The English language and English grammar Author:Samuel Ramsey 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 II. THE SOURCES OF ENGLISH. The groundwork of English is the language of those Teutonic tribes who, in the fifth and sixth centuries, overran a great... more » part of Britain. From the dreary sandflats and fens of Sleswick, Holstein, and Friesland, poured in succession the Jutes, the Angles, and the Saxons. The first established themselves in the fertile fields of Kent, where their memory perished ; the second possessed the North and East, and gave their name to all England—the land of the Angles; the last founded the kingdoms of Essex, Wessex, and Sussex—the East, West, and South Saxons. There were doubtless differences of speech among them, which will account in part for the variant dialects heard among the rural population of England. There are slight indications that the speech of the Angles was a little more like modern English than was that of the Saxons ; and the Kentish tongue sounded harsh and strange to Caxton after nearly a thousand years. As the invasion involved the ; almost total extinction or expulsion of the earlier inhabi- i tants from the districts occupied, but few British or Romany/ words were adopted by the conquerors. A few great Roman works for which the strangers had no names, caused the retention of such words as street, port, chester, wall, and mile; the few British women reserved as household drudges taught their captors their homely names for crock and for maggot and spigot, for clout and cradle and bogle. Upor this foundation of Anglo-Saxon there was first laid a thin stratum of Latin by the Christian missionaries of the seventh V century,—words connected chiefly with religion and morals./Next followed the inroads and conquests of the Northmen and Danes, begun in the eighth century, and continued till within twenty-four years of the Norman Conquest....« less