The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson Read Free Book Online Page B

Their works would be as little known to us as those of the poets of Iceland or Norway, and that would be a tragedy indeed. No country has given the world more incompara-ble literature per head of population than Ireland, and for that reason alone we might be excused a small, selfish celebration that English was the language of her greatest writers.

    4.
    THE IFS ST
    I D'
    THOUSAND YEA S
    I N THE COUNTRY INNS OF A SMALL
    corner of northern Germany, in the spur of land connecting Schleswig-Holstein to Denmark, you can sometimes hear people talking in what sounds eerily like a lost dialect of English. Occa-sional snatches of it even make sense, as when they say that the
    "veather ist cold" or inquire of the time by asking, "What ist de clock?" According to Professor Hubertus Menke, head of the Ger-man Department at Kiel University, the language is "very close to the way people spoke in Britain more than i,000 years ago."
    [ Quoted in The Independent, July 6, 1g87.1 This shouldn't entirely surprise us. This area of Germany, called Angeln, was once the seat of the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that 1,5oo years ago crossed the North Sea to Britain, where they displaced the native Celts and gave the world what would one day become its most prominent language.
    Not far away, in the marshy headlands of northern Holland and western Germany, and on the long chain of wind-battered islands strung out along their coasts, lives a group of people whose dialect is even more closely related to English. These are the 300,000
    Frisians, whose Germanic tongue has been so little altered by time that many of them can, according to the linguistic historian Charl-ton Laird, still read the medieval epic Beowulf "almost at sight."
    They also share many striking similarities of vocabulary: The Fri-sian for boat is boat (as compared to the Dutch and German boot), rain is rein ( German and Dutch regen), and goose is goes ( Dutch and German gans).
    In about A.D. 450, following the withdrawal of Roman troops THE FIRST THOUSAND YEARS
    from Britain, these two groups of people and two other related groups from the same corner of northern Europe, the Saxons and Jutes, began a long exodus to Britain. It was not so much an inva-sion as a series of opportunistic encroachments taking place over several generations. The tribes settled in different parts of Britain, each bringing its own variations in speech, some of which persist in Britain to this day—and may even have been carried onward to America centuries later. The broad a of New England, for instance, may arise from the fact that the first pilgrims were from the old Anglian strongholds of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, while the pro-nounced r of the mid-Atlantic states could be a lingering conse-quence of the Saxon domination of the Midlands and North. In any case, once in Britain, the tribes variously merged and subdivided until they had established seven small kingdoms and dominated most of the island, except for Wales, Scotland, and Cornwall, which remained Celtic strongholds.
    That is about as much as we know—and much of that is suppo-sition. We don't know exactly when or where the invasion began or how many people were involved. We don't know why the invaders gave up secure homes to chance their luck in hostile territory.
    Above all, we are not sure how well—or even if—the conquering tribes could understand each other. What is known is that although the Saxons continued to flourish on the continent, the Angles and Jutes are heard of there no more. They simply disappeared...al though the Saxons were the dominant group, the new nation grad-ually came to be known as En • land and its language as English, after the rather more obscure Angles. Again, no one knows quite why this should be.
    The early Anglo-Saxons left no account of these events for the simple reason that they were, to use the modern phrase, function-ally illiterate. They possessed a runic alphabet, which theyused to scratch