Who invented the English language?

At But Why, we believe that curiosity is key to learning. That's why we bring kids questions to life with experts, fun stories, and fascinating facts in our podcasts and video episodes. But we can't do this without you. Support from people who love the show and believe in what we do helps keep curiosity thriving. Head to butwykids.org slash donate to become a But Why fan club member or make a gift in any amount to support the show. Thanks and stay curious. This is But Why, a podcast for curious kids from Vermont Public. I'm Jane Lindholm. In this show, we take questions from curious kids just like you and we find answers. I don't know about you, but I feel like I learn a new word all the time, even though I've been an English speaker my whole life. Some researchers estimate there are roughly one million words in the English language, so there's no way I will ever be able to know every single one of them, but it's a fun goal to have. Did you know new words get invented all the time? I bet there are words you use with your friends that didn't exist when the adults around you were growing up. And there are words our grandparents or great-great-grandparents used that you may never even hear because they're no longer popular. Lots of people describe languages as living or alive. Now, they're not technically alive, but they seem kind of that way because they change all the time. Our guest for today's show is someone who studies words and how we use them. Dr. Erika Brasovsky is a sociolinguist, and she hosts the PBS show Other Words, all about words and sounds. When we started talking to Erika for this episode, I needed to ask her for a word definition before we even got into the interview because I wasn't sure exactly what a sociolinguist does. So, linguistics is a study of language, and sociolinguistics is a study of language related to who we are as people. So, like where we're from or who we spend time with or even what other languages that we speak. Erika says there are lots of different ways to study languages and things to study within the field of linguistics. Some linguists are really interested in the sounds we make and others study the meaning behind words. Some linguists specialize in languages that used to be spoken a long, long time ago. Erika says she decided to pursue sociolinguistics because she's interested in what's happening in the world around us here and now. I like talking to people, that's why I'm here today, and it's cool to think about what's actually happening. So, why is it that I speak differently than you based on any number of factors, like where we're from or who we spend the most time with or things like that? Okay, we have a lot of words, questions and language questions from kids, so I'm going to get out of the way and jump right in. My name is Maya. I'm eight years old, and I live in Fairfield, California. Who invented the English language? I'm West, I'm seven years old, I live in Arcadia, California. Where did the English alphabet originally come from? So the English language doesn't just have one inventor, the way that things like popsicles or earmuffs or trampolines do, which were all invented by kids, by the way. Whoa. Yeah, it developed over thousands and thousands of years. So what we're speaking right now is called modern English, but before that came Middle English and Old English, which didn't really sound like English that we speak today at all. I took an Old English class and it was like learning a whole completely new foreign language. But language is like, it's changing all the time. So I would say if you speak English, you can be an inventor of some parts of English. Yeah, I don't think of this as modern English. I think of what we're doing as like super wicked cool English no cap. And we're like, oh cringe, oh no. So where did the alphabet that we use come from? So the alphabet has its origins actually in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, which were those were pictures. So they would carve or draw pictures that might be like a jar that would talk about jars or there'd be some animal that would be that animal, right? So Semitic workers in ancient Egypt, 4,000 years ago came up with an alphabetic script that was kind of adapted from hieroglyphics in order to write down their language. And that then developed into the Phoenician alphabet, which is how we got the name alphabet, which is from the first two letters. So Aleph meant ox and bet meant house. And it doesn't mean ox house or house ox now, but that's where we get the letters from. And then the Phoenicians brought their alphabet to Greece and then it spread to Italy and inspired the Latin alphabet. So English itself used to be written in a runic alphabet called the foothorque until the 600s, like not 1600s, the 600s when it became replaced by the Latin alphabet. And then after some adjustments like removing the letters thorn and eth, which were the th sounds and maybe you've seen stores called like ye old candy shoppy. That Y comes from the eth. So really it would have been pronounced the old candy shop. Oh really? So it wasn't ye old, it was the old. It sounds fun and cute now, but it comes from the eth. So they removed those letters and they added some new ones like u and j. So beforehand v and u were kind of, or v was used for both u and for v and i was used for both j and for i. So now there's one of each. So we ended up with our 26 letter alphabet. And there are other