The English Language: A Anthropological Study

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In linguistics we must know where words come from and how the meanings have changed over the years. To do this an etymological study is empirical to linguistic understanding. There are many different aspects of linguistics, such as phonology, phonemics, morphology, syntax etc. Etymology falls mainly under the morphological component, which is the study of the elements and arrangements of words units (Rowe and Levine 2015).
In this essay the meaning and content of etymology has been studied and the subject of what the etymology of the English language is has been clarified. This helps refer the study of etymology back to the linguistic characteristics we have been studying so far.

What is Etymology?
To study etymology is to study the history …show more content…

The English language derives from a variety of languages that belonged to groups of individuals who invaded the British Isles over many of the early centuries after Christ (Rowe and Levine 2015).
The Germanic tribes of the fifth century invaded the British Isles and had a huge impact on the Celtic languages of the native peoples, which was the addition of Old English or Old German. Old English was further influenced when these Germanic tribes converted to Christianity, where Latin was adjoined to the Germanic vocabulary. When the Vikings invaded in the eighth and ninth centuries, new word expressions and pronunciations, such as “sky” and “sk”, were established and converted to correspond with the current vocabulary. The Normans invaded Britain next, during this occurrence is where both Old English and French were impacted by the language of the church, which is Latin. These impacts included the structural changes in sounds and spelling of the words from the varieties of different languages that made up this now “modern” English (Rowe and Levine 2015). Modern English originates from the Renaissance period. During that time, Latin and Greek words became a big part of the everyday English vocabulary. We can see how English language evolved in structure and how it differs from the type of Contemporary English we use today in the works of William Shakespeare (Rowe and Levine 2015). Once the boom of the English language started it spread rapidly due to the expansion of the British Empire, going as far as Asia, Africa, India, the Americas and most of Oceania (Rowe and Levine

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