Explainer
Word histories can connect familiar language to unexpected places and objects. This explanation follows the names England and the Angles through that history. Etymology is useful here as a path into further investigation.
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Original recording: TikTok, 2020-10-06.
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Automatically transcribed from the original recording. Small transcription errors may remain.
What does the English language and a fish hook have in common? For this answer, we need to turn back to the pages of history and trace the thread of linguistic evolution. Now, as we all know, English comes from England, which was once called Anglin, or Land of the Anglos before the Great Ballet Shift. The Anglos themselves got their name from the place they originated from, the Angli Peninsula, which is now part of modern-day Denmark. Angli's origins come from the peninsula's angular shape, and we get the word angle from 15th century English, which means to fish with a hook. And last but not least, the word angle can be traced back to ang, or ank, meaning to bend, which stems from the first language, known as Proto-Indo-European, or Pi for short.