languages that use the same alphabet as English. Correct. So Spanish, for example, uses the same alphabet, although they also have an n with a little tilde over it called an nye. Right. And Welsh has a double l that's pronounced by blowing air through the edges of your mouth, which is very fun. So we have some different letters, even if we're using the same alphabets for some different languages, but then some languages use totally different styles of writing and alphabets. My name is Hugo. I come from Congo, but I'm living in London. I'm six years old. Why are the words that we use now the words that we use now? Why are the words we use now the words we use now? So nobody invented the English language. We can all be inventors, but why do we? How do we have the words that we all know how to say and share? That's a really good question. And it's kind of hard to answer, but I have an idea. So words are really powerful. They can make us feel sad or happy, hurt or excited, bummed out or on top of the world, right? And we get to choose what words we use, right? They say, use your words. So through these choices that we make every day with the words that we decide to to speak or to write or to sign, we build friendships and connections with the world around us. And if you've ever heard a baby copy what a grownup says, you know that we like to repeat things. So the words that we use now are the ones that have been repeated over and over and over and over and over and over and over. Again, so some words have been lost to history and we don't even know what we don't even know. But the words you know and say now are what you've learned or been taught that's been passed down from someone else. Where do the words we use now mostly come from? Do they come from other languages or were they sort of invented by English speakers over time? Yes, both of those things. So a lot of the words in English were borrowed or from dozens of other languages. So many of them like the word coffee comes from Arabic. French influences, you have German influences, you have so many ones. And also we invent them. So when you're thinking of a lot of slang terms, they sometimes get invented by somebody. So like the word okay, which may be one of the most common words or popular words in the world, I don't know, lots of languages say okay, is thought to come from a kind of a joke. It was in a newspaper in Boston and it stood for all correct, but it was like O-L-L correct K-O-R-E-C-T because they were trying to make a joke. And it kind of stuck after there was a presidential candidate who's was from, I think it's from from the area of Kinderhoek and they called him old Kinderhoek. I said old Kinderhoek is okay. There was a whole thing about that becoming this big popular word. And now a long time later, we use the word okay all the time. I had no idea. Even though I really do say okay all the time. Also, just in case it wasn't clear because you're listening and not seeing things written out, all correct would be spelled A-L-L-C-O-R-R-E-C-T. Not O-L-L-K-O-R-R-E-C-T. So the joke was that it's obviously not all correct. If you can't even spell correct correctly. Hi, my name is Hakeem. I live in Chicago, Illinois. I'm eight years old. Why do words spell the way they are? Well, words in English are spelled all sorts of wonky different ways. Fun fact, the spelling bee is an English thing. They don't typically have spelling bees in other languages because their languages are not spelled so wonky the way that ours is. Do you know what a spelling bee is? It's a competition where someone says a word and you have to spell it correctly without being able to look at it. We did an episode a while back with a national spelling bee competitor. We'll link to it in our show notes today. But if you speak a language where it's less confusing how things are spelled, there's not much need for a spelling bee competition. Exactly, exactly. Sounded out, right? But in English, it isn't isn't quite so simple. So I think that this is kind of two questions in one. So words are spelled the way that they are because someone put them in a dictionary and claimed that is the correct way for them to be spelled. And we all just went along with that. So before we had reliable dictionaries, people spelled things any which way that fell right to them and maybe even spelled the same word different ways every time they wrote it. There was no right way to write it. But now spellings have been standardized thanks to the dictionary. But I think this question is also asking how did we get things to be the way that they are? So if you ask me, I think English spelling is kind of a mess. And it's been that way from the very beginning. So to explain that, we'll kind of need a mini alphabet history lesson. So Old English, as we mentioned earlier, was a Germanic language spoken by Anglo-Saxons in what is now England. And like I said, it's not anything like the English we speak today in the 21st century. So Old English, some people say, some experts say, was spoken, let's say in the 400s to the 1100s and they use the runic alphabet known as the Futhork. So in the 600s, the Latin missionaries came in and replaced the Futhork with the Latin alphabet. But the Latin alphabet wasn't designed for a Germanic language. And there were sounds that Anglo-Saxons used that didn't exist in Latin. So they had to improvise. And things got even more complicated when the French invaded English in 1066 and changed a lot of English