Reddit reviews The Story of English: Third Revised Edition

Old English used to have masculine, feminine and neuter nouns. The use of these started to decline due to contact with other languages - people from different areas had to communicate and the lose of features such as gender, verb conjugations (most of which english also lost) and grammatical cases (also lost) makes a language much less complex. If you're interested, I recommend this book.

Shakespeare did have a large influence on the language, partially due to being born in the right place at the right time. Before Shakespeare's lifetime, most books printed in Europe were in Latin. During his life, England alone printed thousands of items in English, and literacy rates were rising rapidly.

The Renaissance as a whole added at least 10,000 new words to the English lexicon. As writing in the vernacular became more popular, authors borrowed words--mostly from Latin, French, Spanish, or Dutch-- to fill the holes they saw in English. But how many of these words can we credit directly to Shakespeare?
The Oxford English Dictionary claimed at least 2,000 English words were first used by the playwright. But this is in need of revision, as many of these words were actually used previously by a lesser-known author. The OED is currently being revised, a process that will take many years. But from the pages edited so far, we can conclude that around 30% of words credited to Shakespeare were actually first used by someone else.

But the true genius of William Shakespeare lies in the way he put words together, and created new metaphorical definitions for existing words. The updated OED currently claims that Shakespeare invented around 8,000 new word senses. Here is a good quote by Bernard Levin that shows many of the phrases we use today were invented by Shakespeare.

souces: The Story of English and Bad English

http://www.amazon.com/Story-English-Third-Revised/dp/0142002313