Thersites said:
Old English (Beowolf is the best known writing in it) is probably descended from early Frisian, a German dialect.
The original Germanic (or Teutonic) tribes migrated up into Scandinavia from the Indo-European homeland somewhere around Georgia or eastern Anatolia, probably around 2000-1500 BC. The Celts were the first Indo-Europeans to colonize the mainland. The Greeks and Romans followed, and established civilizations while the Celts and Norsemen remained in the pre-civilized early Neolithic phase of their development. In the last few centuries BC, the Germanic people began migrating into the northern European mainland through the peninsula of Denmark. By the Imperial Roman Era, they had taken over all of the northern mainland, from what is now Holland and northern France over to somewhere around what is now Bohemia (or the Czech Republic as we all insist on calling it).
The Romans sent out legions of warriors to occupy every place they could. They never conquered the heartland of the Germanic tribes, but they got France, Iberia, the British Isles, not to mention Romania, Greece and... well you all know the extent of the Roman Empire at its peak.
Old English used to be called "Anglo-Saxon" because it was the language of the Angles and Saxons. When the Roman Empire started to break down, they abandoned some of their most distant colonies first. Britannia, which at the time was inhabited by the Britons, a Celtic people closely related to the Scots and Irish, was a prosperous, civilized place just aching to be overrun by barbarians when the Roman legions departed. The Germanic tribes of northeastern Europe were happy to oblige; the same peoples who eventually overran Rome itself. The Angles and the Saxons were the two Germanic tribes who sailed to Britannia. Unlike the Romans, they did not occupy it as rulers. They drove the Britons out of their own country and turned Britannia into "Angle Land." The original Celtic Britons survive only in Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany, a little colony they founded after sailing to what is now France.
The languages of the Germanic tribes are difficult to categorize. The usual criterion as to whether two tongues are languages or dialects is whether they are mutually comprehensible. Each Germanic tribe could understand the ones on its perimeter, but not the ones at the other end of the continent. It was more a continual spectrum of diverging dialects rather than pockets of distinct languages.
The Romans did not take an interest in studying the speech of their uncivilized neighbors (a more precise term than "barbarian," since "uncivilized" literally means "not yet having built cities," a truthful description of the various Germanic peoples at the time), so we have few records of the various German tongues. Etymologies in dictionaries refer to Anglo-Saxon simply as generic "Old High German."
So Old English is basically just a dialect of the same Old High German that the people were speaking in what is now Germany and Austria. It's easy to see the relationship. We have many of the same "strong" verbs: sing, sang, sung vs. German singen, sang, gesungen; the same umlauted plurals: mouse, mice vs. German maus, mäuse; even vestiges of the same way of counting: four-and-twenty (blackbirds) vs. German vier und zwanzig.
Modern Frisian is indeed generally cited as the language most closely related to English. But I have never seen it postulated that Old Frisian was the ancestor of English. Rather that the Frisians are descendants of people who were very closely related to the Angles and the Saxons. I.e., Old Frisian was a close relative of Old English, but it was not Old English.
It's difficult to chart the gradations of the Germanic tongues that would tell us the relationship between the Frisians (who inhabit a tiny area in the northern part of tiny Holland) and the Saxons (who presumably came from the German province of Saxony). The problem is that the Germanic tribes who lived between them were the Franks, who were conquered by the Romans. Unlike the Britons, the Romans did not leave them with their language, but ended up making Latin-speakers out of them. So we've lost the history of the German dialects of the Franks.
Yet modern French contains quite a few tantalizing remnants that leave no doubt about the Germanic origin of its speakers. It is the only Romance language that has the umlauted vowels common to most of the Teutonic languages: coeur, plume. It retains German's preference for the present perfect over the preterite: j'ai attende instead of j'attendais, German ich habe gewartet instead of ich wartete, whereas in English we are equally happy saying I waited instead of I have waited. And it has the guttural sounding glottal R of almost all Teutonic languages, instead of the trilled Latin R of all other Romance languages except (Brazilian) Portuguese. Interestingly, the people of south France, who are descended from the Gauls, a Celtic tribe, trill their R's like their Welsh, Cornish, Scottish, and Irish relatives.
The decisive thing was the Norman conquest, which meant that the rulers of England were Old French-speaking.
Indeed! Any relationship between English and the other Teutonic languages is difficult for a non-scholar to recognize because of the massive absorption of French vocabulary. Even everyday bread-and-butter words like "very" and "question" are French. An educated European who was not at all familiar with English (admittedly an unlikely straw man) would look at a page of written English and say it looks like a dialect of French.
The direct introduction of Latin words in the 16th and 17th century as the language of learning became English not Latin.
Yes, as if it were not already difficult to recognize English as a Teutonic language, we absorbed even more Latin words directly from Latin, bypassing the French middleman. It's interesting that even though there was an overlap of the Roman and Anglo-Saxon occupation of Britannia, virtually no Latin words were adopted into Old English. There were plenty adopted by the original Briton inhabitants, however. Modern Welsh, the descendant of the original Celtic "British" language, is full of Latin borrowings.