spelling to make it more familiar for their French readers. So English spelling was a jumble of Germanic, Latin and French rules. And then came the Great Vowel Shift, where lots of pronunciations changed. So like the OO sound became out. So hoose and hooned became house and hound. Historians are not sure exactly why or how the Great Vowel Shift happened. But it happened gradually. Between the years of 1400 and 1700. So it took many, many generations of people. It wasn't like your adult said to you, could you please get the hooned into the hoose? And you were like, huh? What are you talking about? I can't even understand you. Do you mean get the hound into the house? Hooned or hound being a kind of dog, by the way. And then there's even more. The printing press came about right in the middle of all these pronunciation changes. So printers would spell things as they saw fit. Adding extra letters or changing spelling so that the words would reflect their history. So for example, the word dumb ends with a B, which you can't really hear. So some printers started mistakenly adding a B to the end of words like crumb and numb, which is an error that we call hypercorrection. So it's like more than correct. It's so correct that it's actually wrong. And words from Latin like sign in doubt had letters that were added in to remind readers where they came from, signum and dubitare. And then we still use that today. Kind of because it got put into dictionaries and into books by printing presses, which were pretty new. And why don't we just drop the dumb B from dumb? I think it makes a lot of sense to have things be spelled the way that they sound. But we are people of convention. We just stick with the things that we know, apparently, when it comes to writing. It would be a big, it would be a big shift to change things for everybody across the world. So we're kind of, it seems stuck where we are. My name is Etta and I'm five years old and I live in Germany. Why is English so hard to learn? Hi, my name is Isaac and I'm nine years old and I'm from Kamloops, BC. Why is the English language so complicated? English is difficult, I think, because there are so many exceptions to every single rule. Think of the spelling rule like I before, E, accept after C, or when it sounded as A as a neighbor and way. That's a lot of exceptions just for one little rule. And that doesn't even cover how you spell the word weird. Right. So it's complicated because English is not just invented by one person, right? It's like like a rubber band ball. So like as you add rubber bands to the ball, it gets bigger and more colorful. And the stripes overlap and it gets a little disorganized looking. So similarly, English over the years, we borrowed words and grammar and expressions from lots of different languages and we ended up with this mishmash that we speak today. My name is Grayson. I live in St. Louis, Missouri. I'm nine years old. Why do different countries have different accents? Why do different countries have different accents? And Jack in Ireland notes, you know, even people in the same country, but different parts of the country can have different accents. So let's take English, but I think this is true in, you know, many languages. How can we speak the same language but have different accents and different ways we pronounce words? Well, first things first, we all have accents. Every single one of us. Some accents will make it clear where you're from or what languages you speak or who your friends are. Even if everybody around you sounds pretty similar, you still have an accent. You just all have the same accent, right? So to answer the question, if we're talking about someone, let's say from a non-English speaking country speaking English and having a foreign accent, that's because the sounds that make up each language are different. So for example, in Spanish, there are five vowels and there are five vowel sounds. A, E, I, O, U, which are A, E, O, and O. In English, we have the same vowels, I, A, E, I, O, U, sometimes Y, but between 15 and 20 different ways of pronouncing those vowels depending on where you're from. So when we're babies, we can hear all the different sounds that make up every language in the world, hundreds of different sounds. So when we're babies, we can hear all the differences, but we learn to focus on only the ones that are in the language that we are learning to speak because our brain doesn't have room or time for every single sound in every single language. Right? So if you only learn five vowel sounds growing up, you might have a tough time, not only pronouncing a bunch of different sounds, more sounds than you're used to, but also hearing the difference between them. And now accents within the same country or within the same general area or same language come from how you spend your time. Where do you live? Who do you spend time with? Usually accents develop when there are separations between people. So maybe you live in the US and you say tomato and or you live in the UK or Australia, you say tomato. There is a whole ocean of distance between those places. And there are lots of different social groups too, even in the same area, who can develop different accents. So sometimes when you're talking with someone who has an accent that's really different from yours, you might even accidentally start copying their accent. And that is called speech accommodations. You're accommodating towards what they sound like. We just talked