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Also remember the Normands spoke not only French but some kind of Norse. Still in Normandy there are Norse/Scandinavian names for places. Besides, Saxon and Nor

Also remember the Normands spoke not only French but some kind of Norse. Still in Normandy there are Norse/Scandinavian names for places. Besides, Saxon and Norse languages must've been pretty mutually intelligible, even today German and Swedish is pretty similar even with a millennium or two apart.

stan_rogers 10y ago
There were a lot of cognate words and similar grammar, but genders and inflectional endings didn't match well at all. That drove the dramatic simplification of English grammar, for the most part. As for the Norman influence, it was mostly vocabulary... but changing the languages of documentation to Latin (mostly) and French (in law, for the most part) left English a lot of room to progress away from the Old English that was, by that time, already playing the same sort of role that Latin did in the Early Romance period - it no longer reflected the language that people lived in.
- jacobush 10y ago
  Haha, so Saxon and Norse cancelled each others' grammar out? :)
- theandrewbailey 10y ago
  > There were a lot of cognate words and similar grammar, but genders and inflectional endings didn't match well at all. That drove the dramatic simplification of English grammar, for the most part. It's why English nouns lost their masculine and feminine grammatical gender. The people who used both languages had more important things to worry about.
- Shorel 10y ago
  Creole languages have a very simplified grammar compared to their parent languages. It all points to the case that English is actually a creole language.
  - jacobush 10y ago
    But from pretty closely related languages.
  - amyjess 10y ago
    English doesn't quite meet the criteria of being a creole, though. Superstratum/substratum theory applies here. English has an Ingvaeonic superstratum and multiple substrata, from Old Norse and Norman French at least, if not more.
pbhjpbhj 10y ago
I didn't think French arrived as a language name until well after the Norman conquest?
- jacobush 10y ago
  Something romance then. Whatever derivative of Latin they used.

stan_rogers 10y ago

There were a lot of cognate words and similar grammar, but genders and inflectional endings didn't match well at all. That drove the dramatic simplification of English grammar, for the most part. As for the Norman influence, it was mostly vocabulary... but changing the languages of documentation to Latin (mostly) and French (in law, for the most part) left English a lot of room to progress away from the Old English that was, by that time, already playing the same sort of role that Latin did in the Early Romance period - it no longer reflected the language that people lived in.

jacobush 10y ago
Haha, so Saxon and Norse cancelled each others' grammar out? :)
theandrewbailey 10y ago
> There were a lot of cognate words and similar grammar, but genders and inflectional endings didn't match well at all. That drove the dramatic simplification of English grammar, for the most part. It's why English nouns lost their masculine and feminine grammatical gender. The people who used both languages had more important things to worry about.
Shorel 10y ago
Creole languages have a very simplified grammar compared to their parent languages. It all points to the case that English is actually a creole language.
- jacobush 10y ago
  But from pretty closely related languages.
- amyjess 10y ago
  English doesn't quite meet the criteria of being a creole, though. Superstratum/substratum theory applies here. English has an Ingvaeonic superstratum and multiple substrata, from Old Norse and Norman French at least, if not more.

pbhjpbhj 10y ago

I didn't think French arrived as a language name until well after the Norman conquest?

jacobush 10y ago
Something romance then. Whatever derivative of Latin they used.