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London, Dover and Thames but also brock for badger.
Some 200 Latin words that the Celts had adopted from
the Roman invaders when they had occupied the
islands for the four centuries up to 410 AD made it
into the new Anglo-Saxon mix, among them wine,
cat, kettle, candle, anchor, street and rose.
Many more Latin words would arrive with Christian
missionaries from the 6th century onwards, words like
angel, mass and bishop. A little bit of Greek arrived
with these early Christians too: alms, psalms, pope and
school. In turn the Christians adopted a few Pagan
Celtic words, the Pagan goddess
Eostre
unwittingly
lent her name to the most important of the new
Christian festivals. But nearly all of the 100 most
common words in our vocabularly come from the
Old English that arrived with the Germanic tribes –
the few others in the top 100 are three from Norse
(they, their and them) and a handful of French words
like number.
Where The Vowels & The Cows Come From
Trying to divine how people sounded is much trickier
but there are clues. Old English had no silent letters –
the language was written down as it was pronounced.
At one time we said
g-nat, K-nee
and sounded very
Germanic saying every bit of night and right. The
Anglo-Saxon word
hlaf
later became loaf when we
stopped pronouncing the
h
. We’ve done away with a
fair number of those sounds that we associate today
with the German or Dutch language but kept the
spelling just to make it devilish hard to learn. The
other big thing that changed is that the long
ah
vowel
sound we’d associate now with the Scandinavians
gradually changed into the
oh
vowel sound.
What It Says On The Tin
The surviving languages in the Germanic branch of
the Indo-European family originate from Old Norse
and Saxon and include English, Dutch, German
and Friesian. All languages change over time with
isolated communities changing the least. English has
probably changed more than any other European
language over the past 1000 years – certainly no
other European language has a vocabulary as mixed
as English. Icelandic and Lithuanian have changed
the least.
In the Castle Museum in Norwich scratched onto
the ankle bone of a roe deer more than 1500 years
ago is the earliest word we have, thus far, found
written down in Britain (above). It’s the runic word
raihan
and the best educated guess of archaeologists
is that it means – roe deer. Naming things in this
simple, obvious way was quite a common thing to
do - on the side of an 8th century casket made of
whale bone in the British Museum there’s a runic
inscription that says:
whale bone
. The Anglo Saxons
were a no nonsense sort of people. Each of the
invading Germanic tribes, Saxons, Jutes and Angles
used runes, the Latin alphabet arrived later with the
Christian missionaries.
The West Germanic tribes after 1000 years of roving
had colonised the lowlands of Northern Europe from
where they first raided the English coast in the 5th
century. They brought our language with them.
The invading Germanic tribes pushed the Celts (or
Britons) and the Celtic language to the western
edges of the island. No more than a couple of dozen
Celtic words survived, most of them place names: