No attendance will be taken, but after today's entertaining lecture, I am sure few will want to miss the subsequent lectures. Today, we covered the history of the English language and how it came to become the lingua fraca of the world. I was expecting the 2 hours to be a big yawn, but the lecturer had other ideas, the way she presented her lecture, she had everyone in stitches. Compared to most of the other languages that we find in the world today, English is a relatively new language. Modern English only crystallized midway through the 16th century, thats about 500 years, compared to Sanskrit, Arabic or Mandarin, with thousands of years of history. English was brought to England/ Britain by migrants from continental Europe, and at the beginning it was no more than a dialect spoken by pig farmers and barbarians on a backward island across the channel, as the rest of civilised Europe spoke Latin under the Pax Romana ( Roman Rule). After the Norman conquest of Britain, French was spoken by the Norman Kings and the nobility while the common people spoke a variety of English dialects, a phenomenon which persists even until today, just listen to see if you can make out Wayne Rooney's accent.

Rivarol's famous sentence

Ce qui n'est pas clair n'est pas francaisl ce qui n'est pas clair est anglais, italien, grec on latin
(Whatever is unclear is not French, whatever is unclear is English, Italian, Greek or Latin)

English's rise began when an independent minded English King, Alfred, proud of his roots, compared to Jack Neo and his attempts to make Hokkien hip again by the lecturerer, decided he would standardize the English spoken and began translating latin text into the West-Saxon dialect of Old English.

From that beginning, a series of accidental events would ( To be continued, when I feel suitably motivated to continue...)