History of English

English was created as a joint project between Anglo and Saxons in an attempt to create the world’s best language. Through committees and voting panels, they agreed upon a set of 500 words to be used as “core English”. These 500 words represented the 250 gods of Anglo religion, and the 250 gods of Saxon Paganism. These were the most common words to express day to day needs and activities such as eating and sleeping

This system soon ran into problems as they found that the agreed-upon set of 500 words lacked some expressions such as “walk” or “money”, and had ample expressions for popular clothing of the era. The Anglo-Saxon English thus combined with Germanic to open the doors towards a bright new age of vocabularism. Every part of England except for Wales saw an influx of wonderful new words such as “wonderful” and “words” – both of which were previously expressed by the same word, “worderfule”.

Many years passed, along with many laws which allowed private creation of new vocabulary. This continued up until the creation of the King James Bible. Priests were using Latin for prayer services, as it allowed them to flub their lines and not draw the ire of the congregation, as nobody except for the priests spoke Latin. With the invention of the King James Bible, it became the main source of entertainment for the populous, which understood roughly half of the words enclosed within its pages. This ushered in a new age of word exploration, as the frontiers of vocabulary expanded, and the people rushed to read their way towards them.

The 100 Year War started, and English saw French words working their way into the vernacular. This time period popularized the word “restaurant”, which had previously been expressed as “public house”, and this encouraged people to drink less beer, which had previously been called “beiere”. The French despised the English language, as well as the English, and they did their best to mispronounce every English word that they encountered under the ruse of “making it sound better”.

The English and the French drew up a truce and agreed to turn their aggressions towards India and Africa respectively. In this time many new words entered the English language, including some from Australia. Although the Australian word “billerdy-dilbango” has since been replaced by “poisonous mammal”, some words such as “boomerang” and “kangaroo” still persist to this day.

England later turned their attention to the world and did their best to spread English to all 4 corners of the globe, and succeeded everywhere except for America. The English claimed that Americans didn’t use English correctly, omitting too many silent ‘e’s and changing the ‘z’-sounding ‘s’s into ‘z’s. Americans ignored England in this time and invented new catch-all words such as “ain’t”, “fixin’ to”, and “hootenanny”. Great debate persists over the usage of “football” and “soccer”, with arguments that the games are best described by usage of feet, or whether balls are socked around.

With every intelligent person across the globe now speaking English, we find many variations of the language. India has their own unique expression of “kindly do the needful”, Scotland has “fooking shite”, and Japan has “I’m fine thank you and you.” English truly is a global language that can help us look past our differences and realize that we are all part of an elite global community.

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