Pie Jesu Domine Dona Eis Requiem

As an English major, learning about how we came to speak English as our primary language has always been a fascinating topic to me. During the course of my studies at Grand Valley, I chose to take English 362: History of the English Language. It was a fun and exciting course that covered mostly Old English history up until around the time of Shakespearean language, near the turn of the 17th century. As this course in particular involves World History up to 1500, however, I will discuss the early shift from Celtic languages to Old English in this blog post!

The dates are not entirely clear during this time in history as we do not have a lot of written text to inform us when things actually happened. But around 500-600 AD, there was a huge shift from speaking Latin or Celtic languages (such as Gaelic). In England during this time, the majority of the people spoke some kind of Celtic language. Gaelic was a primary language (much like English is today), though there are several different kinds of Gaelic languages. One can think of these different kinds as different dialects of Gaelic, such as we have different dialects of English today. With the Gaelic language, there's only 18 letters compared to the 26 that we currently have: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, U. The main dialects of Gaelic consist of Scottish and Irish Gaelic, which are very different in pronunciation. It's also important to note that Scottish Gaelic is not the same as the Scots language, which is more widely spoken in Scotland today (and descendant from Old English, as well). A good source, if you are interested in searching for more information on Gaelic or early language, is this book, written by David Crystal (a famous linguist).

From around this 500-600 AD timeline to 1066, both Gaelic dialects and Old-English were spoken throughout the land. As there wasn't primarily a strong consistency with the written word, there weren't consistent spellings or even pronunciation of words in the earliest languages spoken in England. But in 1066, a very important event occurred that fully shifted the language from mostly Gaelic to what we now call Old English: The Norman Conquest of the British Isles. However, it's not as simple to say that in 1066, Old English became the native language and Gaelic was completely wiped out of existence. During this time, what was to become known as Old English also adopted many of the stylistic influences from Gaelic; this is part of the reason why the English language survives today. It can easily adopt other languages into its own. There are Germanic as well as Latin influences within Old English. The Latin influences, however, are particular to the language of the Church, as during this time, Latin was the language spoken in Church and Latin was the language that Church documents were written in.

As previously mentioned, we don't have many written documents from this particular time period. We do, however, have one very famous epic poem in literature that is still widely read and taught in English courses today. It's the poem of Beowulf. The author is unknown, though it is believed to have been written by a monk during this time as monks were the few people who were literate at this time in history. here is a link to the original Old English version of Beowulf. I highly encourage anyone who has a fascination with languages to at least look at this link. It is read just as modern poetry would be read: from left to right, even across the break in the lines of poetry. That was just the style of poetry from this era in history. Thanks to my course in English language history, I can read perhaps one word in every five on that page as we were taught Old English grammar as part of that course.

Hopefully this post was informational to many of you. I give you bonus points if you can translate the title of this post from Latin into English!