449 Germanic tribes started migrating to England and rapidly took over the island. They were the tribes of the Saxons, the Angles, and the Jutes. These tribes spoke a form of Old English, and this language rapidly replaced Latin and Celtic. Although England was divided into numerous small kingdoms, the people seem to have been able to communicate with each other without difficulty. Then in 597, Pope Gregory the Great sent the missionary Augustine of Canterbury to England. Augustine replaced the idols with the Christian cross, therefore allowing people to maintain many of their traditional customs in their traditional places. With Christianity came both Latin and writing, and it the first written records of language come from that time. One of them is The Lord s Prayer in Old English, from the West Saxon Gospels [2] .Lord s Prayer (Old English) ure † u † e eart on heofonum; † in nama gehalgodbecume † in rice † e? In willaeor? an swa swa on heofonum.gedaghwamlican hlaf syle us todagforgyf us ure gyltasswa we forgyfa? urum gyltendumne gelad † u us on costnungealys us of yfele so † lice.us examine several lines of the prayer in detail.ure † u † e eart on heofonum † in nama gehalgod
Fader is recognizable as father, and ure is close enough to our. ? u means thou, † e is a relative particle which can be translated as who. Eart is art and on heofonum means in the heavens. Si is a form of the verb to be that is lost from Modern English. ? in is thine and nama is name. [5]. English is West Germanic and rather close to Modern English. Closer than Celtic or Cothic, anyway. It has an additional set of sound shifts that makes the words sound more like Modern English. Its grammar is also evolving gradually toward that of Modern English.English, like Modern German, still has strong verbs in which the vowel of the verb stem is changed to indicate changes in number or tense: Modern English to bite, bit comes from Old English bitan, bat. Old English also had weak verbs, which added an ending to indicate the past tense. Just like modern regular verbs. modern English and German languages, Old English easily produced new compound words and was open to borrowing. It readily adopted Latin or Celtic words, for example. English started its life in the British Isles as an essentially Germanic language with a native vocabulary. At its early stages it had experienced little influenced from other languages. Later the Old English had to go through several very significant contact periods in which foreign language influences would radically change the language.
BORROWING AND INFLUENCE: ROMANS, CELTS, DANES, NORMANS
Languages ??tend to borrow words from one another, it sa common practice, and English is no exception. Moreover it was especially prolific in its adoption of new words from outside sources. Even at the very beginning, it borrowed several Latin words. It is supposed that Anglo-Saxons took names from the Romans for things that did not exist in their own culture. For example,
win (wine) from Latin vinus;
popig (poppy); Old English sound g before and after front vowels is pronounced y
cytel (kettle),
pyle (pillow),
butere (butter),
weall (wall),
pytt (pit),
draca (dragon; the native Old English word was wyrm),
bisceop (bishop),
cirice (church), and so on.the communication with a Romano-British population of the British Isles Anglo-Saxons could pick up some Celtic words, however Celtic languages ??had surprisingly little influence on Old English. They influenced the Old English in the realm of place names, most of which are Celtic. For example, Wor in Worcester, Ex in Exeter, and Win in Winchester, were Celtic. Rivers and hill in England have a very high proportion of Celtic names. Beside place names Old English borrowed some other words, for example:
binn (bin),
crag (rock),
ass (donkey),
cursian (to curse) .first wave of Latin borrowing took place while Anglo-Saxon tribes were still living on the continent, but a much greater influence of Latin on Old English came from Christians in the VI-VII centuries. Roman Catholic Church was an enormously important cultural presence in England. In the beginning of the Christian period, key Latin terms were translated into Old English. They were a sort of neologisms. Strictly speaking such words were not borrowings, but translations. One of written examples of such a translation is C? Dmon s Hymn. This poem was written in Latin, and than translated. Here is a part of it: sculon herian heofon rices wea...
