E-mail is not French

Now wait a minute, boss. I thought that Latin entered through Spanish and Germanic language bases. For sure, German, which struggled to English, contains so many Latin based words. And I know of which I speeak, a little, having taken both Latin and German.

But French? No. Nope. rope a dopa nope.

And ehBeth

Who ever said that Canadian French was French, email or no? I know that you love the music muses. Wish you could hear what I am listening to right now.

As usual this post as many others has gone off on a tangent. The fact remains that the French are the ones concerned with language purity, As for English [US] the dictionary is laced with words brought with the wave after wave of immigrants as well as new processes and inventions regardless of the source. The Dictionary is revised periodically to include these new words. No attempt is made to transulate them into English. They just become part of the language.

Engish became bastardized when William, Duke of Normandy crossed the English Channel and conquered England way, way back in 1066, and became William I, King of England. That was the starting point for the death of Old English, a West Germanic dialect, and the eventual rise of Middle English, especially as spoken in and around London, the language of Geoffrey Chaucer.

I did not by any means state that all latin or latin cognates in English entered through French--however, a good deal did, and certainly i know of no one ever having made the contention that Latin entered English via German. After the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes and Norse had invaded England, Germanic sources pretty well dried up. Thereafter, thanks to the Norman conquest, the introduction of Latin into the language came from clerical and monastic sources, and the Normans, Angevins, Poitevins and Bretons who took the opportunity to settle in England tended to favor clerics from their own homes. I guess we'll have to agree to disagree, because i don't see any way to at all reasonably suggest that Latin entered our language from German.

Chaucer, and the cleric Wycliffe, were both from East Anglia--Chaucer ended up in London because he worked as a diplomat for the Plantagenets. The great influence of Chaucer's worksarose from having been printed by Caxton in the late fifteenth century, nearly a century after Chaucer wrote. Wycliffe and a band of loyal, renegade clerics and monks, laboriously produced hand-copied editions of the bible rendered into English, and passed around hand to hand--declared anathema by the church, and subject to be burned if they fell into the hands of church authorities, nevertheless, more than 150 copies still survive. Were London no more than a village, it would be a part of Middlesex, and the patois of the Londoners descends from the English current in Middlesex. Once again, the principle ancestor to modern English is that which was spoken in East Anglia in the fourteenth century.

Then why, having learned Latin before I studied German, was I able to cheat my memory of German vocabulary by recognizing the Latin roots of many words?

Yup.

Faksimile.

It does not follow that simply because English and German have words with common Latin roots to say that either English got its Latin roots from German, or that German got its Latin roots from English. Neither is a Romance language, and both got their Latin largely from clerical and monastic sources. In the case of English, a good deal was imported via the French clerics and monks who came over before and after the conquest, principally afterward.

Re: E-mail is not French

To paraphrase Bill Clinton, it all depends on what you mean by the word "this". Most continental Europeans recognize that Americans are good at inventing new words for new things, and we don't mind importing them into our own language. I think this attitude is typical among French, just like it's typical for speakers German and Spanish, the only other European languages I know well enough to tell.

On the other hand, the attitude among many European politicians is that importing anything from abroad -- material or cultural -- is some kind of defeat and a sign of weakness. This attitude resonates well with some influential language experts such as English professors, Germanists or linguists. (As an aside, I like to speculate that this is the real reason Noam Chomsky is so hostile to globalization. It makes the world a better place for almost everyone, but it sure makes it less attractive for linguists.) When I went to school in Germany, "unnecessary" anglicisms were strongly discouraged, and the definition of "unnecessary" was pretty broad. I don't know if this is true in other European countries. But only in France has this protectionist attitude become strong enough to highjack the state and create its own government institution -- I think it's called the French academy of language. And only in France could this institution become so strong as to make some foreign words illegal to say in the government-run media.

American imperialism or not -- some degree of cultural protectionism is popular among European governments, especially in the French government. And it just plain sucks, because the attitude is just not shared by the Europeans governees.

-- Thomas

....a-HA!

Thomas

I guess by your response that you to school before 1945.

We had -that's in the 50's/60's- another curriculum.

Speaking of a tempest in a teapot... has anyone seen Freedom Fries or Freedom Toast listed on a menu?

I haven't and I've looked. I admit, I'm from the left-side of the country and all our electoral votes were against Bush -- but as far as I know, this much-touted Freedom vs French thing is much ado about nothing. There was no transformation here... it's a non-issue. That it happened in the Congressional lunchrooms shows how out-of-step with the real world those senators & representatives are.

French's is still the most popular brand of prepared yellow mustard . . .

Franco-American Spaghetti and other canned pasta is still popular . . .

Bic pens and lighters, although manufactured in the US or Mexico, are from a French company, and still sell very well . . .

Yes indeedy, Miss Piffka, much ado about nothing.

No, actually I went to school in Hannover during the 80s. The teachers in my German classes weren't Nazis, they were aging "68ers" who cultivated a pretty strong anti-American vibe among them. Note that I said "discouraged", not "made illegal". Americanisms weren't considered evil, they just lost you style points in essays -- they were about in the same league as abbreviating "Bundesrepublik Deutschland" with "BRD", which was politically incorrect at the time because the East Germans routinely used it. So you knew that if you used this perfectly sensible abbreviation throughout your essay, it would reduce the your grade from A to A- or B+, depending on the teachers. The same was true when you used "unnecessary" anglicisms, according to the teacher's definition of "unnecessary".

You probably timed your school years better than I planned mine, Walter.

-- Thomas

I'm a "achtundsechziger"


(At least, when looking at the date of my Abitur :wink: )

Setanta is spot on about the entry of Latin through "clerical and monastic sources". They'd go study in Rome and come back trying to make English "more Latin".

But the initial entry of Latin was through invasion, of what is now G.B., by the Romans.

Laura Wright says in "Sources of London English" (Oxford University Press, 1996) that the "Pidgin Latin", spoken in London up to 14th/15th century, sourced in the Roman soldiers language.
(Peter Ackroyd writes in "London - The biography" that this is confirmed in several other books as well. However, I can't look that up just now.)

I dunno. The influx of Englishisms into German may have been 'discouraged' in the 80s, as Thomas says, but I remember doing a double-take when I saw a headline in the German language version of Reader's Digest at about that time. The headline read "Pricessin Anne und der Kidnapper." Kidnapper??? I had no idea that the average German would even know what the word meant.

Yup Walter, many other remnants of the Romans can be found. Including many of the names of English towns.