by Gasconne

Created on: March 29, 2008

Before the Norman Conquest of 1066, Old English was the language spoken in various dialects in the several kingdoms of what is now England. It was a highly inflected language with a characteristically Germanic vocabulary. With the Normans came the imposition of Norman French for official business, for all educated and courtly circles. English was left to languish, rot and atrophy among the lower orders before re-emerging in a different guise as the language of Shakespeare. Truly it was not until about 1500 that the language we would recognize today as English took hold once again. Of course there were great literary flowerings in an interim language with several dialects that we now know as Middle English. Unfortunately, however, the modern reader tempted to dip into the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, for example, will usually call for a translation. Thus they miss the particular richness and gutsiness of the original.

So here we are, 1000 years after the Norman invasion, England has its own distinct voice once again. Over the past 500 years the language has suffered enormous growing pains but it has matured and spread its influence so thoroughly that it is now the sole international language of statesmanship, business and science. The Internet has accelerated the influence of English globally, with content in English dominating the worldwide web.

With this degree of success we might ask why so many language 'mavens' think that it is under threat. Their fears in fact belie their ignorance of the very language they claim to wish to protect.

To begin with virtually every grammatical rule in English is artificial. Because the language that re-emerged in 1500 was so radically different from the highly rule-governed Old English from which it sprang, there were no clearly discernible rules in operation. This was too great a temptation for the eighteenth-century grammarians who set about constructing rules based on the model of Latin. But it was a thankless and ultimately futile task.

Many of the rules we learned so diligently school don't bear logical scrutiny. For instance, we all know that sentences must not end with a preposition. This sounds fair enough since prepositions govern nouns. A preposition without a following noun is like hammer poised to fall but without a nail to hit. Yet this logic fails to account of the numerous phrasal verbs in English such as 'pick someone up' or 'drop someone off'.
These multi-part verbs behave similarly to German multi-part verbs such

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