Druk een for Englisc

Have you ever wondered what the world would be like today if the Saxon shield wall had held that October 14, 1066 and William the Conqueror had lost the Battle of Hastings? Probably not, but I ponder such things. Sometimes I even sit on rocks, when they have been warmed by the sun and something will come to mind that makes me think, “Ain’t that odd?”
The Saxons, who inhabited the south of old England, spoke Old English, a Germanic language not unlike the German spoken at the time, and akin to Dutch. To the north in an area referred to as the “Danelaw,” recent conquerors and settlers spoke an old Scandinavian dialect, which stemmed from old Danish and Norwegian. The Normans spoke an archaic form of French.
So, if William had packed up his surviving troops and sailed back to Normandy, what would the world look like to us now? In all probability, I think, Saxon and Danish would have blended into a language less inflected than Saxon, maintaining vocabulary from each. “Inflection,” for those whose language education didn’t get passed diagramming sentences, means simply that as a word changes its meaning in a sentence, the word or the article in front of it changes.
Latin is an example of a heavily inflected language. For example, the word agricola, or farmer (our word “agriculture” is a derivative of it.) changes as it is used. Agricola non est nauta means “the farmer is not a sailor,” with farmer being the subject of the sentence. Agricolam video, is “I see the farmer. In this case farmer is the direct object of the sentence. Remember that from 9th grade?
Anyway, so we would be speaking a decidedly different language with a Scandinavian or Germanic flair to it, but what about our history? Certainly there would have been different rulers over the course of English history, and their personalities and policies would have colored and shaped what happened to a point. However, England, because it is insular, would still have developed into a sea power, and still would have been predominant in the history of North America. Would the 13 colonies have eventually seceded through violent revolution or quietly evolved into an independent nation such as our good neighbor to the north? I haven’t really pondered that, and the rocks are still too cold to sit on.
What I do know is, if you called the phone company, a utility or some other commercial entity to whom, “your call is very important,” the first option on the answering machine would probably sound something like, “Druk een for Englisc.”