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English is what you got when Anglo-Saxon peasants were forced to serve French speaking nobles. Which is why basic grammar and simple words are Germanic in origi
by btilly 3y ago
English is what you got when Anglo-Saxon peasants were forced to serve French speaking nobles. Which is why basic grammar and simple words are Germanic in origin, while words for food, laws, and various complex things have Romance origins. And then went on to become traders who borrow words from everywhere.
Add to that constantly shifting pronunciation rules. To pick an example that is only mostly complete, "wear" and "where" are now homonyms for most people. But a century ago they mostly were not. The spelling captures the historical pronunciation, not the current one.
But it could be worse. At least we've dropped the insanity of gender from the language. Old English had 5 genders, that generally didn't match what French had.
But still if you want a flavor of what English might have sounded like without being mangled by French, read Uncleftish Beholding: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/110/docs/uncleftish_beholding.html https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/110/docs/uncleftish_beh.... It explains basic atomic theory using only Germanic based words (eg Beholding) and made up words with Germanic roots. So, for example, atoms can't be split or cleft, and so are uncleft is an atom. And Ymir has a mythological role parallel to Uranus, so uranium became ymirstuff.
It is surprisingly readable, but sounds quite different than English usually does.
- HPsquared 3y agoThis feels like reading German.
- OnlyMortal 3y agoWell yes. My dialect is somewhere towards German (more so Dutch). I write, “learnt” rather than “learned”. Past perfect and past imperfect from a Germanic view. “I learnt” and “I have learned”. “I learned” sounds wrong. Source: Yorkshuh.
- stevekemp 3y agoOnly this evening I was trying to explain to my child that "telt" was the same as "told", with extra emphasis and implied overtones.. Source Yorkshuh and Scottishland!
- OnlyMortal 3y agoIt’ll be old Saxon. Admittedly, I’d not use “telt” though I understand why it is used. My Yorkshuh is (now) soft Wetherby. It wasn’t as a lad but I had to learn English, as a second language, when I lived abroad (NL/BE/US). It was embarrassing to have someone translate my English to an American boss.
- psunavy03 3y agoEnglish is a Germanic language, closely related to Dutch and German, which was later influenced by French and Latin.
- hinkley 3y agoAs a native English speaker, it can be distracting to hear someone speaking Dutch in a movie. Your brain keeps trying to make it into accented English, because it sounds almost like it due to pacing and common syllables. The brain latches onto a handful of borrowed words and tries to interpolate the rest.
- jandrewrogers 3y agoSame. Dutch sounds like unintelligible English to me, which is useful for identifying it as Dutch (once I realize it is, in fact, actually unintelligible).
- foobarian 3y agoSame thing with many Slavic languages that aren't mutually intelligible, like Polish or Slovene and Croat. I wonder if there is a concept of Hamming distance for languages.
- Sylamore 3y agoI've experienced this in real life, I was on a committee that rotated meetings between the US and The Netherlands. During a policy session in Zaandam with some Dutch, UK, Spanish and US peers we had a moment when our Dutch hosts had an excited conversation in Dutch but since it was a tech conversation both myself and the UK member blurted out at the same time that our Dutch must be getting better because we understood most of what they just said and didn't need them to translate it for us.
- pbhjpbhj 3y agoLater? Latin was the first official language in the UK, back when Celtic and Brythonic language was widespread. The Normans were in the UK, viking there way up our rivers and establishing the Danegeld before Normandy was Normandy and, well, before French was French. Old French was Gallo-Romance and Middle French, AIUI, emerged with the Norse influence as the Scandinavians moved down past Britain and into Europe. Modern French, ie French, came long after the English court took on the language of the Normans (1066, and all that). Out of this melange English was born, the next official language of England famously legislated as such by the Welsh-speaking Henry Tudor in the late C.15th.
- tivert 3y ago> Add to that constantly shifting pronunciation rules. To pick an example that is only mostly complete, "wear" and "where" are now homonyms for most people. But a century ago they mostly were not. The spelling captures the historical pronunciation, not the current one. It's worth noting that's not unique to English: it's a phenomenon that's universally happens across all languages. It's how language diverge into new ones and how linguists can reconstruct old languages that have no written records.
- wongarsu 3y agoPronunciation drifts in all languages. But usually languages take some effort to have either a clear mapping from spelling to pronunciation (when you read it you can pronounce it) or from pronunciation to spelling (when you can pronounce it you can spell it); or some compromise that tries to achieve both. Hence when pronunciation drifts too far that eventually causes the word to be spelt differently too. Meanwhile English seems to have spelling set mostly in stone hundreds of years ago, and any shifts in pronunciation since then are just ignored (barring minor reforms like the ou->o thing that part of the world adopted)
- monknomo 3y agoPeople are very resistant to spelling reform, and it doesn't help that english has enough accents/regions where it is spoken, that no unified spelling is going to be sensible for all english speakers. I mean, look at Carnegie's attempt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board some wins, but didn't go anywhere, really
- gingerrr 3y agoHow does mapping spelling to sound work in languages like English that have homophones? "wear", "where", "were-" (as in werewolf), "weir" (in some regional dialects) can all be pronounced identically in modern English. If we map them all to a single spelling, is that an improvement to readability and understanding?
