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English is a West Germanic language that originated from Ingvaeonic languages brought to Britain in the mid-5th to 7th centuries AD by Anglo-Saxon migrants from what is now northwest Germany, southern Denmark and the Netherlands.
The English language descends from Old English, the West Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons. Most of its grammar, its core vocabulary and the most common words are Germanic. [1] However, the percentage of loans in everyday conversation varies by dialect and idiolect, even if English vocabulary at large has a greater Romance influence.
Raymond Kevin Hickey (born 3 June 1954) is an Irish linguist specialising in the English language in Ireland, especially in the capital Dublin, working within the sociolinguistic paradigm of language variation and change. Hickey has also worked on the Irish language, specifically the phonology of the modern language.
The largest North Germanic languages are Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian, which are in part mutually intelligible and have a combined total of about 20 million native speakers in the Nordic countries and an additional five million second language speakers; since the Middle Ages, however, these languages have been strongly influenced by Middle ...
Old English is essentially a distinct language from Modern English and is virtually impossible for 21st-century unstudied English-speakers to understand. Its grammar was similar to that of modern German: nouns, adjectives, pronouns, and verbs had many more inflectional endings and forms , and word order was much freer than in Modern English.
In this reading, the rapid changes undergone by Irish around the fifth to sixth centuries also reflected the adoption of the language by speakers of Ireland's former language (which is known to have given Irish some loan-words but is otherwise now lost). Chapter 3, 'The Origin of High German', focuses on the High German consonant shift.
Over enough time, changes in a language can accumulate to such an extent that it is no longer recognizable as the same language. For instance, modern English is the result of centuries of language change applying to Old English, even though modern English is extremely divergent from Old English in grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation. The two ...
The earliest history of Old English lexicography lies in the Anglo-Saxon period itself, when English-speaking scholars created English glosses on Latin texts. At first, these were often marginal or interlinear glosses; however, they soon came to be gathered into word-lists such as the Épinal-Erfurt , Leiden and Corpus Glossaries.