English is a Germanic language that has a lot of borrowings from various languages. Its Germanic base coming from the Viking, Saxon, Jute and Angle invaders - the Latinate parts coming from the Normans and Catholicism. And over time words change form and we pick up new words and lose old ones. Also note words like Pig and Pork, Cow and Beef etc. they mean the same thing, but we have more than 1 word because of different sources, when the Normans took over England you had the Old English working the farms and bringing the food to the Nobles, who were of course Norman/French, so on the farms they would be called 'pigs and cows' as their native form and the Nobles eating them as food would have 'Pork' and 'Beef' instead. So that's why we only call it Pork when it's food instead of a living animal.
If you look at Old Norse for example, the word 'út', means 'out', if you read it out loud, notice how Scottish you sound - I believe (rather than was taught) that this may have something to do with the Vikings that were in Scotland, though in England we have the dipthong to make it 'out', but it seems the Scottish have kept an Old Language in its dialect and you may see this sort of thing duplicated in other dialects (there was a story Caxton told when he invented the printing press about the words 'Eggys' and 'Eyren' for the word egg, both words were different dialects)
But there are a lot of attributes to the evolution of English.
If you look at the languages across Indo-Europe and over time, you'll notice words are connected or are similar - Mater, Mutter, Moðir, Mother, Madre, (and I can't remember the sanskrit) as an example. And scholars have been looking deeply at this with the idea that maybe they all rooting from one language/tribe, but of course being before a writing system reached Europe they can't actually find any physical evidence to support it, but by using existing and known languages they've undergone an attempt to reconstruct this language, called, Proto-Indo European, or better known as PIE (best name in the world)
A couple of books I might recommend are:
The Adventure of English by Melvyn Bragg and
The Orgins of the British by Stephen Oppenheimer. (Not language based, but it shows you genetic evidence to tell the history of England before the Saxons invaded) Also David Crystal's Encyclopedia of Language has a section dedicated to language change, which explains how and why languages change. But as for Proto-indo European , there's a website(which has a flow diagram showing how languages evolved from it):
PIE It might also be interesting to look at older Germanic languages that built up to English, like Old English, Old Saxon, Old Norse and Old Germanic.
Quote: "What I can't figure out is how a series of Neanderthal grunts can evolve into a cohesive language.
Why are there redundant consonants like v and w?"
Listen to a baby experiement with its voice, it will start with vowels, because they're easy sounds, "ahhh, ooohhh, eeee" etc. but as it develops it'll start making sound such as, "gaa, baa, daa" as it discovers parts of the voicebox that can make consonants. I imagine as humans began to use vocal sounds to communicate it would have developed in stages and of course as apes using language to communicate, that part of our brain grew bigger, so we could mentally deal with more complex concepts.
You sir have the moral ambivalence of a mutated shrimp!
