The origin of English can be traced back to the 5th century. At that time, the Saxons, Angles and Jutes in Europe crossed the Strait to the British Island, conquered the local tribes and became the masters of the island. They were later called Anglo-Saxons, and the ancient Germanic dialect they used became Anglo-Saxon, that is, Old English.

In the 9th-/kloc-0th century, the Nordic Germans living in Scandinavia (that is, the Normans) conquered the Gaul region in northern France today. But their language and culture were soon conquered by the local Gauls who spoke old French.

1 1 century, these French normans crossed the ocean and conquered Britain for centuries, but they were not very successful in language conquest. During this period, Old English absorbed a large number of Greek Latin words created by Old French and French, which greatly changed English vocabulary and grammatical structure.

/kloc-in the 6th century, modern English and modern English entered a period of development. English in this period is represented by the English versions of the King James Bible and Shakespeare's plays, but it is very different from modern English.

/kloc-written English after the 0/8th century is basically the same as what we see now.

Extended data:

Because Britain once had many colonies all over the world, in modern times, English is the common language or one of the official languages of many countries and regions:

English is the first language in Britain, America, Australia, Bahamas, Ireland, Barbados, Bermuda, Guyana, Jamaica, New Zealand, Saint Kitts and Nevis and Trinidad and Tobago. 2 1 century, about 500 million people in the world speak English as their first language (mother tongue).

2. English is the common language of Canada, Dominica, Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Micronesia (Federated States of), Ireland (together with Irish), Liberia (together with African languages) and South Africa (together with Afrikaans and other African languages). The population as a second language (that is, not the mother tongue, but the language of the host country) is about 654.38 billion.

3. English is the official language of the following countries and regions (one of them), but it is not the local language and common language: Fiji, Ghana, Gambia, India, Kiribati, Lesotho, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria, Malta, Marshall Islands, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Solomon Islands, Samoa, Sierra Leone, Swaziland, Botswana, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

English grammar is based on Germanic etymology. Although some scholars in18th century and19th century tried to apply French and ancient Latin grammar to English, they failed.

Compared with all other Indo-European languages, the inflectional changes of English are not so complicated, and almost all the yin-yang changes have been lost. Basically, apart from personal pronouns, English has lost the distinction between sex and case. It emphasizes a relatively fixed word order, which means that English is developing in the direction of analytical language (for example, cat tail can be written as cat tail instead of cat's tail, where cats directly use root prototype instead of genus).

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