If you’ve been reading my twitter feed lately, you might have noticed me writing about an interesting BBC documentary I’d come across. Called The Adventure of English, the 8-part series follows the evolution of the English language from its early Anglo-Saxon roots, through centuries of refinement by the likes of Chaucer and Shakespeare, and finally to its arrival as England’s most famous export to the world during the Colonial Era. For a “language otaku” like myself, the show was awesome linguistic pr0n, and I loved every episode. One of the themes of English is how it was changed by other languages it came into contact with, especially after the Norman Invasion, which led to 300 years of rule by French-speaking kings and is the reason 50% of modern English words are French in origin. This mirrors another island nation I’m fond of. Japan also had a linguistic “invasion” in the form of kanji from China around the 6th century AD, which the Japanese adapted to their spoken language. Today, every kanji used in Japan has two basic readings, a Japanese one for the simpler concepts like mizu for “water” or sora for “sky,” and a Chinese reading that’s used to create more complex compound words such as suiso for “hydrogen” or and kuuatsu for “air pressure.”
I enjoyed the BBC documentary on the history of English, but then I’m a “language otaku.”
