French origins of English?

[Serenata67]

@Dr.Drake

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.

Even though it’s post-Norman conquest, the language was still evolving. Heck, it’s still evolving today. The Brits continued to influence the language through their communications with both (what is now) England and the lower French dialects.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

@Pleonast

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.

But early Middle English still retained a good deal of morphological complexity, and that was hundreds of years later. German aside, most of the other languages in its family have also lost much of their grammatical gender systems, and Danish in particular is in some aspects even simpler in its morphology than English (although it does possess more irregular verbs).

[Kobal2]

@Tamerlane

Medieval society was surprisingly legalistic and even kings usually needed a lot of legal cover.

Lawyers, man. Making society more complicated from day one :p. But I wholeheartedly agree : reading The Accursed Kings blew my mind re. the intricacies of the feudal society. It was much removed from the “trebuchet diplomacy” version I had been taught in school.

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.

I stand corrected after a bit of research : the English kings did have to pay homage to the French ones as I remembered, but over their possessions in France (Anjou, Aquitaine and Normandy) rather than oversea. And that’s what the Edward the Third eventually refused to do (or rather, he was OK with paying his respects to Charles VI through a weak homage oath, but wouldn’t be his liege).

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.

As with most conflicts, I doubt one could point to just the one “real” reason.