The Normans who conquered England were Norsemen by blood and there could be reasonable expectation that the languages would mesh. But by the time their ships landed at the old Saxon shore of Pevensey — the precise spot where Frisians had landed in 491 — the language they spoke was a variety of French. The Darwinian properties had worked their evolutionary ways on the human tongue and French had swallowed up their Old Norse. Its roots now were not in the Germanic languages which had come to England, but in Latin. It is fascinating that the Norsemen’s language was all but completely wiped out in
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