Language history

When we look at the night sky we see a the wonderful twinkling of millions of stars. To us, they all look to be shining at the same time, but of course we are seeing light that travelled so far and each star sends its light at different times.

So, it is with language. When we look at the many different words in our language, we see some words that come from a long time ago and other words and phrases that are very modern. For example the word "goodbye" in English is an old word which comes from god be with ye(you) and on the other hand, the word "podcast" is only a few years old.

So why the comparison with stars in the sky? Well, I think when we see the stars, unless we think about it carefully, we don't think about all the stars being at different distances...we just enjoy looking at the different patterns made by the stars.

In the same way, unless we study etymology (history of words) we don't really think about the past history of language. But this history is what makes the language what it has become. Many English words are from French, Latin and German. More recently, some English words come from India; "bungalow" for instance. The word "karaoke" comes from Japanese.

So, because language is such a mixture of old words, modern words and new words, we maybe should realise that, like the stars always moving and changing, so does language.

Some words that were said a lot when I was young are very rarely said these days and new words appear all the time.

So, don't get downhearted when we think about how big and complex languages are. Like the night sky, we can just look and appreciate that all this complexity turns into a beautiful scene which we can enjoy for its own sake.

Bye for now

Alan