about differences in pronunciation, like tomato and tomato. But sometimes we have different words for the same thing, depending on where we live, even though we speak the same language. You might throw things away in the trash can in the US, but they're rubbish bin in the UK or enjoy soccer in the United States, but find that it's called football elsewhere. We have an episode all about that too, by the way. Check out our show notes if you want to hear it. Here's another example. My name is Natalie. I'm 11 years old and I live in Rutherford, New Jersey. Why are some people in England that say biscuits while we say cookies? So for me, English biscuits and you with cookies aren't exactly the same kind of thing. They are very similar. I'd say like the cookie part of an Oreo is a biscuit. So Oreos could be like a chocolate sandwich biscuit, but chocolate chip cookies, like fresh out of the oven, those are definitely not biscuits. So we say cookie because of the Dutch word cookie, meaning little cake. And there was a lot of Dutch influence in New Amsterdam, which is now New York. So that's where we got cookie from. Biscuit comes from the Latin bis in cactus, meaning twice cooked. So originally biscuits were a really, really, really hard bread because they didn't go bad very easily. Soldiers would carry them around for a super long time and they dip them in water or soup or whatever was around to soften them up. And it was a good source of fuel, but that's really about it. But it didn't taste very good. The texture, it's not a snack that I'm excited about. Eventually, when sugar became more common, they started to get tastier. So in the middle of the day before lunch was invented, because it was invented at one point, people would have tea and biscuits to tide them over and tell supper. That's kind of a long answer. But the short answer to the question of why do we say different things in different places is because we have different influences around us. So like how we got cookie from Dutch, it didn't used to be as easy to to communicate with people far, far away. So sometimes we'd end up with different names for the same things. OK, I think it's time for a little cookie break. Or should it be a biscuit break? Or if you're in Australia, a break for some bickies? When we come back, why do we have silent letters? And my favorite, if more than one tooth is teeth and more than one goose is geese, what do we call more than one moose? Meese? Stay with us. This is But Why. I'm Jane Lindholm, and today we're talking with sociolinguist Erica Brzovsky, host of the PBS streaming show, Other Words. Before the break, we asked Erica, where did the English language come from in the first place? And why do we have accents? And why is spelling so confusing in the English language? Speaking of spelling, you know what makes spelling a word extra confusing? Silent letters. My name is Wesley, and I'm five years old. And I live in Chicago. Why do words have silent letters? My name is Madeline from Brisbane, Australia. I'm eight years old. Why do some words like knife have silent letters? My name is Annabelle. I'm eight years old, and I live in Utah. Why does the word island have an S in it that is silent? Wesley, Madeline, and Annabelle have all noticed that there are words in English with silent letters. What's the deal with silent letters? They are tricky. That's why we have those spelling bees, right? So a lot of the silent letters are thanks to the great vowel shift, which happened hundreds and hundreds of years ago. So some words used to have two syllables, but with the shift, they lost their second half. So name and like became name and like. We spell those with the E at the end that kind of represents that. That's the silent E, right? Other constant sounds faded away as well. So dumb, like with a B sound became dumb without the B sound. Niked and liked became night and light. Knife and k'night became knife and night. And some scholars wanted to update the spelling to match the new pronunciation, but the printing press kind of helped lock in those outdated spellings. And specifically the S in island, that's an example of hypercorrection, as we mentioned before. So the word isle, I S L E had the S added because it came from the Latin word in Sela, which has an S in it. But island is from the old English island. I with a long bar over it, E L A N D. And people thought they were related, so they added the S. So why did we get rid of those sounds though? Why don't we still say name? Why do we say name instead? I mean, I see how the, the letter just kind of stuck around, but why did we change the way we say it? Hmm. I don't know if I have an exact answer for that, but think of when you're speaking quickly, like things fall away. You might drop a couple syllables or sounds here and there just because you're speaking quickly, or maybe other words will, will get mixed in with there. So for example, the word apron used to be napron. So you know how when you spell things that start with a vowel, you have to have an A N in the article beforehand. So there's a, you have an. So it used to be a napron and now it's an apron or the word newt, like the, the salamander kind of creature, um, used to be ute and it was an ute. And now it's become a newt. So a lot of the way we speak, it's just to make it easier for us when we're saying the words, even if the spelling then becomes more complicated when we write it. Yes, exactly. My name is Sydney. I'm 10. I live in