With the arrival of Christian monks in England in the 6th century, they discovered several kingdoms speaking dialects of a Germanic language brought from the Continent a century before. In his book SPELL IT OUT: The Singular Story of English Spelling, David Crystal explains that in writing down the Anglo-Saxon […]
Anglo-Saxon
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In his delightful and informative book, SPELL IT OUT: The Singular Story of English Spelling, David Crystal explains many of the quirks and anomalies of spelling English words. He says that with well over one million words in English, affected in myriad ways by 1300 years of history, the task […]
There was no discrete dividing line between Old English, according to John McWhorter in The Power of Babel, which as spoken would have taken days to recognize as related to what we speak, and “English” as we know it. As it happened, Shakespeare wrote in a period (1500s becoming 1600s) […]