Indeed, all you have to do is look at some French text and note how many words are familiar. A native English speaker with a good vocabulary can often get the jist of written French without having studied the language much at all, such is the extent of the shared vocabulary (spoken French is another matter).
Compare that to texts in other closely-related languages such as German or Dutch. While there are still many recognisable words, overall the written language is not as easy to decipher for an English speaker. Many of the shared words are obscured by vowel and consonant shifts that have caused the Germanic languages to diverge over the centuries. The words that we adopted more recently from French have not been affected nearly as much.
I think the best way to think of English is as a creole. First, Anglo-Saxen was a creole of west (Angles and Saxons) and north (Jutes) Germanic elements, with some borrowing from both Latin (from the Roman occupation) and Celtic (from the previous inhabitants of England). When Beowulf was first rediscovered, it was assumed to be an old Norse saga.
Then came the Normans. They were Norse, but had adopted the French language and were thoroughly French. I assume there were some Norse elements in their language. But the language at court was Norman French for a couple centuries. And English as we know became a creole of French and the older Anglo-Saxon, losing most of its inflection in the process. Apparently, a large percentage of French words in English appeared first in Chaucer. By Shakespeare’s time, the language had essentially assumed its modern form. Nearly all the words were from either Gemanic or French (not directly from Latin). Then came the rediscovery of the classics and with it, a large amount of borrowing directly from Latin.
An interesting pair of words (but there are many others) is “fragile” and “frail”. Both words ultimately derive from, I think, Latin fragilis, but the first is a late borrowing directly from Latin while the second comes from French “frele” (French also has the word “fragile”, also a late borrowing from Latin, while frele derives from late Latin, early French etc.).
Finally, I want to say that way over half the words in the dictionary derive from French, while way over half the words in the average discourse are of Germanic origin.
Once I read German and French translations of “Jabberwocky”. It was an eye-opener. Although I am not really fluent in either language, it was clear that the German translation captured the essence of the original, at least in prosody, while the French failed miserably to do so. Not that it was a bad translation, but the sound patterns of English cannot be mimicked in French, while they can in German.
You might add that it’s hard to be poetic without French-derived words.
Poetry c.1384, from O.Fr. poetrie (13c.), from M.L. poetria (c.650), from L. poeta (see poet) [Though I am in total agreement that far too much writing suffers from the ‘try to be impressive with needlessly long words’ disease. Just saying you can’t blame the French language for that.]
I’m not trying to say that you can make a French-free sentence, I’m saying that instead of thanking them, French needs apologize to English for uglying up our tongue.
The Celts were apparently significantly more widespread than Wendell’s first post indicates – the LaTene culture in Switzerland and Austria, for example, Cisalpine Gaul (Piedmont and surrounding areas in Northern Italy), and undefined areas near the above – some inhabitants of Roman Germania were almost certainly Celtic, but this is very hard to ‘prove’. Germanic expansion before local historic times pushed them back to the areas Wendell specified.
There was a significant impact on Old English by the tongue of the Danelaw – an Old Norse/Anglo-Saxon creole, apparently. Many pronouns and auxiliary verbs, usually considered among the least ‘changeable’ forms under the pressure of intruding tongues, in late Anglo-Saxon and Middle English derived from the Danelaw, not from the pre-Viking Anglo-Sxaon forms.
Old French outside Normandy, and to some extent in Normandy, was significantly more impacted by the Frankish (West Germanic) tongue than by Old Norse (a North Germanic tongue).
“British” was a P-Celtic tongue, quite different from the Q-Celtic tongue of Ireland (Gaelic). and of Man It was spoken, significantly impacted by Vulgar Latin during the four-century Roman occupation, throughout what is now England and Wales (probably more as a dialect cluster rather than a single standard language). Its survivors included Welsh, Cornish, and the tongues of Strathclyde and Rheged, the first two surviving into modern times (though Cornish became “officially” extinct in 1799).
English grammar is West Germanic, greatly “simplified” by movement to analytic structure, and significantly affected by the tongue of the Danelaw, as noted above. English vocabulary is extremely diverse in origin – the old joke that English doesn’t borrow words from other language; it drags them into back alleys and mugs them, is not far from the truth – but as noted by previous posters, borrowings from French over a millennium comprise something like half of the basic non-technical vocabulary.
Excalibre provided a rather extensive discussion of Celtic impact on Galego (Galician) in lissener’s “other Spanish languages” thread; perhaps someone could link to it?
Well, no - it doesn’t seem France ever laid claim to England itself until English rebels offered the throne to the French crown prince Louis ( later Louis VIII ) in ~1216. Louis based his very dubious claims not on French overlordship over Normandy in 1066, but rather on the condemnation of John from around the time of Arthur of Brittany’s disappearance ( highly probable murder ) and his marriage to John’s niece, Blanche of Castile. At any rate it came to naught and it wasn’t a claim that was seriously renewed ( primarily as it was phenomenally weak ).
Medieval society was surprisingly legalistic and even kings usually needed a lot of legal cover. The French kings had no legal right to overlordship to England and never fought for such. However they did have overlordship over the Norman/Angevin domains in France and that was the primary cause of conflict. The Plantagenets with their wealth, independence and the status conferred as English kings posed a serious internal threat to French royal authority.