Rutland, Vermont. Why some words sound like other words, like bear and bear. So words that sound the same, but are spelled differently are a type of homonym called a homophone. So we end up with homophones mostly through sound merging. So for example, the words meet and meet. So M E E T used to be pronounced like mate almost and M E A T was met. And now they're pronounced the exact same way. Just meet. And F O U R used to rhyme with tour and F O R E used to be two syllables. So for a, and now they're both pronounced for. So homophones can also occur when words are borrowed into English from different origins, for example, the word tire, the sleepy version, um, has potential dramatic roots while the wheel version comes from French. Even though those in, in American English are spelled the same. Exactly. But there's a Y in the other. Yeah. And British English tire that you use on your car is T Y R E. Here's another tricky thing in the English language. When words go from singular, meaning one to plural, meaning two or three or five or more, we generally add an S or an ES to the end of the word. Like cow becomes cows, fox becomes foxes, horse becomes horses. But of course there are exceptions to this rule. Hi, my name is Grace. I'm 10 years old. I live in Rocky Mountain house, Canada. There's everything that ends with us, like octopus or cactus could end with I like cacti or cactuses. I know about cactus and octopus, but I'm looking for like anything that has those. Hmm. So the answer is nope. In, in Latin, the US, um, words and an I, so which gives us octopi. However, it is a Latinized version of the Greek word octopus and we borrowed it into English and generally when we borrow words, which we do all the time, we make it plural as an English word. So in addition to octopi, we can also say octopuses as an acceptable form of the plural cacti can also be cactuses, even though it sounds more sometimes more like fancy to say cacti. Um, some words like radius and alumnus, um, do get an I at the end and they are never said alumnuses or radiuses. You know, radiant, radii and alumni, right? Um, but some words that end in us never did to see an I. I've never heard of boni and camp I because those are actually bonuses in campuses. There's always exceptions to every rule. So if you're trying to figure out, if you know a word and you don't know how to say, well, many of them, how are you supposed to guess? If you don't know whether it's bonuses or boni or octopuses or octopi, how do you figure it out? My rule of thumb, if I didn't, if I don't know how to pluralize something in English is just to add that sound at the end. Um, because most words do end in S and of course sometimes it'll be like ES or maybe it sounds like a Z sound, but it's that general S or Z sound at the end of it. Like dog dogs, bonus bonuses. There may be times when you're less grammatically correct, but I think that's okay. It's okay to be creative with your language too. So I'd err on the side of adding the sound at the end of all the words. People will probably know what you're trying to say. They'll know what you're talking about. Yeah. And if they feel the need to correct you, that's okay too. Um, speaking of plurals. My name is Oliver. I'm eight years old and I live in North Carolina, Raleigh. If two tooth is teeth and if two goose is geese, then why is two moose not me? That'd be kind of fun if they were meese. They're kind of big though. I feel like me sounds like a, like a small thing instead of like a big, huge animal. Right. So the reason why is because tooth and goose are words with Germanic origins. So the word goose comes to us from old English where the plural of goose was geese. And that's because of some sound changes over time that led from gooseies to geeseies to geese, which we say now. But anyway, the reason why we don't say meese is because the word moose doesn't have Germanic origins. It was borrowed into English sometime around the 1600s from a Native American language in the Algonquin family, likely either Narragansett or Abinaki, which were spoken in what is now the Northeastern region of the United States, New England. So the plurals are different because they have different origins. So Erica, is it actually helpful if you don't come from a family or a culture where you already speak multiple languages to learn some other languages so you can start to see how these words in English even come together? Absolutely. I think of being able to speak multiple languages as kind of a superpower. I English is my primary language. It's the one of them. The best that but I've spent some time studying Mandarin and studying Spanish. And it's definitely helped me see the world in different ways. There's different ways of explaining things in different languages. Some languages have words that we don't have in English that describe certain feelings that we might really know, but don't have words for it. Like there's a word, um, Kuchisa-bishi in Japanese. And it's like when your mouth is bored, like you're eating because you're not really hungry, you're not eating because you're hungry, but you're eating because your mouth or your mouth is lonely, not bored. Your mouth is lonely and it needs something to occupy it. And there's tons of other words that kind of explain fun, interesting experiences that we have as people, but we just don't have one word for it in English. So if you learn other languages, you get to know that. You also get to experience more of