May 2018

People often talk about the difficulties of reading Shakespeare due to his use of “Old English”. In fact, the Old English period begins a thousand years before his birth, and ends about 500 years before his birth. So what is Old English? When did English begin as a language? Who were the first speakers? Why is English considered a Germanic language, when so much of the vocabulary seems to come from French or Latin? And why do the Latinate words, like perspire, defecate, expectorate, urinate, seem ‘cleaner’ than their slang counterparts? Where did the words thee, thou, thy that we see in Shakespeare and the King James Bible go? Does anyone still use these words today? Why are there silent letters in words like castle, know, gnat, soften? Why does the English spelling system seem so irregular? How are sets of words like triangle/three, fish/Pisces, foot/pedestrian related? How did the word meat, which originally referred to food in general (think of the compounds sweetmeat and mincemeat), come to refer to the flesh of animals? The answers to all of these questions can be found by looking back at the origins of the language and the key historical events that have shaped it into the language we speak today.…Learn More