The Phantom Linguist Historical Development rdinarily we pay little attention to the words we speak. We concentrate instead on the meaning we intend to express and are seldom conscious of how we express that meaning. This means that most of us don't know where the words we use come from and how they come to have the meanings they do. Since words play such an important role in our lives, making our life easy or difficult depending on which words we choose on a given occasion, exploring their nature and origin should provide an interesting adventure.
English words come from several different sources.
They develop naturally over the course of centuries from ancestral languages, they are also borrowed from other languages, and we create many of them by various means of word formation. Each of these sources have made a material impact on the vocabulary available to us today. Let's take a look at all three in order. Native Words First or all, it is important to know that languages may be related just like people. You have probably noticed that people from England, Brooklyn, and North Carolina all speak differently.