In 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. Occasional 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 German Department at Kiel University, the language is "very close to the way people spoke in Britain more than 1,000 years ago." {Quoted in The Independent, July 6, 1987.} 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 1,500 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.
( Bill Bryson )
[ The Mother Tongue: English and ]
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