ABSTRACT
The West Germanic branch of Indo-European, to which English belongs, also includes Low G erm an, Dutch, and Frisian. English itself derives from three Low Germ an dialects spoken by the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who came from D enm ark, and North Germany to settle in England from the middle of the fifth century onwards. These dialects are m arked by retention of the unvoiced stops /p, t, k/, which were m utated to the corresponding fricatives /f, 0, x/, in High G erm an, and of the voiced stops /b, d, g/, which were likewise mutated to /p, t, k/. See German: Second Sound Shift. These mutations may be illustrated by such equations as:
Low German High German dor door Tur pad path Pfad skip ship Schiff heit hot heiss
Four main dialects took shape in Englaland, the lan d of the Angles’:
1. West Saxon: spoken in the kingdom of Wessex and other parts of the south; 2. Kentish: the language of the Jutes in what is now Kent; 3. Mercian: spoken by the Angles in East Anglia and Humberside; 4. N orthum brian: the dialects of the Angles in north-east England and south
east Scotland.
