Today, I’m happy to host Vyas Muralidharan, who I met through WordPress’s Blogging 201 challenge back in April.  A member of the Literature Blogging Buddy Circle and the Writer’s Guild: By LBSquared, he sent me a post on the history of English that I found quite intriguing.  I hope you’ll enjoy it!

I’m not going to bother introducing myself.  I live where there are mountains, I like to write, and you should go visit my site.  Now, to the topic at hand: English, the dialect of the Anglo people, and what some Republicans call the most American language.  (Actually, that would probably be Inuktitut, but whatever.)

The history of this great language begins at the fall of the Roman Empire (or at least, the end of the Roman presence in Britannia), when they left behind all their roads, but not much of their Latin language.  In 450 AD, the Germanic tribes of Angles and the Saxons (who became Anglo-Saxons) arrived in Britannia.  Anglo-Saxons spoke what we know as Old English.

Anglo-Saxon was a Germanic language from the Indo-European family, meaning it can trace its roots back to Sanskrit and Greek.  When the Romans left, they didn’t leave much of their language.  Old English to the rescue!  It had words that we still use today.   But don’t let that fool you.  The common people of today wouldn’t be able to decipher the language.  This is what Old English looked like: