Origin and position of English - статья на английском языке

The English language of today is the language which has resulted from the fusion of the dialects spoken by the Germanic tribes who came to England. <...> The traditional account of the Germanic invasions goes back to Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in 731, tells us that the Germanic tribes which conquered England were the Jutes, Saxons and Angles. From what he says and from other indications, it seems altogether most likely that the Jutes and the Angles had their home in the Danish peninsula, the Jutes in the northern half (hence the name Jutland) and the Angles in the south, in Schleswig-Holstein, and perhaps a small area at the base. The Saxons were settled to the south and west of the Angles, roughly between the Elbe and the Ems, possibly as far as the Rhine. A fourth tribe, the Frisians, some of whom almost certainly came to England, occupied a narrow strip along the coast from the Weser to the Rhine together with the islands opposite. <...>
It is impossible to say how much the speech of the Angles differed from that of the Saxons or that of the Jutes. The differences were certainly slight. Even after these dialects had been subjected to several centuries of geographical and political separation in England, the differences were no great. <...> English belongs to the Low West Germanic branch of the Indo-European family. This means in the first place that it shares certain characteristics common to all the Germanic languages. For example, it shows the shifting of certain consonants ... It possesses a „weak" as well as a "strong" declension of the adjective and a distinctive type of conjugation of the verb — the so-called weak or regular verbs such as fill, filled, filled, which form their past tense and past participle by adding -ed or some analogous sound to the stem of the present. And it shows the adoption of a strong stress accent on the first or the root syllable of most words, a feature of great importance in all the Germanic languages, since it is chiefly responsible for the progressive decay of inflections in these languages. In the second place it means that English belongs with German and certain other languages because of features which it has in common with them and which enable us to distinguish a West Germanic group as contrasted with the Scandinavian languages (North Germanic) and Gothic (East Germanic). These features have to do mostly with certain phonetic changes, especially the gemination or doubling of consonants under special conditions, matters which we do not need to enter upon here. And it means, finally, that English, along with the other languages of northern Germany and the Low Countries, did not participate in the further modification of certain consonants, known as the Second or High German Sound-Shift. (The effect of this shifting may be seen by comparing the English and the German words in the following pairs: English open— German offen; English water — German wasser; English pound — German pfund; English tongue — German zunge.) In other words it belongs with the dialects of the lowlands in the West Germanic area.
<...> The period from 450 to 1150 is known as Old English. It is sometimes described as the period of full inflections, since during most of this period the endings of the noun, the adjective, and the verb are preserved more or less unimpaired. From 1150 to 1500 the language is known as Middle English. During this period the inflections, which had begun to break down towards the end of the Old English period, become greatly reduced, and it is consequently known as the period of leveled inflections. The language since 1500 is called Modern English. By the time we reach this stage in the development a large part of the original inflectional system has disappeared entirely and we therefore speak of it as the period of lost inflections. The progressive decay of inflections is only one of the developments which mark the evolution of English in its various stages.
(From "A History of the English Language" by Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable)