Paul Roberts A Brief History of English seemed to be more of a history lesson than and English reading. He claims that Modern English has been derived from many other languages like Latin, Proto-Indo European, and the Anglo Saxon languages. He indicates that English language started to appear around 600 BC. Only small words came up from other languages and started in England. Beowulf is the most known epic poem of Old English Literature in England. Later on in the article, he keeps going on and on about how Modern English arrived around 1700 AD. Roberts at the very beginning of his article claims that no one can understand the English languages very well until they know how it derived and came to be Modern English that we speak today. I believe that this is not necessary at all because even if you do not know the history of English does not mean that you can not speak it any worse than somebody else who actually knows the past. No one speaks in that tongue at all so why does one need to learn it. It would be like learning Latin the dead language.
Another reason why I do not like this article is because as i stated earlier, it is more of a history lesson than inquiry to language. And more important its a history lesson that really pertains to nothing about the significance of learning the language. One would not be able to speak better English just because he knows how it came about.
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I'm a little skeptical, too, about the claim that you can't know English without knowing its history; on its surface that's clearly false. I wonder, though, if Roberts's concern isn't so much with our knowing how to use English, but rather with our understanding how English works.
I think the difference has to do with what we mean by the word "know." We don't need to know the history of the language in order to use it--to know it in the "know how to" sense. But to know it--to understand how it works and why, like one "knows" a city--we do need to understand how it's got(ten) the way it is.
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