OFF: English (was Mountain Grill)

[Carl Edlund Anderson]

On 25-Feb-2005 20:54, Arjan Hulsebos wrote:
> Carl Edlund Anderson wrote:
>> On 23-Feb-2005 10:18, Stephe Lindas wrote:
>>> Would the Saxon part of Anglo-saxon, not be German? I'm no historian,
>>> but weren't alot of the Romans that occupied Briton of Sarmatian and
>>> German descent, rather than Italian?
>>
>> As far as can be told, post-Roman Britain received a fair deal of
>> immigration from the European coasts of the North Sea -- the areas that
>> are today the Netherlands, Friesland, northern Germany, and Jutland.
>
> Well, a couple of things happened after the collapse of the Roman
> empire. First, there was the invasion of the Huns, causing a
> continent-wide migration towards the west. Then there were the Vikings.
> Then the French invaded England in 1066. All of them left their marks in
> the English language as we know it.

For those not already overly well versed in these topics, it might be
emphasized that the Hunnic incursion took place on the continent (not
actually in Britain) and that the activities of the Vikings and Normans
in Britain took place a number of centuries after the end of the Roman
presence.


> Dutch is closer to German than to English, especially syntactically.
> That's not surprising, as both Dutch and German branched off from
> mediaeval Plattdeutsch. I've read a bit of "das Nibelungenlied", which
> was written around 1200, and found it to read almost like an old Dutch
> dialect.

Indeed.  And English is closer to Plattdeutsch than it is to Hochdeutsch.

>> In reality, what we think of as "Old English" was probably created
>> through a bit of a mish-mashing of features from the various dialects of
>> "North Sea Germanic" -- which were probably very similar anyway, at
>> least mostly mutually inteligible -- sifted and leveled over time until
>> we see written Old English.
>
> .... with a bit of Norse added to it, and a large dose of Latin/French.
> Almost no Celtic left, as far as I know (correct me if I'm wrong).

Well, once you add the influence of Norse and French, it's no longer
considered Old English, but rather Middle English!  Of course, there are
no firm lines between "Old" and "Middle" in reality, but when we talk
about "Old English" we're usually really talking about the form of
written English (there being few audio recordings from this period ;)
that predates the Norman Conquest (and that actually shows relatively
limited influence from Norse; the Norse influence really becomes
apparent in the Middle English sources, though clearly it must have been
banging around, if seldom evidenced in writing, during the Old English
period).

> I always wind English native speakers up by saying that English is a
> creole language. An old one, but creole nevertheless.  ;-)

;)  Scholars first advanced the "Middle English is a creole" argument in
the 70s, I think.  One can see the logic behind the idea, but then
people often throw around terms like "creole" without defining them too
carefully.  I think the majority opinion is that if one defines a creole
such that Middle English is one, then quite a lot of other languages
also become creoles.  After all, even the European Romance languages
have quite large numbers of learned borrowings from Latin (that is,
borrowings made into the literary language by educated speakers rather
than words evolving naturally from a Latin original through everyday use
-- sometimes a particular Latin word will have both a "naturally
evolved" descendant and a "learnedly borrowed" descendant in a daughter
language.

Still, as languages go, English has been extremely flexible in absorbing
vocabulary from just about anything it can find :)  There's rather less
direct influence from other languages on its functional grammar, though.

Cheers,
Carl

--
Carl Edlund Anderson
http://www.carlaz.com/