People often complain about English and its quirks , with different spelling and meaning of same sounding words, different meanins of same spelt words, and why so many silent letters . To understand these peculiarities you need to understand the how the British isles history and invasions shaped its culture including language. Its bsically a mix of proportions of Germanic , Latin and Fench.
Long before English became the language we recognize today, the British Isles were shaped by multiple linguistic influences.
For the short answer watch The entire history of the English in 22 min
1. Proto-Indo-European Roots
It’s thought that a proto-Indo-European language existed thousands of years ago in Eurasia, forming the ancestor of many European and South Asian languages, including the Germanic and Celtic languages that influenced early English. That the Germanic language travelled west from Ukraine Romanian area, that proto Indo European is thought to have come from.
Tracing English as far back as possible
2. British isles initially spoke Celtic
Britians Celtic language explained
During the Roman occupation (43–410 CE) of Britain , Latin was introduced, leaving traces in inscriptions, place names, and early religious texts.
But those of British Isles still spoke celtic native language derived from some form of indo-european language of proto european language
After the Romans withdrew, in the 5th century CE, The people still spoke their native celtic language.
3. Old English
Is not english as we know it. Germanic tribes—the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes—migrated from regions that are now northern Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands. They brought their west Germanic dialects, which formed the foundation of Old English (c. 450–1150 CE), and used runes, a Germanic writing system, to record their language in inscriptions and short texts. Unlike Latin, runes were a script rather than a language—they represented sounds but did not shape grammar or vocabulary.
Why we should bring back writing in runes
Latin words influence west Germanic Latin you still use Germanic based languages ie Old English
The very name England is variation of Angle-land
Is English really a Germanic language?
4. Where was latin introduced if not from Romans?
However it was around 700 ad that christian missionary's brought classic church latin to Britain and thus changed the written language from runes to the Roman/Latin alphabet letters we use today.
5. Viking influence
Soon after Old English,was influenced by latin .it later absorbed vocabulary and simplified grammatical forms from Norse-speaking Vikings (c. 8th–11th centuries CE), who settled in northern and eastern England. WEnglish, Old Norse contributed hundreds of words; since Old Norse was a Northern Germanic language variant, these words are part of the broader Germanic layer that still makes up the core of English
Another major turning point came with the Norman Conquest of 1066, of William the Conqueror and the Normans from Normandy became the ruling class, introducing French into England. Ironically the Normans were Frenchmen descended form Norman vikings settling there. French dominated law, government, and culture for centuries, while English remained the language of the common people. The blending of Old English with Norse and French influences produced Middle English (c. 1150–1500 CE), setting the stage for the evolution into modern English.
Addendum
Why English has same words with different or contradictory meanings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wopcJoJIoJE
Why english has so many silent letters,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXVqZpHY5R8&t=881s
English names
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIMGph7xkDA
The interesting thing about the Romans, Latin and Romania
The Latins were an actual Italic tribe in central Italy who spoke early Latin and lived in a region called Latium (roughly modern Lazio) from about 1000 BC onward, forming the core of what later became the Roman population. By 500 BC the city of Rome was inhabited mainly by people of Latin tribal descent, living in the region of Latium and speaking early Latin, even though the population already included significant elements of Sabines and, later on, Etruscans, so that early Rome was ethnically mixed but still firmly rooted in the Latin world. The Romans then spent the next two centuries gradually conquering the rest of the Italian peninsula, and by the time they defeated Hannibal in the Second Punic War (around 201 BC), Rome effectively controlled the entire modern Italian peninsula as far south as Sicily and up to the Apennines, with the core “Italian” land mass fully under Roman dominance, calling this heartland Italia.
The term Romania, the idea of a “land of the Romans,” was later used in Greek and Byzantine times to describe the eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, not the Italian peninsula. When modern nation‑states formed in the 19th century, the Romance‑speaking population north of the Danube chose România as their national label to emphasize their descent from Roman colonists and Latin‑speaking heritage, even though the Romans themselves had never called that area “Romania.” The modern Italian state derived its name from the historical Italia.
Vulgar Latin was the everyday spoken Latin of ordinary Romans across the Western Empire, roughly 1st–6th centuries; it varied regionally and slowly evolved into the Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian, Romanian, etc.). In Britain, there was a local “British Vulgar Latin,” but it mostly died out as a spoken language by the 6th–7th centuries as Old English spread.
The Latin that Christian missionaries brought to England in the 8th century was an older, more “classic‑style” ecclesiastical Latin used for liturgy, scripture, and scholarship, not the same as the late‑Roman street speech that had already faded hundreds of years earlier.
Vulgar Latin was the evolving popular speech that became the Romance languages, while the Latin brought to England later was a frozen, written, church‑Latin sort of Latin, used mainly for books and sermons rather than as anyone’s mother tongue.
The word vulgar started as simply “belonging to the common people” (from Latin vulgus = “the crowd”) and was used in English from the 14th century onward for “ordinary, common, popular.” Over time, elites began to associate “common” with “unrefined, low‑class, uncouth,” so by the mid‑17th century vulgar acquired the sense of crass, crude, or lacking taste—especially when judging manners, speech, or behaviour. That’s why “vulgar Latin” sounds jarring today: it really just means “Latin of the people,” but the later, negative sense of vulgar has completely overshadowed the original neutral meaning.
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