Germanic in England

A. Proto-Germanic split into three branches, and some of the peoples who spoke the western one settled in England. (Their relatives today in the Netherlands speak Frisian and Dutch.) The language they developed, Anglo-Saxon or Old English, was one much like German.

B. But it did not stay this way. Part of the reason was the massive influx of borrowed words. But English also changed its grammar considerably. Today, English is not only the one Germanic language that has lost all gender marking but also the only Indo-European language of all Europe without it. English is the only Germanic language without the inherent reflexives: in German, one remembers oneself, one hurries oneself, but in English, one simply remembers and hurries. I noted that English no longer makes any distinction between here and hither, where and whither, and so on. However, all of the other Germanic languages do. There are many other cases like this in English.

C. English is, in this sense, somewhat simpler than German, Dutch, Swedish, and its other sister languages. English was learned as a second language more than as a first, then passed down in this fashion. Specifically, it was likely in the northern half of England after the Viking invasions at the end of the 8th century that English was streamlined in this way.

What is English? English, then, is a descendant of Proto-Indo-European that, along the way toward its emergence, lost most of its case endings and a third of its vocabulary. It replaced that vocabulary with words from a language possibly related to Arabic and Hebrew, then supplemented this with words from, most copiously, Old Norse, Norman French, Dutch, Latin, and Greek. Meanwhile, it was learned so much as a second language by Vikings that its grammar was restrained somewhat from the overgrowth typical of languages that develop uninterrupted. A lot can happen to a language in 4,500 years!