A Comm for Historymemes

Romans came in the 1st century. Angles, etc, started coming over in the 4th century, but were only really successful after the Romans left about the middle of the 5th century.

Ah, but the Norse didn't come until the 9th century, fixed that.

I mean, I was messing around a bit to make it more fun, but yeah, you start with the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and a few Frisians invading and having to come to a sort of mutually intelligible Germanic dialect (to the extent they even did), adding some Celtic place names and lingering Roman verbiage and practices, though I guess they would have been dealing with the latter all along. There will be Scandinavian injections from subsequent raiders, especially in the North and East.

Then 1066 comes and the Normans, speaking Viking French invade and displace English as the language of court and bring in thousands of words that rework the vocabulary extensively, especially for uses that reveal the social divide (e.g. "cow" for the animal, "beef" for the food made from it). English survives but has several centuries with no one in power giving a single shit about how it changes.

Then the scholastic era begins and gives birth the Renaissance, and the printing press makes an appearance, so you've got increased literacy in Latin mostly in the early going, and the types of knowledge that are coming in often have no direct cognates in English, so English being English (and not French, LOL), they just say "fuck it, you're an English word too, now." Many of them die off or get relegated to narrow fields where the specificity remains valuable, but many stick around to offer polysyllabic nuance to English, especially among the literate class who will necessarily dominate what comes down to us in writing. This is also the gang that decided that if a rule of grammar works in Latin, it should in English, leading to idiocies like "don't split your infinitives." Why the fuck not, Clarence or Godfrey or whoever? The infinitive is already two different words, Godfrey, and it is exceedingly easy to carefully split it and preserve or even increase the effectiveness of the communication. Fuck you, Godfrey. 😂

The Great Vowel shift occurs over this period as well, for unknown reasons (some have hypothesized it was simply younger generations wanting to distinguish themselves from elders and newcomers to London), and unfortunately just at the time when people decided the spelling should become more consistent, so while most English words have some reason for being spelled how they are, you often have to do some historical spelunking to figure out what those reasons are, and it's only marginally helpful to know that rough and through used to rhyme.

Finally, as English becomes a language of colonization and empire, influences come from everywhere, and the general trend of adopting new items and new ideas with something like their original "foreign" term continues at an accelerated pace. Even as the one empire faded, a new English-speaking hegemon was emerging, one who if anything was somehow even less concerned about linguistic purity.