English its real historical background

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According to my teacher today, most American spoken English was from Great Britian. And Britian once was conquored by Norch (French) in some decades. So British speak English often compose of French language. But if that's the case, why the hell English nowadays is mixed up with Latin and Greek stuffs?
She told us English grammar was following Germanic rules. That we speak English that is Germanic format. So English alphabetics like a,b,c,d so on...were they deprived from England or Latin and Greece?

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English came from many sources. The area we call England had many different kinds of people living there at different times. All those languages were mixed together over time and they evolved into modern English. English has taken words and structure from many older languages spoken by the Greeks, Romans, Celts, Germans (and other tribal groups from the north) plus French (the Normans). Look up the history of England with the date 1066 AD to see some of what I am talking about.

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So alphabetic ABC orders were from England, not Middle-East, right?

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Alphabet is from alpha and beta, the first two letters of the Greek alphabet. (Can't avoid redundancy there.) Anyway, vocabulary is always traded along with goods and ideas. There are no pure languages.

(Not even Latin, which I'm half-convinced was never actually spoken. Too damn haphazard. Like English. Which is also never spoken. If you think you hear someone speaking English, help is available.)

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(I'm just playing around, by the way. I don't mean any offense.)

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The English alphabet is most like the Roman alphabet. Check this site for where English words came from:

http://cls.coe.utk.edu/lpm/esltoolkit/01history.html

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It does not say where it came from. Then how the hell it came up this: when I simply typed and entered letter "A," it shows this is the alphabetics order derived from Hebrew/Semetics and then modified by Greek/Latin into today's "A."

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Let's talk about your own language for a change.

My teacher at school, taught me that Mandarin was first bought to your part of the world by disgruntled North Americans, who left their homes when the price of Maple Syrup crashed in 5000 B.C. (which originally stood for British Columbia, by the way). They traversed the arctic circle, travelled down through Europe selling their syrup and giving us a sweet tooth in the process, and entered your part of the world via India, which they didnt like because the weather was too hot and the food too spicy.

They found a nice area to settle, and carried on with their ancient American language, this eventually being recognised by the modern world as Mandarin, which means, in ancient American "language of the syrup makers".

So, was my teacher correct in saying that you all speak and write Canadian?

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Re: English its real historical background

ps2huang wrote:

According to my teacher today, most American spoken English was from Great Britian. And Britian once was conquored by Norch (French) in some decades. So British speak English often compose of French language. But if that's the case, why the hell English nowadays is mixed up with Latin and Greek stuffs?

As you know, the Normans invaded England (1066?) and brought the French roots. So it should not surprise you that the Latin also came by way of invasion. The Romans occupied England for nearly 400 years.

Greek, Dutch and Latin (again) influences came around the Renaissance (more or less), and the manner in which it penetrated English is very relevant to your obsession with the displacement of the English langage.

Greek, Dutch and Latin all have had certain influences on English that are entirely ascribable to certain cultural superiorities at certain times.

For example, Greek and Latin were favored languages for academics during periods when England was culturally behind the times. This meant a lot of "learned" folk were bringing back their influences (one example is that dette became debt to further resemble the language flavor of the time, Latin).

And interesting example of technological advancement influencing a language is when a Dutch man (Caxton) introduced the printing press to England and Dutch technicians have a lasting mark on our spelling merely due to having been responsible for bringing this technology to England.

You seem to have an inordinate obsession with the English language, and have an odd way of proclaming/hoping that it will cease its global dominance.

This may well happen, and if the past is any suggestion what will bring about this change is when the balance in the culture wars shift.

If China, for example, becomes a more dominant force in economy, technology and popular culture it will likely start to replace English as the global language of choice.

But the culture wars have never been so lopsided as they currently are, and it's also possible that English can eradicate Chinese.

You shouldn't take it so personally though, though some fret and try to do something about it these things are a force of human nature and not concious battles.

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And interesting example of technological advancement influencing a language is when a Dutch man (Caxton) introduced the printing press to England and Dutch technicians have a lasting mark on our spelling merely due to having been responsible for bringing this technology to England.

Caxton wasn't Dutch; he came from Kent, and it's generally thought that he learnt printing technology in Cologne. Are you mixing him up with his pupil Wynkyn de Worde?

Caxton did leave a lasting mark on our spelling, not because of any Dutch influence but because he started printing in English (which tended to standardise and fossilise spellings) a generation before a major pronunciation change took place. In Caxton's time we still pronounced the k in words like knife, knowledge and knell; so he spelt them with a k and this spelling has stuck until the present day. If printing had been introduced 30 years later, when for some unknown reason English people had stopped pronouncing the k, he would certainly have spelt them nife, nowledge, nell.

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syntinen wrote:

Caxton wasn't Dutch; he came from Kent, and it's generally thought that he learnt printing technology in Cologne. Are you mixing him up with his pupil Wynkyn de Worde?

