Liquid Leopard, on 16 November 2013 - 10:27 AM, said:
I don't think there was such a thing as English 1000 years ago, and people often have a hard time reading Shakespeare, whose wrote all those plays about 400 years ago. In fact, isn't English a blend of languages from the Angles, Normans, and Germanic people?
First:
Who has problems reading Shakespeare? In all seriousness, English has evolved much less in the 400 years since Shakespeare's day than it had in the preceding 100.
Second: English is, in fact, a hybrid of every language that the various English-speaking cultures have encountered.
Most of English is either Germanic (Angles, Jutes, Saxons, Danes, and Norwegians) or French (Normans and French) in origin. But there are words from Scottish, Irish, Celtic, Spanish, Portuguese, Welsh, Dutch, German, Belgian, Greek, Serbian, Turkish, Arabic, Farsi, Italian, various African languages, aboriginal American and Austrasian languages, Pacific Islanders, Afrikaans, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, &c., &c., &c. One of the strengths of English is how adaptable and adaptive it is. This, in turn, makes the language very difficult for people who were not raised speaking it to speak and can render some native, fluent English speakers nigh incomprehensible to native, fluent English speakers from the other side of the world.