The Romans left the Britains to defend their empire

When the Romans withdrew from Britain, drawn home by domestic disaster in about 450 A.D., the Celts renewed their strife. The King of Kent, Wytgoern, invited the Saxons from the continent, to aid him in the battle against the Picts and Scots.

The Saxons, Angles, Jutes, and Frisians eagerly responded; and by the sixth century they had imposed their rule and their language upon Britain.

The newcomers, who gave England its name, "Angleland", gave the language not only their vocabulary, but also its framework. Most of English prepositions, pronouns, and conjunctions are from the Low German which these people took to Britain.

Although in our current English dictionaries some three-fifths of the words are of Greek, Latin, and Romance origin, in our actual speech more than half the words in Modern English are from the Old English.

Some Saxon words were already, on the Continent, borrowed from Roman soldiers and traders: inch, mile, pound, street, wall, table, mule, chest, pillow, and wine; while the words love, come, live, eat, and speak come from native Saxon origins.

Additional influences on the English language

In the sixth century, a young priest, Gregory, was impressed by the spectacle of fair-haired and fair-skinned slaves in the Roman Forum.

When told who the slaves were, he responded: "They are not Angles, but angels." In 597, now Pope Gregory, he sent forty missionaries to Britain, led by Augustine.

They found the Frankish Queen Bertha, wife of King Ethelbert of Kent, already Christian, and happy to welcome them. Within a century, England was a Christian land.

There was a temporary revival of the English culture in the late ninth century, under King Alfred. He encouraged translations, in which many of the foreign terms were Anglicized: exodus was rendered as outfaring, discipulus became learning-boy.

Alfred established the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was continued by others until 1154.

In 1016, the Danish King Knut (Cnut or Canute), came to power. He was a temperate monarch, who rebuked the folly of his over adulate (obsequious flatters) courtiers by demonstrating that the tide would not turn at this bidding.

In Knut's time, more Teutonic words were integrated into the English language.

After the Battle of Hastings, in 1066, William the Conqueror imposed Norman rule upon England

William was of Viking ancestry, but his forefathers had spent 150 years in Normandy, and their language was Vulgar Latin, the speech of the Roman soldiers and traders, corrupted into Norman French.

William wiped out the Saxon nobility, supplanting them with his own followers, whose names are recorded in his census, the Domesday Book.

The ascendancy of the French-speaking Normans over the English-speaking Saxons thrust two languages into opposition in the land.

The servants, adjusting themselves as best as they could, did not use many of the endings of the new Norman words; therefore, in the course of the next centuries, the fusing language lost many of its inflections (patterns of stress and intonation in a language).

For almost four hundred years, French was the language of the rulers, at the royal court; not until 1362 was English made the language of the law courts.

In church, and at Oxford University, one used either Latin or French. In these centuries, almost three-quarters of the Saxon words died; but enough remained to keep the basic form, the "feel" of the language, Saxon, while enriching it with the new host of Norman terms.

The many enforced mixtures, from Celtic times on, also made the language amenable to borrowing; while, the French, for example, even today resent the intrusion of foreign terms, and strive to keep their language "pure", free from "contamination" by what they scornfully call Franglais, English continuously welcomes new terms from other tongues, and even builds upon them.

As a result of such language borrowings, English has enriched itself with words from all around the world, more than any other tongue. It has the largest vocabulary of any other language and it is capable of an infinite variety of words.