The Story of English. A PBS series in the 80's if I recall......
Yeah, the series is from 1986 ... it looks and feels surprisingly dated, but it's probably b/c of the low video resolution.
Episode 1 (also in 7 parts) is also very interesting, b/c it describes how widespread the English language is (or was).
Nowadays, it's interesting to observe that the use of English as a "lingua franca" has declined in non-English-speaking countries, probably b/c computers can process local writing systems now, which wasn't possible in the 1980ies.
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Another thing that I found interesting was what episode 2 says about the Germanic tribes. From what is now France, there have been the Normans (from Normandy), the Bretons (that gave
Britain it's name) and the Gauls (Lat.
Gallia, that brought the
Gaelic language); From what is now Germany, there have been the Celts (from roughly central Germany), the Anglos (from Northwestern Germany) and the Saxons (from Eastern to Northwestern Germany). Saxony even still exists in Germany as the names of two states: Lower Saxony (which is in the Northwest) and Saxony (which is in the East). Saxony still speaks a very peculiar version (dialect) of the German language that was and still is spoken in almost all of East Germany (it was the national language during the GDR period). The two languages (English and German) developed apart b/c England used to be pretty isolated, while Germany was often subject to tribe meandering and invasions from regions as far as Turkey or Russia, which brought a great diversity to the German language it is now. As the episode points out, Old English and German are more flexible than modern English, and thus need fewer words. Remarkable the observation that word order doesn't matter much in Old English and German -- it's true. Plus, German has the advantage that words can be combined almost arbitrarily to form new words, so it might be that there's even an unlimited number of words in German ... lol ... modern English has the advantage that it's very compact and that it's relatively easy to learn (especially compared to Arabic, Russian, Chinese or other languages with complex pronunciation and grammar).
