So now they have made our English tongue a gallimaufry or hodgepodge of all other speeches, wrote poet Edmund Spenser in 1579.
All languages go through changes.
If they didn t, then we would all be speaking some pre- Tower of Babel language. Instead, we have words with shifting meanings and sounds, syntactic changes, loan words from other languages, dialects, and even language death. Early Germanic warriors and settlers came to England in the fifth century from around where Denmark and the Netherlands are today. They brought with them a language that already had a few loan words from Latin and Greek, like cheese and wine. Their language began to slowly develop on its own, separate from the original continental Germanic.