Curious Kids: who was the first person to speak English?

Who was the first person to speak English? – Grace, aged eight, Belfast, Northern Ireland

The first speaker of English did not sound like you or me. That’s because language changes all the time. You have probably noticed that the language of your grandparents differs from yours. You can imagine then how very different English was when it was first spoken in Britain many centuries ago.

The earliest speakers of English spoke Old English. I am using the word “speakers” because there must have been more than one speaker: after all, we use language to talk to others.

Old English developed in a turbulent period of British history. This was just after the Romans had left Britain, around 1,600 years ago. The Romans had colonised Britain but they abandoned the country in the fifth century because the Roman empire was collapsing all around them.

Curious Kids is a series by The Conversation that gives children the chance to have their questions about the world answered by experts. If you have a question you’d like an expert to answer, send it to curiouskids@theconversation.com and make sure you include the asker’s first name, age and town or city. We won’t be able to answer every question, but we’ll do our very best.

The Romans who ruled Britain spoke their language, Latin. But most of the people who lived in Britain when the Romans were there – and before that too – spoke a Celtic language. This Celtic language was rather like Welsh, but again much older than the present-day Welsh language.

After the Romans left Britain, Germanic tribes who were on the move throughout Europe in the fifth and sixth centuries invaded. These tribes were the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. The language they spoke is known as North Sea Germanic.

The first English speakers

Once they settled in Britain it became Old English, which is also sometimes called “Anglo-Saxon”. From the Angles comes the word “English” and from the Angles and Saxons together comes the word “Anglo-Saxon”. I teach Old English to students of English at university.

So Old English or Anglo-Saxon is the oldest form of the English language that was spoken and written in England in the early Middle Ages, the period from roughly 450 to 1050. Very few Celtic words were taken over into Old English. The word “brock” (meaning “badger”) is one of the rare exceptions.

Do we know the names of the first speakers of Old English? Two names are mentioned in ancient legends that tell the story of how the Angles and the Saxons arrived in Britain.

According to these legends, the British (when they were still Celtic speakers) asked two Germanic leaders, Hengest and Horsa, to come to Britain to help protect the country after the Romans had left.

Hengest and Horsa arrived in Britain with lots of other people from their tribe and conquered the land. We have no way of knowing if these legends are true, but if they are we have here the names of the two chieftains who brought their language to Britain.

An Old English poet

There is one other name that deserves to be mentioned, and that is Caedmon. He is the first poet in English whose name is known. The story of his life is told by the monk and historian Bede, who lived in the north of England from around 673 to 735.

Bede not only tells the story of Hengest and Horsa, but he also tells us about Caedmon, who was a cowherd. Bede wrote that Caedmon could not read or write and received the ability to compose beautiful poetry as a gift from God. The first poem that Caedmon was inspired to create is a poem in praise of God. The first two lines of this poem will give you a taste of Old English:

 Nu sculon herian     heofonrices Weard, 
 Metodes mihte     and his modgeþanc

In modern English, this means: “Now we must praise the guardian of the heavenly kingdom, the Ruler’s might and his plan”.

You might think this is not really English at all. But we still use some of the words used in Old English – “and” and “his” are both in these two lines of poetry. Other words have survived too, though we often spell and pronounce them differently. See if you can spot the Old English words for “might” and “now” in these lines from Caedmon’s poem.

Caedmon looked after the cattle in a monastery in Whitby in Yorkshire. One of my university students studying Old English comes from Whitby and she told me that her school is named after our first named English poet: Caedmon College. His legend lives on.

Ad Putter, Professor of Medieval English Literature, University of Bristol

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Curious Kids: how does your brain know how to move your body?

How does your brain know how to move your body? – Ivy, age 8, Victoria

Hi Ivy, thanks for asking such an interesting question!

To answer it, we’ll need to look at some different parts of the brain and what they do.

First, the brain collects information

The front part of the brain plans and makes decisions. It does this after considering the different types of information it receives from “nerve cells”.

This information is called “sensory” information. It comes from touch, pain, temperature, hearing, seeing, and so on.

This is what happens when, for example, we spot someone giving out chocolate on the street, we turn our heads to look at them and walk towards the chocolate.

So how do the messages get from the brain?