- 3y ago
- CoastalCoder 3y ago> Old English had 5 genders, ... Would you mind elaborating on this? I know almost nothing about the topic, but IIUC from Wikipedia, Olde English only had 3 genders: [0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_grammar#Gender https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_grammar#Gender
- z500 3y agoThey probably meant cases. Nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, and vestiges of the instrumental.
- btilly 3y agoThe way I learned about it, in addition to masculine, neuter, and feminine, there was also a distinction between weak and strong. So a man would be strong masculine, a body weak masculine, a girl weak feminine, and a woman strong feminine. Add in neuter and you get 5 genders. But reading https://oldenglish.info/wam2.html https://oldenglish.info/wam2.html, there were also 2 weak neuter nouns, eage and eare. Which are now eye and ear. Not sure how that fits with what I was taught.
- hinkley 3y agoI never quite got used to the added layer of polite verb conjugation in French, but I hear Japanese is far worse. As a native speaker it might not be so bad. But as a second language it means that at some point you're taking a class that consists largely of learning to beg your betters for favors. Which I don't think is ever going to sit well with students of quasi-democratic nations. Doubly so for more stereotypically cantankerous ones.
- pomian 3y agoFormality in discussion with others, seems to be very common in other languages, and is very hard for a native North American speaker to use correctly. The whole concept sounds like contrite begging for us. Please sir, sir I could I sir ask you sir, to possibly pass the cheese, sir. So, of course we over correct and throw in more sirs(or ma'ams) willy nilly.
- Angostura 3y ago> English is what you got when Anglo-Saxon peasants were forced to serve French speaking nobles. And when the spelling was largely fixed by William Caxton, who pronounced the words with a 15th century Kentish accent
- hinkley 3y agoThe rumor is that after the Revolutionary war, English nobility affected an accent change to distance themselves from those Americans, and that a historically accurate miniseries about the American Revolution should feature British Officers with something approaching a southern drawl, rather than the modern posh British accent. Basically the American South did not get the memo about changing English accents.
- Angostura 3y agoI'll let you look at modern English spellings - Know, though, thought etc etc and decide for yourself whether that looks like a transcript of southern American english:)
- MrJohz 3y agoI'd love for you to correct me on this, but I believe this is nonsense. The only places that discuss this are very dubious articles from infotainment-style blogs, and I can't find anything to back this up on Wikipedia, let alone anything more reputable. IIRC, the element of truth that begets the lie here is that the Southern accent does have some elements in common with older British accents. But it's not clear whether those elements are retained from those old British accents, or whether they've simply been added into the accent later. And even then, we're talking about very specific features - I think the rhotic R is one of them? - and not the accent as a whole.
- baq 3y agoI’d like to give the word ‘bass’ at least an honorable mention.
- hinkley 3y agoOn the topic of food; livestock, which were raised by peasants, kept their Germanic names. Meat was expensive though and usually went to nobility, or people catering to them (learn the language of the occupier if you want to get ahead). So you get ham from a pig, beef from a cow, and mutton from a sheep.
- kridsdale3 3y agoI asked GPT4 to re-insert latin word-components to Uncleftish Beholding to "remangle" it. The result is perfectly fine modern English. It does a pretty good job of "uncleftish-ifying" any other text if you enjoy that style. https://pastebin.com/FCAjrckG https://pastebin.com/FCAjrckG
- pcrh 3y agoThat's fairly impressive to be honest. Correctly interpreting "uncleft" as "atom", for example.
- dreamcompiler 3y ago> At least we've dropped the insanity of gender from the language. Except for ships, which are always feminine in English. It feels very weird to me because gendered noun categories are unusual for English and ships are just about the only counterexample that remains.
- dkjaudyeqooe 3y agoThat's a tradition, or possibly a convention, not a language rule. All inanimate objects are 'it'.
- Symbiote 3y agoI consider this sexist and will continue to use "it".
- pbhjpbhj 3y agoWhy is it sexist, surely it is linguistic gender and has nothing to do with biological sex? Of course, you can use "it", your choice. Mind you I find the forced overlaying of sex onto language absurd, my late mother was chairman of many committees and always complained when people started calling her "chair"; I agree.
- Symbiote 3y ago"sċip" is neuter in Old English. The tradition refers to some sort of mother / goddess protection the sailors are hoping for.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y ago> English is what you got when Anglo-Saxon peasants were forced to serve French speaking nobles. Are you suggesting that England, the very definition of imperialist settler colonialism, is itself the product of imperialist settler colonialism?
- pard68 3y agoWell it is. Celts are the original peoples and have been invaded at various times by Gaels, Scandinavians, French, and Romans. Probably others too.
- PaulDavisThe1st 3y agoThere were non-Sapiens species on the islands. Later, after the last ice age, a neolithic culture apparently linked to Anatolia. Subsequently during the Bronze age, the Iberians ("Bell-Beaker people") arrived, preceding the Celts. So any talk of "the original peoples" in the British Isles is just about as meaningless as it is anywhere outside of some parts of Africa.
- OJFord 3y agoMany, it's not even a lukewarm take I'm afraid. Different invaders for different times. Also Jews were expelled for a few centuries, and made to wear particular clothing prior to that. I'm sure you could find many other examples that we more readily associate to some other country (or in some other direction) today, and they may be different again in centuries to come.