A New Perspective on the Story of English

The preceding subjects allow us to see the history of English in a new light. English is, basically, one of today’s branches of Proto-Indo-European. The Germanic family that English belongs to was distinguished by odd consonant changes, changes in stress that encouraged endings to wear off, and possibly, an ancient encounter with a Semitic language, leaving words that do not trace to Indo-European at all. Then the branch of Germanic that the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes brought to England came to be learned as much by Viking invaders as by natives, which streamlined English into the one Germanic language without such distinctions as here and hither and the one Indo-European language of Europe with no gender markers.