The brain lives in the brain box in our head. The spinal cord lives in the spinal canal, in the back part of our body.

Tiny nerve fibres that come out of the lower part of the brain and the spinal cord connect many muscles. When they tighten, they make things move.

Some nerve fibres connect to muscles that cross the joints. Others attach to the tongue and eyeball and make them move.

Nerve cells send signals among each other, and between all the muscles and glands, including those responsible for making saliva in the mouth and digestive juices in the stomach.

A human brain has more than 100 billion nerve cells and sends messages to make us do things like walk, skip or stand up from a chair.

Different jobs for different parts of the brain

The brain has many regions that coordinate how we move.

One part helps us work out how much force is necessary in making the movement. It also tells the brain to start the movement.

Another part plays a role in the timing of movements.

Different types of nerves also have different roles. Some help us move voluntarily – when we choose to. These nerves connect to the muscles responsible for moving our joints in different body parts, like our arms and legs.

Another group of nerves work automatically. They sense what is happening inside our body without us consciously knowing. These nerves control the muscles in our heart, blood vessels, stomach, intestines, kidneys and other organs, helping them work properly.

What’s the answer in a nutshell?

So Ivy, to sum up, the brain receives information from our senses and uses this to control our body movements.

Different parts of the brain send messages to different parts of the body to get these movements right.

Our brain can also store movements into memories that will be recalled for future use. That’s why you can remember how to ride a bike, even if you haven’t ridden one for months.

Hello, curious kids! Do you have a question you’d like an expert to answer? Ask an adult to send your question to curiouskids@theconversation.edu.au

Arjun Burlakoti, Senior Lecturer in Anatomy and Neuroanatomy, University of South Australia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Curious Kids: How are planets created?

Curious Kids is a series for children in which we ask experts to answer questions from kids.

How are planets created? - (Saba, 6, Kenya)

Thanks for asking such an interesting question, Saba. When you talk about planets you’re probably thinking of the planets in our solar system – the ones orbiting (circling around) our sun. There are eight of these planets. One of them is where you and I live: Earth. The others are Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

There are many, many more planets way beyond our solar system and our galaxy, the Milky Way. Scientists like us, known as astronomers, have found over 5,000 planets around other stars. We estimate that there may be trillions across the Universe.

How did they come into being? It all starts with a cloud of gas and dust.

Gas and dust

These clouds of gas and dust are called nebulae. They float around in space much like the clouds in our sky. There are some regions with more clouds and some with fewer and astronomers can see these using telescopes.

Nebulae contain gases like hydrogen, helium and carbon. When a nebula becomes dense enough its gravity pulls it together into a very dense core. This is a bit like the water in your bath swirling around the drain before getting sucked down. As the cloud gets dense it heats up. When it gets dense and hot enough the atoms – tiny building blocks for all the matter in the world – in the nebula start to fuse.

This process is called nuclear fusion and produces a lot of energy. And the cloud lights up like a firework. This is how a new star is born, just like our Sun was 4.5 billion years ago.

A small amount of gas and dust remains around new stars in a spinning disc. Planets are formed from this disc of material.

Protoplanets

As the disc rotates, the material in it, small bits of rock and ice, lump together and get bigger and bigger. That forms what we call planetesimals, which collide with each other like bumper cars, creating even larger bodies known as protoplanets.

The protoplanets keep growing. While this is happening, they can attract gases from the surrounding disc, creating a thick atmosphere. This process is called accretion and it is how gas giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn are formed. If a protoplanet forms from heavier elements in the outer solar system it can create an ice giant. The planets Neptune and Uranus are ice giants.

Even after the planet is formed it can keep changing over time through processes such as volcanic activity, tectonic movement, and erosion. On Earth, mountains like Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania – the country next door to Kenya – formed from large volcanoes. And even larger mountains like the Himalayas have formed from tectonic plates colliding. Tectonic plates are big pieces of the Earth’s outer layer; sometimes they crash into each other and that creates things like mountains.

Millions of years

The way I’ve described this makes it sound as though planets are formed quickly. But the process which begins with those clouds of gas and dust takes millions of years to transform into the beautiful and diverse worlds we see in our Solar System and beyond.

Daniel Cunnama, Science Engagement Astronomer, South African Astronomical Observatory, South African Astronomical Observatory

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.