English derived way of talking about these new things, just as we use the Japanese word sushi rather than coining a native English-based neologism like fishrice.
But it wasn't just words for new governmental positions and offices that the English adopted. The French, being the conquerors, became seen as prestigious, and so did their language. Using French was (and still is****) seen as a good way to elevate your social standing, a way of fitting in with those in high places. A result of this was not only that using French words sounded classy, but also that native English words became seen as plain and unsophisticated. People who wanted to sound sophisticated and advance their social standing would use the French words when they were in the presence of their higher-ups. One particularly illustrative example of the results of this is that we now have several pairs of words that refer to essentially the same thing. For example, the native English barnyard animals sheep and fowl became mutton and poultry when prepared and served to the French, and likewise for the native English pig and cow and the Norman French-derived pork and beef. Several other doublets like these exist even beyond the domain of food, such as ask and question, sweat and perspire. Each member of these pairs has pretty much the same meaning, but the Norman French-derived words are still considered the choices for the more discerning speaker.
Now, these grammatical changes and lexical adoptions occurred generally throughout the English-speaking population: no variety of English spoken today has anything but the barest case ending system, and fully a third of modern English vocabulary comprises Norman French-derived words. But let's consider a hypothetical situation for a moment: what if there were some English speakers not in England when the Norse and the Norman French showed up? Let's say that a group of settlers left for an isolated pocket of mainland Europe, arrived safely, and then shortly after got word of the complicated goings-on back in merry old England. They'll stay put rather than head back as subjects to the French, of course!
At this point, the language they speak and the language back in England are still roughly similar. Perhaps there are a few different words here and there from their particular region, but nothing major. But over time, the English case system drops out in the process we've just described, and the language of our settler group, who are still doing quite well for themselves 500 years on, thank you, hasn't lost it, because there haven't been any issues with non-native speakers having to learn the language. They've kept the case system while the England-dwellers have lost it!
They've also not had to bother with any of the social upheaval that's come with the imposition of French politics and dining on their way of life, so they haven't worried about using any of those prestigious French words to fit in.
These are only two of the many changes that Old English underwent in its transformation to modern English: we also added "do" when asking questions that don't have any auxiliary verb and when forming negatives, and we increased our use of the present progressive tense and aspect combination. People used to say, "What read you?" for "What are you reading?" and "I know not" for "I don't know." So we have to consider these changes and many others I've glossed over as well.
But we've got to keep in mind that our mainland settlers' language hasn't stood completely still either. Sure, maybe they've kept their case endings, but they've started to trade with the nearby peoples, who don't speak English. These people will probably have words for things that exist on the mainland that don't on the island, so our group will probably adopt these to refer to these things. They might start taking on other syntactic or phonetic features of their speech, either to simplify it to make trade easier, or because people who live near other tend to sound alike. Maybe there's intermarrying between the locals and our recently-arriveds, so the kids grow up speaking both languages and mixing the two. Then their kids hear a version of the language that has a few new features from the other thrown in for spice and grow up when that's the new normal way to talk. Or maybe everyone starts imitating the particular idiosyncrasies of the respected village leader, because it's seen as classy, and this becomes a new standard. Maybe the original settlers already had a distinctive regional accent, and their descendants emphasize features of this accent because they're proud of coming from and, in a sense, belonging to this group, and they want to make sure others know that it's a major part of who they are. After a while, we've produced a language no less rich than it originally was, but flavored with the locals' language, shaped by local politics and society. All the while, the settlers (though after so much time, we'd better just call them residents) have fallen out of touch with the island, which means that putting in the effort to ensure mutual intelligibility with the islanders just isn't worth it. Communication's kind of hard when you've got avoiding conquest on the mind and an very large body of water in the way.
I'm sure you can see where this is going: after enough time apart, these changes will have taken place in so many different directions and different ways due not only to different situations, but just due to chance, that we'll end up with two different languages: English and Nenklis (its pronunciation doesn't stay still either: gs became prononced as ks after ns, and final shs became just s. Also, the n from an glommed onto the beginning of the word after the phrase an English was reinterpreted as a Nenglish***).
