(_b_) To the Norsemen we also owe the words _are_, which pushed out the pure English _syndon_; _talk_; _tarn_; _busk_ (dress); _sky_; _hustings_; _fellow_; _odd_; _blunt_; _kid_; and many more. 27. =THE SCANDINAVIAN ELEMENT= (iii).--One result of this mixture of Danes with Englishmen was that both, in trying to speak the language or to use the words of each other, would naturally take firm hold of the _root_ of the word, and allow the inflections to take care of themselves. Hence English words would lose their inflections; and this process, after it had once begun, would go on at an increased speed, the greater became the communication at church and at market between the English and the Danes. The same process is now going on in the United States. Thousands upon thousands of Germans have settled there among an English-speaking people. These Germans are rapidly falling into the habit of using their German words without inflections at all. 28. =LATIN ELEMENT OF THE THIRD PERIOD= (i).--This element is really Norman-French. French is Latin, with many of the inflections lost or changed, and with the pronunciation of the vowel-sounds enormously altered. But it did not come from the written Latin of books; but from the spoken Latin of soldiers and country-people (the _lingua Romana rustica_). Norman-French is the French spoken by the Normans, who lost their own Norsk or Danish speech, and learned French from their French wives and children. In the year 912, the Normans, under Duke Rolf or Rollo, wrested from King Charles the Simple the beautiful valley of the Seine, which was afterwards called by the name of Normandy. Norman-French was a dialect of French, and it differed in many respects from the French spoken in the other parts of France. This Norman-French was introduced into England as a court language by Edward the Confessor, in the year 1042; but it was brought into this country as a folk-speech by bands of Norman-French under the leadership of Duke William, the seventh Duke of Normandy, in the famous year 1066. This Norman-French, which they brought with them, became in England the language of the ruling classes, of the court, of the lawyers, and of all priests high in the ranks of the church. Books ceased to be written in English; boys translated their Latin into French; an English churl had to employ a lawyer who used only French in his law-papers and his pleadings; and even ‘uplandish’ or country people tried ‘to speak Frensch, for to be more ytold of.’ The saturation of English with French words probably reached its highest point at the end of the fourteenth century; and about that time a reaction set in. As has been before pointed out, in 1349, boys were allowed to translate their Latin into English; in 1362, Edward III. passed an act of parliament to authorise the use of English in courts of law; and even the Normans who lived in London had begun to use English in their families. But, by the time French had ceased to be