I was watching a programme on BBC Newsnight which came up
with a new theory in the origin of the English language.
Unfortunately I cant find a link for the programme or find
the name or the person that put forward the theory, however it proposed that English
was around a long time before the Anglo Saxon arrival to Britain.
He highlighted old English place names that ended in ey which
tended to refer to an island. He also referred to a huge lake in the middle of England
during the Stone and Iron Age and linked this with a number of towns around the periphery
of the lake with ey endings.
The lake had disappeared a long time before the Anglo Saxons
arrived, meaning the towns must have been named by the original inhabitants of Britain,
and old English was their language.
Ill try and find some links.