the world. And sometimes it helps you with learning your primary language too. Hi, my name is David. I am five and a half. I live in a thousand oaks. Why do you eleven and twelve not and in the word team? Well, if they did, then we wouldn't be able to call eleven and twelve year olds preteens. But this seems like another two part question. So why is T E E N not part of those numbers, which I do have an answer for. And then why did the people who came up with the number names do it that way, which I have, I can make an educated guess for. So eleven and twelve come from the old English and Leofon and twelve, which even further back were plus leaf, so in leaf and which is one leaf and two leaf. But scholars aren't exactly sure what leaf means. One theory, because we don't always know. Sometimes it's in the past and it's gone. One theory is that it means leftover. So like one left after ten and two left after ten. So teen was just a form of ten. You know, you can see how they kind of sound alike. So like you say, teen, teen, teen, teen, teen, teen, teen, teen, it might eventually get to ten. There was other variations, too, but that was just one of them. So thirteen and up were just three, teen, fourteen, five, teen or three, ten, four, ten, five, ten, right? But why were they different? Why weren't they like the ain't lift twa lift? Well, why wasn't it just three, lift, four, lift, right? It's hard to know for sure. We don't have a for sure, for sure answer. But back a long time ago, there wasn't much reason to talk about more than ten of something. You have one, two, three, four, five, several, many, you just have a lot of things. So if it's more than the numbers that you count, it's just a lot, right? But most of us have ten fingers, right? So it's easy to count to ten on your fingers and maybe your toes if you prefer that. But sometimes you need just a little bit more than the ones on your fingers. So you would say, oh, a little more than ten, eleven, ain't lift or twelve, twelve lift. And we got so used to that. So even when we needed to count up to three, ten and four, ten and five, ten, the pronunciation of eleven and twelve stuck. Huh. But we're not sure about that. We're not sure exactly why three, ten, four, ten, five, ten is exactly that way. But the guess is that we or why one, ten and two, ten didn't end up. It's probably because they were they were like that before and we just stuck with what we knew. So do you think if suddenly all the kids listening today decided together, we're going to change it and we're going to start calling eleven, one, ten. And we're going to start calling twelve, two, ten. And so it's like, how old are you? I'm two, ten. And next year I'll be thirteen. Do you think we could change the English language? Absolutely. It would take a long time, perhaps, or like a big amount of kids doing deciding to do this, but it could definitely happen because language is always changing. You might even notice it when you hear some slang that you're like so over at this point. Like if I try to use any Gen Alpha slang, they're like, I'm just going to sound super Ohio, right? That's so embarrassing. So all of our listeners here get to decide what happens next, where our language is going. You don't need to come up with things or try to make changes. They're going to happen naturally. But if you wanted to make one, ten and two, ten be the next cool thing, by all means, absolutely do it and we'll see if it actually sticks. The truth is every single day, new words get invented. For those of us listening who are adults, that means we sometimes get confused when you kids tell us something using a slang word you and your friends use. But on the flip side, the really cool thing is you kids are the ones at the forefront of language change. Y'all are the ones who are doing the big thing. So I'd say keep it up and I'm excited to see where you take it next. Like what innovations and cool, new, fun, weird, awesome things they'll come up with. If you were to invent a new word, what would it be? I'd like to invent a word that describes the feeling when you love something or someone so much that you wish you could just squish yourself together with them and become one being. Like how two water droplets push together, blob into one big water droplet. What would the word be for that? Send us a video of what word you would invent and what it would mean and we'll put it on our Instagram page. Thanks to sociolinguist Dr. Erica Brzovsky for answering so many of our questions today. If you found this episode fascinating, you should check out the show she hosts on PBS called Other Words. Other Words investigates fun, interesting, and sometimes totally strange things about language. You can find it on YouTube and at PBS.org. We'll link to it in our show notes for this episode as well. As always, if you have a question about anything, have an adult record you asking it on a smartphone using an app like VoiceMemos, then have them email the file to questionsatbutwhykids.org. But why is produced by Melody Baudette, Sarah Bake, and me, Jane Lindholm, at Vermont Public, and distributed by PRX. Our video producer is Joey Palumbo and our theme music is by Luke Reynolds. If you like our show, please have your adults help you give us a thumbs up or a review on whatever podcast platform you use to listen to us. It helps other kids and families find us. We'll be back in two weeks with an all new episode. Until then, stay curious. From PRX.