As a bonus and an final thought, here's the Lord's Prayer in a reconstructed language, Proto-Indo-European, which is the great great great... granddaddy of modern English. It's popularly thought to have been spoken around 3700 BC (you know it's reconstructed if it's the Lord's Prayer as it would have been before the Bible was even written!):
Pater naseros cemeni,
nomen tovos estu cventos,
reguom tevem guemoit ad nas,
veltos tevem cvergeto cemeni ertique,
edom naserom agheres do nasmebhos aghei tosmei
le todque agosnes nasera,
so lemos scelobhos naserobhos.
Neque peretod nas,
tou tratod nas apo peuces.
Teve senti reguom,
maghti decoromque bhegh antom. Estod.
(No dice finding a recording here, either; sorry!)
You probably understand less of this than you do of the Old English example. Maybe the first word? Likely a few more if you know some French or Spanish. You probably got "amen" just from where it showed up, reliable as always at the end of the prayer. But it's been so long since English used to look like this that we have a very hard time thinking about it a being the same language. But if you trace English back step-by-step, this (or something very close to it) is what it looked like!
We know Proto-Indo-European existed, but since it was spoken so long ago, we don't have any records of what it actually looked or sounded like. This was before people were writing stuff down either, since writing had yet to be invented. What you see above is the result of people comparing the different languages that it became, to figure out what changes took place and try to undo them, making an educated guess at what the modern languages used to look like when they were all one language. Proto-Indo-European boasts an impressive progeny: everything from English, to the other Germanic languages, to the Romance languages, to Greek and Latin, to Hindi and many, many others. Here's map of where they're spoken in Eurasia:
To sum up: different languages come about because groups of speakers stop heavily communicating with each other, cutting off contact either partially or completely with other people who originally spoke the same language, for any number of reasons. Over time, the changes at every level of linguistic structure accumulate due to several interacting and largely unpredictable factors, which eventually lead to the languages' speakers being completely unable to understand each other without formal instruction in the language, or being raised bilingually. At this point, people are usually willing to say that we've got two languages where there used to be one.
The same can then happen with the two new languages we've got, and we'll have four, or five (if two groups split off), etc. Repeat this process over and over again, a continuously shifting linguistic tumult against the backdrop of the great migrations, conquests, and explorations of human history, and it gives rise to the varied multitude of languages today.
Footnotes:
*This word isn't actually so unfamiliar as it looks: gedæghwamlican is morphologically segmented the following way: ge-dæg-hwam-lican. The first and third segments aren't so important to us, but the second, dæg, is the modern day, and the lican at the end comes from the same word as like (not the verb, but the one used in comparisons), which eventually got truncated to the modern adverbial suffix -ly. So quickly was originally quick-like ("in a quick manner"), but over time the k and the (now silent) e dropped off. Strangely, when we hear people nowadays say things like "I did it quick-like," we think they sound like bumpkins, even though this is how everyone used to talk. Dropping the endings probably even used to be seen as lazy! It's incredible how standards and the prestige associated with different ways of talking changes over time, to the point where the original situation got turned all topsy-turvy: the "lazy" variant is now the norm, and the previous norm is now the "lazy" variant! Time makes fools of us all.
**hlaf was the Old English word for bread, but over time its meaning narrowed and bread took over. It survives, though, as the modern word loaf.
***This isn't so unlikely; the process actually occurred in reverse with an apron, which used to be a napron.
****Which would you rather try: a wine with something unknown about its taste, or a wine whose taste has a certain je ne sais quoi?
(And as an aside, if the topic of language change interests you, please find and read a copy of John McWhorter's The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language. You won't regret it.)
Read other answers by Michael Wilson on Quora:
- What languages have the most and the least number of homonyms?
- What is the difference between a virtual world and a fantasy world? How is a fantasy world different from a fantastic world?
- What are some words (in any language) that have no meaning but are used in daily conversation?
from Quora http://ift.tt/28IdPvm
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