History of the English Language, Animated

Have you ever tried to make sense of the English language? If you've taken courses on linguistics, logic or philosophy of language, you've learned that grammar is supposed to give us a formal understanding of the structure underlying any particular language. To a surprisingly large extent, the rules of grammar do a pretty good job of organizing this formal structure, especially for languages like Latin or its romance derivations.

But the English language is kind of an unruly child, partly because it is, more so than many other languages, an amalgamation of disparate historical and geographic linguistic influences (Anglo-Saxon, Latin, German, French, Norse, etc.), as the following funny and educational 10-minute animation makes clear: