Time Traveler’s Language Guide

By Allan Metcalf. One left, two left — Excuse me, I was just talking with a guy from 6,000 years ago.
Language, being learned rather than innate, has a natural tendency to change as each person learns it under slightly different circumstances.
It works like the game of Telephone, where each person whispers a message to the next, and the outcome isn’t the same as the input. Languages don’t change as fast as Telephone, because mispronunciations and misinterpretations usually get corrected by family, friends, teachers, editors, and busybodies. Still, a thousand years of Telephone can make a big difference. It certainly does in English, which received a thick infusion of French vocabulary, topped off with Latin and Greek, during the past millennium.
So the English spoken in England a thousand years ago, the true “Old English,” is quite different from ours. Read more...