What is the earliest language that can be defined as “English,” not merely in name, but in being a distinctly separate language rather than a variant of another language? And how many of the words have exactly the same meaning today?
(This was brought up when an anti-SSM person complained about “redefining” marriage, and I pointed out that most of the words we use have been “redefined” again and again . . . otherwise we’d all sound like Chaucer. I then realized that that we could go back a lot further than Chaucer.)
Language experts usually start with Old English (c 1000 AD), though it’s impossible to determine this sort of thing with any accuracy. 1000 AD is used because it predates the Norman invasion, but Old English was probably around for some time before that. It’s not as though one day everyone woke up speaking a different language (barring invasion), but more like “the language these damn kids speak today is different than what we spoke when we were in school”
What’s usually considered the start would be in the middle of the 5th century A.D., when various groups from northern Germany emigrated to England:
Because the Angles and the Saxons were among these peoples, the language is sometimes referred to as Anglo-Saxon. The language then eventually became known as English. The name “England” derives from this. The language that these groups (the ones who emigrated from Germany in the mid-5th century) spoke before they emigrated is usually thought of as one of the many dialects and languages of the Germanic peoples at the time. At the point that they arrived in England, it’s usual to refer to their language as being English.
‘Old English’ is a misnomer, because it is no longer comprehensible to modern English speakers, meaning it is no longer English. The name Anglo-Saxon is much more accurate.
Comprehensibility here is mostly a matter of vocabulary. Old English had many words which have been replaced by words from Norman French, Latin, Greek and many other languages, and a few (including very common words like “the”) that were replaced by Scandinavian words – before the Norman conquest of 1066, two groups of invaders speaking Germanic languages took over England, one from modern-day Denmark and northern Germany speaking Anglo Saxon, and the other from modern-day Norway speaking Old Norse. If it hadn’t been for that mixing in of vocabulary, Old English would be much easier to read.
Presumably one could measure this by going word-by-word through the OED; I don’t know that anyone has, or what the results were.
One figure that is commonly batted about is that English has retained 76.6% of its basic vocabulary over the last 1,000 years (cite: Lees’s 1953 “The basis of glotto-chronology” in Language 29/2:113-127.) I haven’t read the article, but I suspect it is measuring something different from what you want-- vocabulary items retained per meaning instead of meanings retained per vocabulary item.
Just try reading Jane Austen for examples of Modern English words that already don’t mean the same as they used to. For example, the word “glass” in 19th-century English doesn’t mean something you drink from, it means either a mirror or a telescope.
The problem with using Anglo-Saxon instead of Old English is that it sort of implies that there was a sudden break in the language. There are never sudden breaks in languages. They are *always *changing, sometimes faster than at other times, but always changing. From the arrival of the Germanic-speaking peoples in England in the mid-5th century to the present, you have a continuous chain of this sort:
A mid-5th century speaker understands a speaker of 600 A.D., who understands a speaker of 700 A.D., who understands a speaker of 800 A.D., who . . . who understands a speaker of 1900 A.D., who understands a speaker of 2010 A.D.
Of course a speaker of the mid-5th century and a speaker of the year 2010 won’t understand each other, but that doesn’t mean that there was a break at any point.