1 Beginnings
How did the English language begin, this supple, economic, subtle instrument of communication, commerce, and belles lettres that has become de facto and in many institutions and contexts de jure the lingua franca of the world? What were the linguistic, historical, and cultural factors that joined to make this language of so small an island “conquer” so great a swath of territory throughout the world? For that we have to reach far into the Indo‐European past.
The Germanic tribes had departed the Indo‐European primeval home probably by the beginning of the Common Era at the latest. They drifted into western Europe and settled in what today is northern Germany, the Low Countries, and southern Scandinavia. The Baltic Sea, the shallow inland sea that separates Germany and Denmark from Norway and Sweden, was more of a boggy marsh than a sea when the Germanic peoples made this their dampish home, thus easing ingress and movement throughout the area.
The Germanic tribes – Saxons, Angles, Jutes, Frisians – were a roving, restless, pushy lot like their Indo‐European forebears, always seeing the other side of rivers, of valleys, of bodies of water as greener, more fertile, than where they were living. That this other side might be inhabited by other people, well, so much the better: let the games begin! This hereditary trait, this restlessness, this urge to jump in a boat and find new lands to conquer and different people to terrorize, the English later were to display in abundance.
Around 449 the restless continental Germanic tribes began what we may call the Germanic Conquest of England. The English Channel in good weather is not much of a barrier to even small craft sailing from countries such as Holland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the northern coast of Germany. Already in Roman times bands of Germanic invaders (we usually call them “Vikings”) had been a nuisance for the Romans, always grabbing women and things that did not belong to them, plundering, causing mischief. It was only after Roman rule had become ineffectual against the warriors landing from the north that Germanic invasion on a large scale could succeed. The Celts, those who did not assimilate to Germanic ways, moved west and south into Cornwall and Wales; Scotland with its hills, wild terrain, and rain remained untamed by both Roman and Saxon for a long time to come.
Thus came into being an Anglo‐Saxon Civilization. Its language was Old English (also known as Anglo‐Saxon), which we nominally date 450–1150, a fusion language to which various of the Germanic invading tribes had contributed, most particularly the Saxons from northern Germany.
What resemblance did Old English, this rough beast of a language, bear to the English of modern times? The answer is: very little. Old English, like the Old Saxon to which it owes most, was a “heavy” language: heavily inflected and richly conjugated, with three genders and four cases, and numerous subclasses of nouns, verbs, and adjectives. The Old English verb conjugations are no less complex in comparison with modern English: where English today has in the present indicative only one marked ending ‐(e)s, in the third‐person singular (goes, tries, kills), Old English had four. Even the simple, anodyne definite article the of modern English required eighteen different forms to decline it: three genders in the singular, four cases for the singular and the plural, plus an instrumental case for masculine and neuter singular.
So much for the language. What about the literature it produced? The greatest single work in Old English is Beowulf, a story of heroes and dragons and great deeds still studied today as a classic of world literature. Besides Beowulf there is the great war poem The Battle of Maldon and numerous religious poems. Under the Anglo‐Saxon king Alfred the Great (ruled 871–899) and due directly to him we have outstanding translations from the Latin of such works as Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People and Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy.
Old English already was disposed toward linguistic hospitality, an openness to the influence of other languages which endures to the present day, welcoming new words from the languages with which it shared territory (Latin, Celtic) and from the languages of influential figures such as warriors and priests who came speaking no English. Many place‐names point back to the Celtic linguistic substratum (Kent, Cornwall, York) as do words such as crag and bin. Of far greater importance and extent were borrowings from Latin, earlier from the Latin of Roman conquest, later from the Latin of Christian conquest. From the earlier period we have camp, mile, pit, cheap, wine, and many other domestic words so well integrated into English that only an enthusiast would know them not to be originally Germanic. Christianity came to Britain in 597, though it was not to displace local religious traditions until centuries had passed. Its impact on English vocabulary is great: church words such as bishop, angel, disciple, human, relic, and rule; school words like school, verse, meter, and grammar; and words not easily categorized such as elephant, radish, oyster, talent, and crisp.
In depth and mass of linguistic imprint on the English language, however, all else vanishes to nothing in comparison with the French influence that followed upon the Norman Conquest. In 1066 the king of England died without an heir. The wrangling began, and a second cousin to the deceased king soon announced that he was the rightful successor and all other pretenders be damned. This cousin was William, duke of Normandy, French down to his capillaries (although a Northman, loaded with Viking genes). William had had a hard childhood, having to overcome the stigma of illegitimacy among much else, and he rose to his dukedom through physical toughness mixed with shrewdness. William made careful preparations for invasion, taking care to cultivate supporters on the English side of the channel (a “Fifth Column”), and in 1066 he sailed with his soldiers across the English Channel, the Channel being very narrow and easy to traverse at this point. It is no accident that the D‐Day invasion of 6 June 1944 going the other direction chose the beaches of Normandy to land on.
William and his men landed at Hastings, then as now a town on the Channel not far south of London. The battle did not last long. On Christmas day, 1066, William was crowned king of England. One of the first effects of the Norman Conquest was the creation of a new French‐speaking Norman aristocracy. While William did not complete his conquest for several years to come, a Norm...
