In a book I still find marvellous, Our Marvelous Native Tongue, The life and times of the English language, Robert Claiborne wrote about the great, successive waves of migrant peoples, beginning 8,000 years ago, over the face of Asia, North Africa, and Europe. They moved by generations, labouring and loving, warring and fighting, singing and slaughtering, farming and hunting, starving and feasting and farting around the campfire.

As they went, they created the rich and exasperating languages we speak here in this room. In making that introductory statement, I have easily drawn on a dozen root words that go back those 8,000 years to a common Indo-European source. Our common language, says Claiborne, still includes "fire" and "fart."

And fight. Starve. Slaughter. Feast. Sing. Love. Child. Kind. Kindred.

The literacy of Western Europe, as in most ancient societies, evolved along class lines. In medieval India, only the Brahmin could read the sacred Veda.⁽¹⁾

In medieval Europe, Latin was the language of literacy. It was owned and operated by the Church through the good offices of the clerical scribes who wrote edicts and proclamations for their mainly illiterate masters -- the ruling warlords of the day.

The warlords of Normandy and Brittany who conquered the island to their west in 1066, were the great-grandchildren of Norse raiders from Scandinavia who had been pillaging and settling the coastal regions of France for a couple of centuries. Their "vulgate" had by now assimilated the campfire Latin of the Roman invasions. Old French richly and easily mingled with Old Norse and the Germanic vocabulary of the tribes of northwest Europe, who had settled in southern Britain earlier.