Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The English language changed enormously during the Middle English period, in vocabulary, in pronunciation, and in grammar. While Old English is a heavily inflected language , the use of grammatical endings diminished in Middle English . Grammar distinctions were lost as many noun and adjective endings were levelled to -e.
Studies in Words is a work of linguistic scholarship written by C. S. Lewis and published by the Cambridge University Press in 1960. [1] [2] In this book, Lewis examines the history of various words used in the English language which have changed their meanings often quite widely throughout the centuries. The meanings in the predecessor ...
John Lewis-Stempel, is a farmer, nature writer, and historian, and combines his knowledge of the British military and the first world war with a passion for nature. He is a two-time winner of the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing, known for works like Meadowland: The Private Life of an English Field and The Running Hare.
However, he found considerable discrepancy between the most common and least common words. The top thousand words were 83% of English origin, while the least common were only 25% of English origin. [6] However, due to the variability of vocabulary of individuals, dialects, and time periods, exact percentages cannot be taken at face value. [3]
Modern English, sometimes described as the first global lingua franca, [61] [131] is also regarded as the first world language. [132] [133] English is the world's most widely used language in newspaper publishing, book publishing, international telecommunications, scientific publishing, international trade, mass entertainment, and diplomacy. [133]
The modern Frisian language is the closest-sounding language to the English used approximately 2,000 years ago, when the people from what is now the north of the Netherlands travelled to what would become England, and pushed the Celtic language—ancestor of modern Welsh— to the western side of the island. Words like "blue" can be recognised ...
The highly diverse Nilo-Saharan languages, first proposed as a family by Joseph Greenberg in 1963 might have originated in the Upper Paleolithic. [1] Given the presence of a tripartite number system in modern Nilo-Saharan languages, linguist N.A. Blench inferred a noun classifier in the proto-language, distributed based on water courses in the Sahara during the "wet period" of the Neolithic ...
English words gave way to borrowings from Anglo-Norman following the Norman Conquest as English lost ground as a language of prestige. Anglo-Norman was used in schools and dominated literature, nobility and higher life, leading a wealth of French loanwords to enter English over the course of several centuries—English only returned to courts of law in 1362, and to government in the following ...