Gee, for a guy who has spent his entire adult life working with written English, I didn’t know doodly-squat — I checked; it’s a word — about the language’s origins. According to the third module of my TEFLOnline course, English is derived from the Germanic languages. Around 500 A.D., West Germanic invaders began coming to Britain from Jutland, southern Denmark and western, present-day Netherlands. (I knew it. Everything can be traced back to the Netherlands. It’s like Kevin Bacon.)
Anyway, the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians all spoke what came to be known as Anglo-Saxon, or Old English. (The Beatles, of course, later paid tribute to one of those groups with the song, “Hey, Jute.”)
In fact, Old English is similar to modern Frisian, still spoken by approximately 400,000 people in western areas of Holland, according to TEFLOnline’s “A brief history of the English language.” Even today, Frisian is the Germanic language most closely related to English.
Postscript: China is letting me in to the country. FedEx delivered my passport with the F visa stamp from the Chinese embassy. The die is cast.
The China Rog-ect 