The Hundred Years War technically was the result of a succession dispute over the French crown. However its real roots were in the steady erosion of the Angevin position in France.
Indeed, one book on Celtic history I have asserts that by the tenth century BCE, much of Europe, from Asia Minor (modern Turkey) to Hispania, had pockets of Celtic populations. IIRC, it even said that parts of northern Italy had a Celtic-derived law code into the 20th century. I’d cite the title and author if the book wasn’t in storage, but I’ll hunt around and see if I can find corroborating evidence online.
For anyone who wants to learn about the history of the English language, I would like to recommend the book “The Stories of English” by David Crystal. It is a wonderful book.
I audited a graduate course on the topic this past semester. I read the above book in addition to the assigned text. Crystal was a much better writer and more intellectually rigorous.
Yes, we are all entitled to our own aesthetic opinions, but this is just nonsense.
Regarding Latin influence on English: Latin has been continuously influencing English for at least 1500 years. However, a word that was borrowed from Latin 1500 years ago won’t be the same if it were borrowed today. In fact, some words were borrowed multiple times from Latin, for example: canal/channel, poor/pauper, coy/quiet, straight/strait/strict, disc/disk/dish/desk/dais/discus. See also here.
Sure we inherited lots of words from French. But nonetheless the idea that we “owe a lot” to the French for this is absurd.
Imagine we didn’t inherit any words from French. Would we be standing around saying “Oh there are so many things that we don’t have a word for! I wish I could use that object over there, but we don’t have a word for it, so I can’t.”?
No, of course not, we’d come up with our own words, and probably have a more consistent and phonetic language as a result.
We have a much more rhetorically powerful and poetic language as a result, because we often have 2 words for everything. For example, (speaking of Freedom Fries), we have “freedom” (Germanic) and “liberty” (French), virtually synonymous.
Sorry, I accidentally reversed that. I meant to draw the connection that the area of Brittany, which is closer to France than to England, was connected, thus during immigrations/emmigrations, French words, ideas, etc. would transfer into the English language… I shouldn’t try to remember my college linguistics classes when I’ve put in a 12 hour day…
Yes, but it saddens me that there are so few words that mean the same thing. We need more redundancy dammit!
Still, I suppose if every concept had 20 words in English, taken from 20 languages, our language would be more “poetic” but we’d owe so, so much to the wonderful people who gave us those words.
In strictly idealized terms, creoles are fully functional languages that evolve from pidgins. A pidgin is a severely chopped down, minimal language that comes into existence when people from two different language communities need to communicate without any immediate need for being “correct”. Usually it’s for reasons of trade. A creole develops when a generation of children grows up hearing primarily the pidgin being used.
Given the examples of creoles that exist today, such as Spanish-African and English-Polynesian, it’s evident that the parent languages have to be pretty far apart to begin with. I doubt if it would have been possible for there to be an Anglo-Saxon/Danish “creole” because the languages were far too close to each other at the time for that to happen. They probably still are too close. And earlier Anglo-Saxon was in no way a creole, because the mere existence of loanwords–even a great many of them–does not a creole make.
As for the French contribution, it is primarily in the vocabulary. However, nearly all of these words (e.g. all of the -ion words) soon changed in their pronunciation to follow the Germanic pattern of pronunciation, which calls for the first syllable of a root morpheme* to be stressed. In German, for example, the borrowing of “-ion” words from French is far, far less prevalent than in English, and there the pronunciation of such words is much closer to that used in Standard French, with the accent on the “-ion”.
*“Root morpheme” is the root of a word. ‘Running’, ‘run’, ‘ran’, ‘runs’ all have the root morpheme “run”.
True. I realize that calling English a creole is controversial. (And I think you’re agreeing with my point that it is meaningful to call a language a creole.) The main evidence for it is the vast simplification of verb endings. English conjugation is simpler than that of any other Indo-European language that I’m aware of (which isn’t saying much). I’m not sure how to explain that without a creolization process.
English has also lost noun genders, in contrast to most other IE languages. I’m not sure how to explain that either if not for creolization.
So even if you’re not willing to call English a creole, I think all linguists agree that a grammatical simplification process occurred to the Anglo-Saxon language during its interaction with the Norse speakers in the Danelaw.
No trouble. There’s still a problem with dates, though. The Breton migration to what is now Brittany was probably largely complete by the time the Anglo-Saxon migrations really got going. An earlier Anglocentric theory that they were fleeing Saxon depredations is probably not so. I’d recommend Giot at al.'s The British Settlement of Brittany for those who are interested. There’s a theory that Brittany was the conduit by which the King Arthur stories traveled from Wales / Cornwall to France, and thence to England. It rests on thinly documented evidence, but it’s the best theory going. That’s post-Norman-conquest, though.
I termed what was spoken in the Danelaw a creole because it was a tongue paretaking of both parent languages where the grammar was a melange of the two. I suppose that Germanic grammatical strucutre in the two was sufficiently similar to make it not a true creole – but I don’t have a better term for that sort of intermeshing. Comment?
