ThisGreatWorld™, The English Language – 1. The origins
We can fairly state that the language started with King Edward VI in about 1550, possibly when he commissioned the Book of Common Prayer and he decreed that it had to be written in English.
In doing that:
- He formulated the English language because the scribes selected words in everyday use as a spoken language
- The language was written down for the first time so the spelling was agreed upon and indeed in many cases the word was selected
- He decreed that English be the language used at Court, rather than French
- He created the Church of England and English became the language of the Church rather than Latin
By now we have the language in existence, so what were the underlying circumstances which caused English to spread and to be spread throughout the world.
I think they might have included:
- The Romans had already caused a shopping demand for imported goods and thus people from
- The underlying structure of Protestant England is that everyone is responsible for themselves, for their own development and growth, that we are not governed by destiny, fate or ‘The Gods’ and then we rejected the concept of the power of God being personally passed through ‘hands-on’ from St Peter replacing it with the ‘Priesthood of all Believers’ ie The Methodists and other Protestants
- The merchants who met at Lloyds coffee shop in
- The Industrial Revolution which gave us three centuries of technological superiority over everyone else
- During this time English Law became formulated and supported by the people of England as being fair for everyone, including the overthrow of the Monarch, the other-throw of the knights and lords, and the other-throw of the Church (Any more for any more, roll up, rollup.)
- The wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution enabled us to become a world power with the established government in 80 or so countries and the pre-dominant language for government and commerce was English. This included North America,
- At the same time the merchants and the missionaries went out, in their own eyes, ‘conquering’ the world, to
- The most published book written in English has been the Bible, and again the words and phrases used there came to be incorporated into everyday use
- Parallel to this was the phenomenon of Shakespeare, a genius, who expressed problems and emotions which everybody, throughout the world, identified with, and he wrote about them in the finest and most enjoyable way, using English, which meant that people throughout the world brought his words and phrases into everyday use
- The other brilliant accident was the ease with which all the English people who went abroad brought back words from other languages and these were incorporated into English, for example mulligatawny, char, office wallah, pyjamas, surrender, Sheila, kukri, yomping, igloo, khaki, coca cola, maize, rice, and then there are all the Latin, Greek, German and French words we incorporated, plus manana, paella, pasta and on & on. Indeed they still are, English is a live and vibrant language which is growing everyday.
- The development of North America, particularly the united States of America as they took people into their country from Europe and then the rest of the world and they were required to prove they could speak English
- Exported Films and TV programmes, plus Radio and TV and in particular the BBC World Service and Voice of America
- The Second World War saw humdreds of thousands of people coming from all over the world to join together against the Nazi tyranny, whether Poles, French, African, Indian, Polynesian, canadians, Americans, and the ANZACS. They all came to help us in our hour of need and needed to speak English. Then of course the troops had to tackle the enemy in Europe, the Middle East and the Far East which caused English to spread even more.
- The final stages were the adoption of English as the language of international air transport
- Most recently the explosion of the Internet where the Lingua Franca is English, with English you can communicate with everyone on the Internet
- The desire for other countries to communicate with everyone else has demanded that everyone speaks English. (French and Spanish, the primary alternatives, had been eclipsed.)
- The overarching legacy of English is the ability for everyone throughout the whole world to talk to each other in the same language, true not with perfect understanding but far better than not being able to do so at all. Sufficiently so that even Chinese, which at one point was spoken by more people in the world than any other single language, has been overtaken as the most commonly spoken language and furthermore their people are required to learn English