The Great Christmas Debate

Quote:

Olivier said: Origins don't matter much, it's what you make of them. The Brits are of French origin and look at the mess they're in

Steady on, our Brit blood is a mongrel mix not only of french blood, but also Iron Age tribal, Roman, Anglo-Saxon and Viking!
For example I was born and bred in the English midlands town of Leicester which was once a Roman garrison town, so I might have Roman blood in me, but at least I don't have the urge to go out and crucify anybody!
Icidentally Rome's badass 14th Legion was stationed in Leicester which might account for the fact that i'm a tough-minded argumentative s.o.b and --ahem--PC internet wargaming champion.. Smile

http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g64/PoorOldSpike/14th-legion.gif

0 Replies

@saab,

William the Conqueror did not speak a Nordic language, he spoke a regional variety of old French. And all his army spoke French and were French.

3 Replies

@Olivier5,

Who disputes that? The aristos are a tiny fraction of the population. They stopped speaking French in court during the reign of Henry V.

1 Reply

@Finn dAbuzz,

Quote:

While the Norman Invasion of England clearly had a large influence on English (at least in terms of the word "Peace"), considering the undeniably major influence of Latin on French, it's difficult to understand how it can be considered that French has had a greater influence on English than Latin.

Well, we could write to the curators of the Oxford English Dictionary to ask them why they say so, but they do say so... My understanding is that if a word was historically first noted in a document after Hasting and in a form similar to the French form (which is often quite different from the original Latin because of centuries of evolution), then it can be assumed on reasonable ground that it came from French and not Latin.

All language have ancestors. To simplify, French is a father to English, Latin a grand father.

2 Replies

@Olivier5,

To repeat a point made earlier, your link said 29%. You said half. You're wrong.

1 Reply

@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

William the Conqueror did not speak a Nordic language, he spoke a regional variety of old French.

That has been the Langue d'oïl .

0 Replies

@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

And all his army spoke French and were French.

Many of them - those who came from other regions of France - spoke (Old) French. But those from La Manche spoke (Old) Norman - Old Norman contained many Norse loanwords unknown in Old French at that time.

1 Reply

@parados,

Quote:

It looks like the average native English speaker has a vocabulary of 30,000. Top 10% have almost 40,000.

That seems like a more relevant (lower) estimate for the language size, if one focuses on words that are being used with non-trivial frequency.

I like the conclusion in your link, about "a wider range of vocabulary [being] typically used in fiction than in non-fiction writing."

0 Replies

@Walter Hinteler,

Quote:

Many of them - those who came from other regions of France - spoke (Old) French. But those from La Manche spoke (Old) Norman - Old Norman contained many Norse loanwords unknown in Old French at that time.

That may be true but it was still a French regional dialect among many that flooded England post-Hasting.

0 Replies

@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

All language have ancestors. To simplify, French is a father to English, Latin a grand father.

If Latin is the father of French who (what) then is the mother of French, and what did she contribute to English to make her's son's influence on the language something more than just her husband's?

1 Reply

@Finn dAbuzz,

I don't know if there are French words of Norse, Frankish or Celt origin that got imported into English. There are probably a few but what difference does it make?

2 Replies

@Olivier5,

Well you seem to think that there is a significant difference between the levels of French and Latin influence on English.

(I could be wrong here of course. Perhaps your argument consists of nothing more that the relative places the languages occupy on a technical schematic of the linguistic origins of English)

Unless French contributed something to English that was not derived from Latin, I fail to see how the difference is of a significance to anyone other than a chartmaker.

2 Replies

@Finn dAbuzz,

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

Unless French contributed something to English that was not derived from Latin, I fail to see how the difference is of a significance to anyone other than a chartmaker.

I misread that, for a second I thought you wrote cheesemaker.

0 Replies

@Finn dAbuzz,

French built on Latin and created many different words out of one Latin word. That's a contribution in itself.

I looked up a list of French words of Germanic origin. Out of one third of letter A, I gathered these English words coming from that stock:

Abandon
Aboard
Bastard
Forage
Frank, Franchise, French, Franciscan, etc.
Nom de GUERRE
Egret
...

0 Replies

@Olivier5,

The language of the Vikings could be heard in all of Europe for about 1000 years ago. Geographically it was the most spread language. From New foundland over Greenland, Scandinavia to Russia in east and to England and Normandy in the south you could hear people speak nordic
It was not everybody who lived in these areas who spoke nordic. It was the Vikings who had the power so many spoke the language
In England the influence by the Vikings language wise lasted up till our dasy.
About 2% of English have borrowed words from Nordic languages, but of those two % includes some of the most common and used words in English.
Kake=cake, kalla= call, ägg=egg, giva=give husbonde=husbond, skinn=skin
sky=sky taga=take they=de them=dem vindue=window vinge=wing

1 Reply

@saab,

From wikipedia

http://i1334.photobucket.com/albums/w641/Walter_Hinteler/a_zpsb5bd17ba.jpg

http://i1334.photobucket.com/albums/w641/Walter_Hinteler/b_zps6c603f89.jpg

0 Replies

@izzythepush,

I said close to half of words in common use. It appears, from various considerations above, that its closer to 40%. My source had a caveat about the 29% Latin words, saying they are often medical, scientific or legal terms. In modern English, words of a Germanic origin are the most frequently used. Words taken from French are on average less often used (though many are quite frequent, see: car, table, fork, etc...). Of the three main sources, Latin words are the least frequent in the language. How often do you get to say habeas corpus, even though you know the term?

1 Reply

@Olivier5,

Ipso facto gets a lot of airplay. QED.

1 Reply

@izzythepush,

Bus, data, ficus... Some are in common language no doubt but if you read an English etymological dictionary, you'll find something like 10 words coming from French for every single word coming from Latin.

0 Replies

@izzythepush,

Quote:

The aristos are a tiny fraction of the population.

They came with scores of secretaries, artisans, etc., and in any case, they defined the culture and the politics of the place pretty much forever. Last time I checked, the lords still had a house in Westminster...

1 Reply

The Great Christmas Debate

Related Topics

Quick Links

My Account

able2know