--- title: Where English came from — a lesson of Mova's school · trees and pragmatics description: «Where English came from», a lesson of the language course of Mova's primary school, sentence by sentence with dependency trees and pragmatics. It begins: English was not always in England: about 1,500 years ago Angles, Saxons and Jutes sailed over the North Sea from what is now Denmark, northern Ge --- [Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/22-where-english-came-from/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [corpora](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/) / [school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/) / [Language](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/) / Where English came from # Where English came from Lesson 22 of the language course of Mova's primary school: 16 sentences, each with its syntax tree and pragmatics. The lessons are written for Mova, and their agreed trees are part of Mova corpus 0.4 (CC BY-SA 4.0). How Mova does on its tests: [the lesson at school](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/school-run/language/22-where-english-came-from/). - [0](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/22-where-english-came-from/0/) — English was not always in England: about 1,500 years ago Angles, Saxons and Jutes sailed over the North Sea from what is now Denmark, northern Germany and the Netherlands, and their speech became Old English. - [1](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/22-where-english-came-from/1/) — Old English looks like a secret code today; the famous poem "Beowulf" begins "Hwæt! - [4](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/22-where-english-came-from/4/) — Later the vowel sounds slid about, the printing press arrived, and spelling got stuck while the sounds kept moving, which is one reason English spelling is so odd today. - [5](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/22-where-english-came-from/5/) — Your great-great-great-grandparents' English already sounded a bit different from yours, and your grandchildren's English will sound a bit different again. - [6](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/22-where-english-came-from/6/) — In the 400s and 500s AD, Angles, Saxons and Jutes settled in Britain; their language became Old English, spoken from about 450 to 1100. - [8](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/22-where-english-came-from/8/) — "Beowulf" is an Old English poem about a hero, written down about 1,000 years ago; today it has to be translated. - [9](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/22-where-english-came-from/9/) — English is a Germanic language, a cousin of German, Dutch and Frisian: house is "Haus" in German and "huis" in Dutch, and water is "Wasser" and "water". - [10](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/22-where-english-came-from/10/) — In 1066 the Normans from France conquered England; for about 300 years the rulers mostly spoke French, while most people kept speaking English. - [11](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/22-where-english-came-from/11/) — The Normans did not ban English; it lived on and took in thousands of French words, becoming Middle English, spoken from about 1100 to 1500. - [12](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/22-where-english-came-from/12/) — Chaucer wrote "The Canterbury Tales" in Middle English in the 1300s; "Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote" means "When April with its sweet showers". - [13](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/22-where-english-came-from/13/) — Words change meaning: "meat" once meant any food, which is why old books say "meat and drink" and a "sweetmeat" is a sweet. - [14](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/22-where-english-came-from/14/) — Between about 1400 and 1700 English vowel sounds changed a lot (the Great Vowel Shift): "bite" was once said a bit like "beet" and "house" a bit like "hoose". - [15](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/22-where-english-came-from/15/) — William Caxton brought the printing press to England in 1476; printers had to choose spellings, and many of their choices stuck. - [16](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/22-where-english-came-from/16/) — In "Ye Olde Tea Shoppe" the Y stands for an old letter called thorn (þ), which made a "th" sound, so people always said "the". - [17](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/22-where-english-came-from/17/) — Shakespeare's plays are the earliest written record found so far for some words, like "bedroom" and "eyeball"; many may already have been spoken, so "first recorded" does not always mean "invented". - [18](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/22-where-english-came-from/18/) — Mandarin Chinese has the most native speakers (people who learned it from birth); English has the most speakers in total if you count people who learned it later, about 1.5 billion by many estimates. - ← previous: [British and American words](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/21-british-and-american-words/) - next →: [Borrowed words: French, Norse and Latin](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/23-borrowed-words-french-norse-and-latin/) - ↑ back to [Language](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/corpora/school/language/)