In 1582, Richard Mulcaster, headmaster of the Merchant Tailors’ school, wrote that “our English tung is of small reatch, it stretcheth no further than this Iland of ours“. It didn’t stay that way. Today, English is spoken by more than a billion people all over the world.
It is a colourful, vibrant and diverse tongue, that long has picked up words from the many languages with which its speakers have come into contact. Here are five words that illustrate the English language’s fascinating history.
‘English’
The English language originates in the dialects spoken by the early Germanic tribes – the Angles, Saxons and Jutes – who began to settle Britain following the departure of the Romans in the fifth century AD. The Angles established themselves in the kingdoms of Mercia, East Anglia and Northumbria and it is from them that the word English derives.
Its ultimate origin is the Latin Angli “the people of Angul” – the name given to an area of Northern Germany (now Schleswig-Holstein) where the tribe originated. It was so-called because of the peninsula’s hook-like shape (the same root lies behind angler “fisherman”).
When Pope Gregory the Great (590-604AD) encountered a group of young Angles at a Roman slave market, he remarked that they looked more like angeli “angels” than Angli, prompting him to send St Augustine on a mission to convert the English to Christianity.
‘Beef’
Although roast beef is seen as a quintessentially English dish, the word beef was introduced from the French boeuf during the Middle Ages. It was one of a group of words, including pork, veal, venison and mutton, that were taken from the speech of the French noblemen who settled in Britain following the Norman Conquest of 1066, and whose only encounter with these animals was at the dining table.
