What was the 1st English word?

According to a 2009 study by researchers at Reading University, the oldest words in the English language include “I“, “we“, “who“, “two” and “three“, all of which date back tens of thousands of years.


What was the very 1st word?

Also according to Wiki answers,the first word ever uttered was “Aa,” which meant “Hey!” This was said by an australopithecine in Ethiopia more than a million years ago.

What is the oldest English word in the world?

Mother, bark and spit are some of the oldest known words, say researchers. Continue reading → Mother, bark and spit are just three of 23 words that researchers believe date back 15,000 years, making them the oldest known words.


When was the first English word spoken?

3) The Anglo-Saxon migration

Old English was first spoken in the 5th century, and it looks incomprehensible to today's English-speakers. To give you an idea of just how different it was, the language the Angles brought with them had three genders (masculine, feminine, and neutral).

What are the 23 oldest words?

Science Says These are the Oldest 23 Words in the English...
  1. Thou. The singular form of "you," this is the only word that all seven language families share in some form. ...
  2. I. Similarly, you'd need to talk about yourself. ...
  3. Mother. ...
  4. Give. ...
  5. Bark. ...
  6. Black. ...
  7. Fire. ...
  8. Ashes.


What's the Earliest English Word?



What word needs 3 hours to say?

The longest English word

The longest word in English has 189,819 letters and takes 3 hours to pronounce. This is a technical term for the chemical composition of titin. Titin is the largest known protein responsible for maintaining the passive elasticity of the muscles.

What is the shortest word in history?

The shortest word is 'a. ' Some might wonder about the word 'I' since it consists of one letter, too. In sound, 'a' is shorter because it is a monophthong (consists of one vowel), while 'I' is a diphthong.

Who originally spoke English?

English is a West Germanic language that originated from Ingvaeonic languages brought to Britain in the mid-5th to 7th centuries AD by Anglo-Saxon migrants from what is now northwest Germany, southern Denmark and the Netherlands.


What is the closest language to English?

The closest language to English is one called Frisian, which is a Germanic language spoken by a small population of about 480,000 people. There are three separate dialects of the language, and it's only spoken at the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany.

Who created English words?

Having emerged from the dialects and vocabulary of Germanic peoples—Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—who settled in Britain in the 5th century CE, English today is a constantly changing language that has been influenced by a plethora of different cultures and languages, such as Latin, French, Dutch, and Afrikaans.

Is English or Greek older?

Greek – 1450 BC (circa. 3500 years old)

Moving forward just a hair in time, Greek is probably the oldest language still spoken as a primary, day-to-day language.


What language did the English speak 1000 years ago?

Old English language, also called Anglo-Saxon, language spoken and written in England before 1100; it is the ancestor of Middle English and Modern English. Scholars place Old English in the Anglo-Frisian group of West Germanic languages.

What are the oldest words?

Scientists at the University of Reading have discovered that 'I', 'we', 'who' and the numbers '1', '2' and '3' are amongst the oldest words, not only in English, but across all Indo-European languages.

What is the oldest word for love?

The word 'love' was once '*leubh', a word used by the Proto-Indo-Europeans approximately five thousand years ago to describe care and desire. When 'love' was incorporated into Old English as 'lufu', it had turned into both a noun to describe, 'deep affection' and its offspring verb, 'to be very fond of'.


What is the oldest text?

The world's oldest literature is widely accepted to be the Sumerian “Instructions of Shuruppak”, which dates to somewhere around 2600 B.C.E.

What language did Jesus speak?

Most religious scholars and historians agree with Pope Francis that the historical Jesus principally spoke a Galilean dialect of Aramaic. Through trade, invasions and conquest, the Aramaic language had spread far afield by the 7th century B.C., and would become the lingua franca in much of the Middle East.

What is the hardest language to learn?

Across multiple sources, Mandarin Chinese is the number one language listed as the most challenging to learn. The Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center puts Mandarin in Category IV, which is the list of the most difficult languages to learn for English speakers.


What's the easiest language in the world?

15 of the easiest languages to learn for English speakers - ranked
  • Frisian. Frisian is thought to be one of the languages most closely related to English, and therefore also the easiest for English-speakers to pick up. ...
  • Dutch. ...
  • Norwegian. ...
  • Spanish. ...
  • Portuguese. ...
  • Italian. ...
  • French. ...
  • Swedish.


Why does America speak English?

The use of English in the United States is a result of British colonization of the Americas. The first wave of English-speaking settlers arrived in North America during the early 17th century, followed by further migrations in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Which language is older Spanish or English?

The answer is, Spanish. There are many reasons for this. But the main reason is that English, unlike Spanish and many other languages has no single root language. Spanish is a derivative of Latin, which is thousands of years old.


Is American English older than British English?

American English is actually older

When the first settlers set sail from England to America, they took with them the common tongue at the time, which was based on something called rhotic speech (when you pronounce the r sound in a word).

What word has all 5 vowels?

EUNOIA is the shortest word in English which has all five vowels.

What word has no vowels?

Shh, psst, and hmm do not have vowels, either vowel symbols or vowel sounds. There is some controversy whether they are in fact “words,” however.


What word is 189 819 letters long?

1. methionylthreonylthreonylglutaminylalanyl… isoleucine. You'll notice there's an ellipsis here, and that's because this word, in total, is 189,819 letters long, and it's the chemical name for the largest known protein, titin.