§ 68. The bulk of the verbs in pg and in the og languages fall into two large groups called strong and weak.

The terms strong and weak were proposed by J. Grimm; he called the verbs strong because they had preserved the richness of form since the age of the parent-language and in this sense could be contrasted to weak verbs lacking such variety of form. From the verbs the terms were extended to noun and adjective declensions. The main difference between these groups lies in the means of building the principal forms: the Pres­ent tense, the Past tense and Participle II. The strong verbs built their principal forms with the help of root vowel interchanges plus certain grammatical endings; they made use of IE ablaut with certain modifi­cations due to phonetic changes and environment (see § 64).

§69. The weak verbs are a specifically Germanic innovation, for the device used in building their principal forms is not found outside the Germanic group. They built the Past tense and Participle 11 by inserting a special suffix between the root and the ending. The suffix — PG -ð — is referred to as the dental suffix, as [ð] is an interdental fric­ative consonant. The use of the dental suffix is seen in the following forms of weak verbs in OG languages:

	Infinitive	Past Tense	Participle II	NE
Gt	domjan	domida [ð]	domips	deem, deemed
O Icel	kalla	kallaða	kallaðr	call, called
OE	macian	macode	macod	make, made

The dental suffix [ð, 0, d] is a marker of the Past and Participle II; it is preceded by remnants of the old srem-suffixes: -i- in the Gt domida, -o- in OE macode. The weak verbs formed several classes with different stem-suffixes, in the same way as nouns fell into declensions.

3.

§ 89. The history of the English language begins with the invasi6n of the British Isles by Germanic tribes in the 5th c. of our era. Before describing these events it is essential to recall a few preceding facts of history relevant to the development of English.

Prior to the Germanic invasion the British Isles must have been in­habited for at least fifty thousand years. Archeological research has uncovered many layers of prehistoric population. The earliest inhabitants whose linguistic affiliation has been established are the Celts. The Celts came to Britain in three waves and immediately preceded the Teutons.

Economically and socially the Celts were a tribal society made up of kins, kinship groups, clans and tribes; they practised a primitive ag­riculture, and carried on trade with Celtic Gaul.

The first millenium B.C. was the period of Celtic migrations and expansion. Traces of their civilisation are still found all over Europe. Celtic languages were spoken over extensive parts of Europe before our era; later they were absorbed by other IE languages and left very few vestiges behind. The Gaelic branch has survived as Irish (or Erse) in Ireland, has expanded to Scotland as Scotch-Gaelic of the Highlands and is still spoken by a few hundred people on the Isle of Man (the Manx language). The Britonnic branch is represented by Kymric or Welsh in modern Wales and by Breton or Armorican spoken by over a million people in modern France (in the area called Bretagne or Brittany, where the Celts came as emigrants from Britain in the 5th c); another Britonnic dialect in Great Britain, Cornish, was spoken in Cornwall until the end of the 18th c.

§ 90. In the first century B.C. Gaul was conquered by the Romans. Having occupied Gaul Julius Caesar made two raids on Britain, in 55 and 54 B.C. The British Isles had long been known to the Romans as a source of valuable tin ore; Caesar attacked Britain for economic reasons — to obtain tin, pearls and corn, — and also for strategic reasons, since rebels and refugees from Gaul found support among their British kinsmen. Although Caesar failed to subjugate Britain, Roman economic penetration to Britain grew; traders and colonists from Rome came in large numbers to settle in the south-eastern towns. In A.D. 43 Britain was again invaded by Roman legions under Emperor Claudius, and towards the end of the century was made a province of the Roman Em­pire.

The province was carefully guarded and heavily garrisoned: about 40,000 men were stationed there. Two fortified walls ran across the country, a network of paved Roman roads connected the towns and military camps. Scores of towns with a mixed population grew along the Roman roads — inhabited by Roman legionaries and civilians and by the native Celts; among the most important trading centres of Roman Britain was London.

Evidently, the upper classes and the townspeople in the southern dis­tricts were to a considerable extent Romanised, while the Romanisation of rural districts was far less thorough. The population further north was but little affected by the Roman occupation and remained Celtic both in language and custom. On the whole, the Romanisation of distant Britain was more superficial than that of continental provinces (e.g. Gaul and Iberia, where the complete linguistic conquest resulted in the growth of new Romance language, French and Spanish).

The Roman occupation of Britain lasted nearly 400 years; it came to an end in the early 5th c. In A.D. 410, the Roman troops were offi­cially withdrawn to Rome by Constantine. This temporary withdrawal turned out to be final, for the Empire was breaking up due to internal and external causes, —- particularly the attacks of barbarian tribes (including the Teutons) and the growth of independent kingdoms on former Roman territories. The expansion of Franks to Gaul in the 5th c. cut off Britain from the Roman world.

4.

The invaders of Britain came from the western subdivision of the Germanic tribes. To quote Bede, "the newcomers were of the three strong­est races of Germany, the Saxons, the Angles and the Jutes". (See an extract from his work — in the Appendix.) Modern archeological and linguistic research has shown that this information is not quite precise. The origin and the linguistic affiliation of the Jutes appears uncertain: some historians define them as a Frankish tribe, others doubt the partic­ipation and the very existence of the Jutes and name the Frisians as the third main party in the invasion. It is also uncertain whether the early settlers really belonged to separate tribes, Saxons and Angles, or, perhaps, constituted two mixed waves of invaders, differing merely in the place and time of arrival. They were called Angles and Saxons by the Romans and by the Celts but preferred to call themselves Angelcyn (English people) and applied this name to the conquered territories: Angelcynnes land (‘land of the English’, hence England).