Nope, just plain wrong it seems. The information I am recalling is that he was Dutch or at least spent a great deal of time there. But it looks like I was wrong on at least his nationality.

Quote:

Caxton did leave a lasting mark on our spelling, not because of any Dutch influence but because he started printing in English (which tended to standardise and fossilise spellings) a generation before a major pronunciation change took place. In Caxton's time we still pronounced the k in words like knife, knowledge and knell; so he spelt them with a k and this spelling has stuck until the present day. If printing had been introduced 30 years later, when for some unknown reason English people had stopped pronouncing the k, he would certainly have spelt them nife, nowledge, nell.

At the risk of disseminating even more incorrect information, I recall that the printing technicians (who I think were Dutch and haven't checked) also changed spelling by using additional characters for line justification and in order to make more money (paid by character or line or somesuch).

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I found some validation for the Dutch technicians here:

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/vivian.c/Writings/Shorts/Books&Spelling.htm

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But they haven't always been such saints. When William Caxton couldn't find English people to man his printing press in 1476, he hired Dutch printers who brought with them the 'gh' spelling for 'g', leading to 'ghost' rather than good old English 'gost'. Many of the diverse spelling of the 16th century are allegedly due to printers' needs to make words fit a line of print: variations in length came in very handy, say between 'truly', 'truely', 'treulie' and 'trewlie'.

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Re: English its real historical background

ps2huang wrote:

According to my teacher today, most American spoken English was from Great Britian. And Britian once was conquored by Norch (French) in some decades. So British speak English often compose of French language. But if that's the case, why the hell English nowadays is mixed up with Latin and Greek stuffs?
She told us English grammar was following Germanic rules. That we speak English that is Germanic format. So English alphabetics like a,b,c,d so on...were they deprived from England or Latin and Greece?

Hmmm, I am unsure if your teacher is confusing the Norse, (or Vikings) who also conquered parts of England, (between the Romans leaving, and the French [Normans] invading) and left their linguistic imprint also.

Danelaw and the English

The Queen's English owes as much to the Vikings as it does to the language of the Court. These invaders left an indelible mark on Britain which can still be found in the words we use, the dialects we speak and the places we live in.

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle of 793 gives us a vivid picture of Britain coming under attack from the Viking invaders.
'Terrible portents appeared over Northumbria and miserably frightened the inhabitants: these were exceptional flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. A great famine followed these signs; and a little after that, in the same year on 8 June, the harrying of the heathen miserably destroyed God's church in Lindisfarne by rapine and slaughter.'

This 'harrying of the heathen' refers to the first Viking attack on English soil. This was followed for two centuries by a series of regular incursions and wars that lead to the settlement of many Vikings. England and the English language would never be the same again.
This was, in fact, the original North-South divide.

In 878, King Alfred agreed a truce with Guthrum, the Viking king. It required Guthrum to be baptised and, essentially, the division of England into the Anglo-Saxon southern kingdom and the Danelaw. The Danelaw included counties north of an imaginary line running from London to Bedford and then up to Chester. This was disputed land throughout the tenth century. Towards the end of this period, after the second wave of Viking invaders arrived under Olaf Tryggvason, the amount of Viking settlement in any area varied considerably. This was, in fact, the original north-south divide, in many ways the precursor of the one surviving today. One need only think of the modern stereotype that any area north of Watford Gap is flat-cap, ferret country to recognise that this division still exists superficially.

It is true to say, though, that the impact of Old Norse on the Old English dialects being spoken by the native population was significant and had far-reaching implications. It was the interaction between the Viking settlers and their English neighbours, their trading and farming activities and their eventual intermarriage and assimilation that helped to create the melting pot of two languages. Their combination in the northern and east Midlands dialects gradually filtered into the English spoken throughout the rest of the country. The east Midlands dialect, in particular, was later to emerge as a major contributor in the growth of modern English.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/lj/conquestlj/legacy_01.shtml?site=history_vikings

Caxton went to Brussels, I thought?

Hmm, Wikipedia on Caxton:

William Caxton
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

William Caxton (c. 1422 - c. 1491) was the first English printer. He was born in Kent, and came to London as apprentice to a mercer, a dealer in cloth.

In 1446, he departed for Bruges, where he was successful in business and became governor of the Merchant Adventurers. His trade brought him into contact with Burgundy, and it was thus that he became a member of the household of Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy, the sister of the English King. This led to more continental travel, in the course of which he observed the new printing industry. He wasted no time in setting up a printing press in Bruges, in collaboration with a Fleming, Colard Mansion, on which the first book to be printed in English was produced in 1475 - , Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, a translation by Caxton himself. Bringing the knowledge back to his native land, he set up a press at Westminster in 1476, and the first book known to have been printed there was Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres (Sayings of the Philosophers, first printed on November 18, 1477), written by none other than Earl Rivers, the king's brother-in-law. The most important works printed by Caxton were Le Morte d'Arthur and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Caxton

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English its real historical background

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