The Roots of English

There has been a language called ‘English’ for at least 1300 years. It descends from a form of Germanic brought to Britain by the Anglo-Saxons, whose homelands lay along the eastern shores of the North Sea. The Romans settled some of these fierce, fair-haired warriors in Britain as mercenaries, and more came as invaders as the Roman Empire began to collapse and the legions were withdrawn to protect Rome itself.

The Indo-European Heritage

English and the Germanic languages, as a whole are part of a much larger family of languages, including most of those of modern Europe and southwest Asia. The common ancestor of this family was the language known to scholars as Proto-Indo-European. Of modern European tongues only a handful – notably Hungarian, Finnish, and Basque – have a different ancestry.
Family likenesses can be traced in many of the words these languages use today. The Hindi word maharajah, for instance, derives from the Indo-European root reg-, meaning ‘to put straight’ and, from that, ‘to rule’. This same root turns up in Latin in words like rex, regis (a king) and rego, return (to rule). Form these were formed the English words regal, rector,correct, and direct. Also from Latin, but this time changed by centuries in early French, come royal and adroit.

The Germanic form of the same Indo-European root has given English right and rich (which originally meant ‘powerful’, and owes its form to French influence). There is also the German Reich (originally ‘a kingdom’), as well as the Romany (Gypsy) term for a man of authority, rye. The Gypsies carried their language from their original homelands in northern India on their journeys west.

Language experts have pieced together a reasonably clear picture of the vocabulary of Proto-Indo-European – which, in turn, reveals much about the people who spoke it, as well as about where and how they lived.

For example, the Indo-Europeans seem to have had words for winter and snow, but not far sea. This suggests that they lived not too far to the south, but away from oceans. They had words for oak, beech, pine, bear, wolf, and deer, but none for donkey, chicken, bamboo, palm, camel, lion, or monkey. Their homeland would thus seem to have been a region of temperate woodland with cold winters.

The Indo-Europeans also had words for pig, horse, cow, dog, and plough, and so must have known something about agriculture.

The commonest theory among scholars is that the original Indo-Europeans lived, at least at times, in settled villages somewhere in eastern Europe or the steppes of western Asia, and that their period as a fairly unified group was probably around 5000-3000 BC. After that they spread out over much of Europe and Asia, leaving as their heritage a bond of shared word roots among the languages of what became widely diverging cultures.

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