# English as a Romance Language. **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 15, 2007, 1:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/english-as-a-romance-language/411812 "2007-07-15T01:43:41Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2007, 3:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/english-as-a-romance-language/411812/21 "2007-07-17T03:20:29Z")
[QUOTE=smiling bandit] And ironically, German picked upwhat is arguably the worst and most useless “feature” of Romance languages, while English left it at the alter: gender. There’s a bewilderingly complicated and utterly pointless array of word gender, which modifies pronouns and so forth by what the heck is going on the rest of the sentence… It’s just stupid, and even though I syudied German for years I just fake it. 😃 [/QUOTE] Not sure if that whole post was a joke, but German didn’t pick up gender. Gender is a generally thought to be remnant from the I/E parent language, still extant in both German and Romance languages. ---
**Author:** ![sturmhauke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e47c2d/32.png) [@sturmhauke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sturmhauke)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2007, 8:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/english-as-a-romance-language/411812/22 "2007-07-17T08:04:29Z")
[QUOTE=jayjay] From Twain’s [“The Awful German Language”](http://www.kombu.de/twain-2.htm) [/QUOTE] Man, that totally has me in stitches. I shall have to look up more of Twain’s essays. ---
**Author:** ![smiling\_bandit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e9a140/32.png) [@smiling\_bandit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/smiling_bandit)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2007, 3:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/english-as-a-romance-language/411812/23 "2007-07-18T03:00:06Z")
[QUOTE=John Mace] Not sure if that whole post was a joke, but German didn’t pick up gender. Gender is a generally thought to be remnant from the I/E parent language, still extant in both German and Romance languages. [/QUOTE] Well, partly a joke. I was under the impression that German absorbed gender (at least in its modern form) from contact with Latin. ---
**Author:** ![John\_Mace](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_mace/32/185_2.png) [@John\_Mace](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_Mace)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2007, 6:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/english-as-a-romance-language/411812/24 "2007-07-18T06:12:04Z")
[QUOTE=smiling bandit] Well, partly a joke. I was under the impression that German absorbed gender (at least in its modern form) from contact with Latin. [/QUOTE] OK. But just to be clear-- it didn’t. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2007, 1:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/english-as-a-romance-language/411812/25 "2007-07-18T13:38:58Z")
How gender developed in pre-proto-Indo-European is [interesting](http://www.zompist.com/lang21.html#28). The original division of noun classes was between animate (things that move) and inanimate (things that are static). Hittite, the first language to split from Indo-European, still had only these two noun classes. Later a third class developed for collectivities. At some time before proto-Indo-European split into the rest of its daughter languages (except for Hittite), these noun classes became what we now think of as “gender”-- animate nouns became masculine, inanimate nouns became neuter, and collective nouns became feminine. For example, there were two proto-Indo-European words for fire: \*_egnis_ (m.) and \*_paewr_ or \*_puwer_ (n.). The former referred to flames that move (as in a forest fire) and the latter to embers that sit still (as in a hearth). From \*_egnis_ came Latin _ignis_, Sanskrit _agnih_, Lithuanian _ugnis_, and Russian _ogon’_–all masculine gender. From \*_paewr_ came Greek _pyr_, German _Feuer_, and Old English _fyr_–all neuter gender. In Czech _pýr_ means ‘ember’. Meanwhile the feminine gender developed from the neuter plural form (e.g. in Latin both end with -_a_). It became known as feminine because somehow nouns denoting females were given this form. ---
**Author:** ![I\_m\_Ron\_Burgundy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/9fc29f/32.png) [@I\_m\_Ron\_Burgundy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/I_m_Ron_Burgundy)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2007, 9:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/english-as-a-romance-language/411812/26 "2007-07-18T21:10:14Z")
AFAIK the constructs and grammar are Germanic, otherwise French would be a joke to us. There’s more to language than words, and there’s certainly more to it than word origins. PS I’m of the position that the French-English meat product talk is apocryphal horseshit. Anyone with 1 year of French knows a cow is une vache (bull-taureau, cattle-betail) and a pig is un cochon, that le porc and le boeuf actually refer to the meats. Unfortunately I don’t have an Old French dictionary handy. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2007, 12:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/english-as-a-romance-language/411812/27 "2007-07-19T00:18:07Z")
[QUOTE=I’m Ron Burgundy?] le porc and le boeuf actually refer to the meats. [/QUOTE] All you need is a Modern French dictionary to see that this criticism misses the point, because the words mean the animals too. _porc_ - pig; hog; pork. _boeuf_ - ‘beef; head of beef; steer; ox’. As a classical music fan, this word always makes me think of [_Le Boeuf sur le toit_](http://daniellathompson.com/Texts/Le_Boeuf/boeuf_chronicles.htm) by Darius Milhaud - it doesn’t mean the beef on the roof, it means the ox on the roof. In fact, I found no word for ox other than boeuf. (I’m vegetarian, I don’t have un chien in this.) ---
**Author:** ![Monty](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/monty/32/47_2.png) [@Monty](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Monty)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2007, 12:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/english-as-a-romance-language/411812/28 "2007-07-19T00:27:35Z")
That’s an interesting point except I’m fairly certain that ‘pork’ and ‘beef’ etc. came into English prior to Modern French. ---
**Author:** ![sturmhauke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e47c2d/32.png) [@sturmhauke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sturmhauke)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2007, 2:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/english-as-a-romance-language/411812/29 "2007-07-19T02:39:48Z")
A lot of French words entered English after the Normans took over in 1066. According to Wikipedia, [Old French](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_French) spans the time from around 1000 to 1300. ---
**Author:** ![Johanna](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/johanna/32/8318_2.png) [@Johanna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Johanna)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2007, 8:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/english-as-a-romance-language/411812/30 "2007-07-19T20:11:05Z")
[QUOTE=Monty] That’s an interesting point except I’m fairly certain that ‘pork’ and ‘beef’ etc. came into English prior to Modern French. [/QUOTE] Of course, the borrowing must have happened in the 12th century if not earlier, but if you trace the etymology back to Latin _porcus_ and _bos_, respectively, they mean the animals. In the _Barnhart Dictionary of Etymology_ we find OF _buef, boef_ means ‘beef, ox’, and was in English “Probably before 1300.” And OF _porc_ “About 1300” came “directly from Latin _porcus_ pig, tame swine.” Recall the famous line from an epistle of Horace where he called himself _“Epicuri de grege porcum.”_ [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/english-as-a-romance-language/411812.md?page=1)