The History of the English Language by Lucy Rucker

English is a complex language, even for those who were born with it as a mother tongue. We can see that many experts try to explain and create a concept of what is “proper English”. But nowadays, who knows it? Globalization makes the spread of English come so fast, and also, new variations and idioms comes even faster every day that trying to organize how English is spoken and used in certain areas is almost impossible.

Most of the experts say that this problem comes from changes in history and improvements that modified grammar and spelling. Words coming and going makes us think that made this language as difficult as it is. But actually, those words were made to make it a little bit easy, and that’s what Lucy Racker covers in her article.   

In this article we can see that the main topic is shown in the beginning of the text: “How did the English Language begin? But Racker didn’t just want to talk about the history of Old, Middle, and Modern English. She also wanted to criticize the ways this language is challenging and always changing, making it difficult to non-native speakers to learn it.

Is just like she said, if even in the United States, people of different parts of the country can’t understand each other, though both are English native-speakers, what can expect other people that want to learn this language?  As an example, Racker uses the difference of pronunciation between UK and United States, but even the difference in the meaning that people in the north, south or any other area in EUA gives to some words.

Also, she wants to emphasize some key words to support her ideas and make English learners notice that the main reason of why English is difficult for them to learn comes from several changes in the history of the language. Beginning with old English, coming from Anglo-Norman-France, many of words changed a lot from this era to Middle English, and even the order in the sentences were modified. However, improvements were more significant in the transition from the Middle to the Modern era.

In my opinion, even when the author is proud of her language and explicitly says that loves it the most, she is aware of its complexity that represent to us as English learners to carry on with a language that I think has not just a single proper way to speak it.