History Of The English Language Author:Thomas R. Lounsbury Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. INFLUENCE OF FOREIGN TONGUES UPON THE ENGLISH OF THE ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD. Down to the time of the Norman conquest the Anglo-Saxon form of the E... more »nglish language remained essentially the same. The grammatical modifications, in particular, that it underwent, were comparatively few in number, and slight in importance. Some inflections were lost; cases originally possessing different endings came to have the same; and the tendency of verbs of the strong conjugation to pass over to the weak began even thus early to show itself. Still none of these changes were violent or extensive: all of them took place in accordance with the natural law of development. But during this period the language came into contact with three other tongues, which to some extent affected the vocabulary, and perhaps, also, the form of expression. These were, first, the speech of the native Celtic inhabitants; secondly, the Latin ; and, thirdly, the Norse. Of these, Latin was the only one which at that time added any appreciable num- y 30 English Language. ber of words to the language of literature. Term.s from the Celtic or the Norse may have been adopted into the colloquial speech; but it was not until the break-up of the classic Anglo-Saxon, which followed the Norman conquest, that they occur to any extent in writing. Celtic.—The native inhabitants found by the Teutonic invaders in the part of Britain they overran belonged to the Cymric branch of the Celtic stock. As the conquest was the work of several hundred years, it might be supposed that the vocabulary of each people would have received large accessions from that of the other; but such was not the case. Very few Celtic terms are found in Anglo-Saxon literature; and not many, indeed, appear to have made their way into written E...« less