Isaac Asimov in his science column once explained that English was basically two languages - the Germanic peasant language of the Anglo-Saxons, overlaid with the French language of their Norman overlords. (All, of course, combined with Latin from the learned class).
Thus the cow or pig the peasant raised became beef and pork when it made it to the lords’ tables. The people using the French words rarely interacted with the live animals… There are two words for a lot of things in English, the basic word and the “fancy” word, like sweat and perspire.
He cited Macbeth:
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood
Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather
The multitudinous seas incarnadine,
Making the green one red.
Where Shakespeare basically explains the $10 word to the humble uneducated masses with the 10¢ ones “making the green one red.”
Also, just to be clear, the apostrophe is a late introduction. Originally, English formed possessives like other Germanic languages, with just an s, no apostrophe. So it’s not that possessive pronouns are transgressing a rule. It’s that possessive nouns started doing something strange for really no good reason.
David Crystal’s The Stories of English tries to correct what he calls “the standard history” that mostly revolves around the Norman Conquest, the one that Asimov repeats. That was obviously important, but so were the internal changes.
We like to think that the language is changing especially fast today, but the reality is that English changes all the time and has been for a thousand years, mostly through the spoken language, especially England’s million dialects. Formal writing strives to keep up and the grammarians throw out the oral language because it’s not on pieces of paper in front of them.
I mention Crystal because he covers a lot of issues that are implied in this thread and I own a copy, but any library should have a dozen modern books about the history of English that fill out Asimov’s one-dimensional picture.
Also, I wouldn’t cite Asimov for any facts. He was much like Bill Bryson in that he generally repeated whatever he heard or read anywhere that sounded good to him. Given that Asimov was a chemist, maybe he’s more reliable on chemistry or related sciences, but not for linguistics.
I revered Asimov when I was young and I have dozens of books by him, including all the collected essays from F&SF. There were 399, and I’ve gone back to read the few that weren’t collected.
His faults today are more obvious. One that he couldn’t help is that we knew so much less about the fine details of everything, from astronomy to evolution. He could read and regurgitate in simple, understandable style anything that got said, but the world changed underneath him.
The other fault is the lack of nuance about people. His histories are records of great men and places and battles and all the standard textbook stuff of the 1950s. He had no economics or sociology or political science. Linguistics turned from a field of examining printed pages to one of listening to people in all their idiosyncratic wonder. He couldn’t have coped.
I’d still put Asimov over Bryson, though. The couple of times I’ve tried to read his books I found a factual error about every other page. Asimov’s facts may have been superseded, but they were rarely wrong for their time.
So is he wrong? Do other languages (French, Spanish, German, Italian, etc.) have a dual character, where there is a more formal expression that is linguistically unrelated to the more formal word?
My point was that this view, which was omnipresent at the time, is now thought to be oversimplistic. It’s not wrong, but it concentrates too much attention on a small slice of the changes in English. The language existed before the Norman Conquest as a mix of various speeches and also went through a huge number of internal challenges since. Those are as important to the development of modern English as having two words for meat.
Moreover, the codification of what constitutes “proper” speech developed in the 19th century as a reaction to the rise of lower-class literacy and mass media. Look through the first edition of the OED and all you will see are quotes from Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, and the Bible rather than the contemporary speech rising up all around the compilers. The grammarians that laid down the “rules” for how she is spoke influenced many generations of schoolteachers in all the English-speaking countries down to the present day and those “rules” were pulled out of their asses. Fowler’s Modern English Usage put the lie to many of these “rules” a century ago, but they are still mentioned today, even here in language threads.
The result is much like American schoolbooks of the era, when history was the story of Great Men and slavery and Indian slaughter were barely mentioned. The full story is far more nuanced, and complicated, and interesting than the half-story.
As stated above by Exapno, this is a broad oversimplification of the nature of the English language. It is not just two registers, one Norman French and one Anglo Saxon.
Furthermore, there are many languages that have multiple registers. For example, Bengali. There are two standard forms of Bengali:
(1) Standard Bengali based on the upper-class spoken dialect of Calcutta, known as cholitbhasha (colloquial language)
(2) Standard Bengali based on the Sanskritized vocabulary and grammatical forms of formal literature, known as sadhubhasha (language of the sages)
German is an interesting case. The language contains several dialects, called in English High, Central, and Low German. Most of the differences come from a vowel shift that High German made but the others didn’t, but vocabulary also has multiple counterparts. “The German word for “apple” is Appel north of Speyer and Apfel below it.”
As German spread in influence, it was adopted by speakers in many countries, each putting their own spin on it. Swiss German mixes German and French originated words and is more a spoken language than the official written Schriftdeutsch. Yiddish is largely German but sweeps in words from Hebrew and many of the local languages in eastern Europe. In an ironic reverse, Pennsylvania Dutch has had large vocabulary influences from English.
English may be especially noted for such behavior, but whenever any language starts making connections with other speakers, the two will influence one another.