ABSTRACT
We have now reached a point at which the designation English can be used of the language we are studying only in the rather forced sense that some of the speakers of it were Angles. The story cannot be dropped abruptly, since there was no sudden shift in the habits of speakers; nor can it be traced in the detail appropriate for English proper. Very briefly we must survey three antecedent phases of development: the WG which lies behind Anglo-Frisian, the CG lying behind that, and the IE family, which is the furthest we can trace any relative of English. To do this, we change our pace from even steps of two hundred years, to one of about a thousand followed by one of perhaps two thousand. The truth is that we are going more and more into realms of relative rather than absolute chronology, and the time-scale becomes not only larger but a great deal vaguer than it was before.
