The English Language: A Historical Outline.

Lingua Anglosaxonica The Birth of English In the fifth and sixth centuries three Germanic peoples-the jutes, the Angles and the Saxons- invaded England. They spoke dialects so nearly similar that they could understand each other. Those peoples of Britain formed an ethnic whole, and were named Saxons. However, they were sometimes called Angles At the end of the sixth century, Pope Gregory 1 uses only the name Angli. The Roman missionaries used Gregory's term, Angli. It …

…Words taken from French often kept their original plurals in "-es". Such changes spread from the northern to the midland dialect. In the southern dialects, the history of the noun inflections was quite different. The nominative singular of the nouns ended in -e and the nominative plural ended in - en, e.g.: Name, namen Tunge(tongue), tungen (in Old English name, naman, tunge,tungan) Southern English did not use the -es genitives, or plurals.