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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 6143 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese | Message 9 of 31 21 June 2008 at 2:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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I did wonder whether the familiarity was due to exposure at school. I spent seven years studying French,five
years studying Latin and 2 years studying Spanish but only 6 months of German (until just recently). However I remember how those who took both French and German would always complain that German was a lot more difficult, mainly due to having to learn lots more vocab, often words which were the same in English and French but different in German. One thing I have encountered with Germanic speakers who speak exceptionally good English is that they sometimes underestimate the amount of passive English they receive everyday. This helps them greatly when they are studying English and makes it seem to them that he languages are closer than they are. There may be similar effect, although on a smaller scale, happening with the Romance languages towards English (certainly in the US with its Hispanic population). One final point, UK armed forces/foreign office offer financial awards for people who pass foreign language exams. All the Romance languages and all the Scandinavian languages, including Icelandic, are in the easiest category while German is in its own category between the lowest and middle level! Until the highest level of proficiency when German is relegated into the bottom group! Seems like a case of "six and two threes", probably complicated by the fact that most English speakers' experience of the Germanic languages is limited to German which is one of the more difficult members of the family. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 6143 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese | Message 10 of 31 21 June 2008 at 2:19pm | IP Logged | ||
See the sprachbund link. Bulgarian grammar has similarities with Romanian, Albanian and Greek. Certainly coming from a Russian background Bulgarian grammar seems more similar to English than Russian. (no noun cases, complex compound tenses etc) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6037 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 11 of 31 21 June 2008 at 3:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm still cautious to accept this Wikipedia article at face value. Greek definitely has a strong influence but in my opinion it is more in terms of vocabulary than grammar. Romanian and Albanian... I really can't see them as a source for any significant influence. Edited by Sennin on 21 June 2008 at 3:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| TheElvenLord Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6083 days ago 915 posts - 927 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Cornish, English* Studies: Spanish, French, German Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin | Message 12 of 31 21 June 2008 at 3:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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Lets give a little history of English shall we, which may sort out why there are all these languages.
At first, there was Celtic (Well, Brythonic and Godielic). When the Romans invaded, there were alot of loanwords taken from Roman to Celtic. One example is : Kegin (Kitchen) comes from Cocina Not only did the Latin language influence Celtic, but every other language around them. After the Romans left, 2 major groups invaded the land. The Angles and the Saxons - Now known as the Anglo-saxons. The Angles came from an area in N Germany/Denmark. The Saxons also came from N Germany. Both languages of these people were mostly Germanic, with latin influences. When they both arrived, this mixed with the Celtic languages (or just annihilated them) and there we have it. In different regions, there are different mixes. In the Celtic nations (The nations of Celts left after the Romans invaded) there was a mix of Latin, Celtic (Brythonic in Cornwall and Wales, Godielic in Scotland, Isle of man and Ireland) and SOME (But very little) Anglo-saxon. In places in the North, the language was also influenced by the Vikings, of which there are quite a few loanwords. So, in general, we have a mix of Anglo-saxon, Latin and Celtic. Now, In 1066, the Normans invaded, and William (known as The conqueror) became king of Angleland (England) after the last Saxon king (Edward) died. This culminated in a final battle of the Saxons near Hastings. The Normans brought their French related language with them, and spread it around Britain. So, in conclusion. English is a hybrid language, made from: Angle (German) Saxon (German) Viking Celtic Norman (French) Latin Hope this solves a few things for you. English is related to all of them! (Flippin invaders, always pushing us Celts around :D ) (I am a linguist ( as in Linguistics), this is from what I have been taught at school, and from the Internet) TEL 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Fat-tony Nonaglot Senior Member United Kingdom jiahubooks.co.uk Joined 6143 days ago 288 posts - 441 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian, Esperanto, Thai, Laotian, Urdu, Swedish, French Studies: Mandarin, Indonesian, Arabic (Written), Armenian, Pali, Burmese | Message 13 of 31 21 June 2008 at 3:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have also read about it in Crystal/dp/0521559677/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1214079 741&sr=1-1">this book]this
book[/URL] among others and it seems to be an accepted fact. Don't forget that the Slavs and Romanians are relative newcomers to the Balkans and that Albanian and Greek, or at least their ancestors, would have spoken over a far larger area than they occupy today. The argument goes: Romanian and Bulgarian would have been adopted by a local populace who would have spoken a language similar to Albanian or Greek and therefore the incoming Slavonic and Romance languages would have been adopted some of the traits of the native languages. I'm not too certain on the linguistic details of the Balkan sprachbund but the South Asian and South-East Asian sprachbund (plural?) certainly appear well-founded. Edited by Fat-tony on 21 June 2008 at 3:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| alfajuj Diglot Senior Member Taiwan Joined 6214 days ago 121 posts - 126 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Taiwanese, French | Message 14 of 31 23 June 2008 at 6:00am | IP Logged | ||
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Comparing English to German and then English to French, I think you will see that English is at heart very Germanic. But English is a parallel family member with German so sometimes the similarities are not easy to recognize. For lexical similarity, by Ethnologue's method, English was evaluated to have a lexical similarity of 60% with German and 27% with French.
You see a lot of superficial resemblances to French because there are so many loan words, which leads one to believe that English is much closer to French than it really is. The cognates with French are just a lot easier to spot than the Germanic family similarities. It's interesting to look at a few example sentences: English: The sun comes. German: Die Sonne kommt. French: Le soleil vient. English: The moon is white. German: Der Mond ist weiss. French: La lune est blanche. English: This is my brother. German: Dieses ist mein Bruder. French: C'est mon frère. But... English: an important criminal German: ein wichtiger Verbrecher French: un criminel important Sometimes both the German and the French words are both from another source, such as Latin, so it's hard to tell which one the English is closer to: English: esthetics, grammar German:Ästhetik, Grammatik French esthétique, grammaire 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6014 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 15 of 31 23 June 2008 at 7:31am | IP Logged | ||
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The reason people think English is quite far from German is the matter of noun-case declensions, and all that technical terminology.
English-speaking society placed a lot of stock in Latin as the source of all true culture and many of the first vernacular writings were translations of Latin. These translations were heavily influenced by the originals in terms of language and structures used (they were stylistically more like Latin than they were like contemporary original texts) so it wouldn't surprise me to find that some of that had rubbed off into the compound tenses. Spanish is an easy language for anyone to learn on the grounds of its internal regularity, so I wouldn't accept it being easy for English speakers to learn as an indicator of similarity between the languages. The Frisian language group, they tell me, are the current nearest relatives of English (excluding the "New Englishes" that have emerged in the last few centuries). They are described as unintelligible with English, but old Frisian fishermen claim to have had no problems communicating with locals when setting ashore on the east coast of the UK. I met a Swedish man who told me about the first time he visited Scotland. He got a bit lost and asked a local for directions. "Gae doon the rad and turn richt at the hoos wi the ploo" ("go down the road and turn right at the house with the plough") -- he says he was wondering if he was in Denmark. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| zerothinking Senior Member Australia Joined 6375 days ago 528 posts - 772 votes Speaks: English* | Message 16 of 31 24 June 2008 at 12:35am | IP Logged | ||
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sorry if someone already explained this to you..
(didn't read all the posts, just the gists) It's simple a matter of English having borrowed the words from Latin and French because French was once a lingua franca, most of the scientific words today are from either Greek, French, or Latin, or other languages. Vocabulary in general doesn't show necessarily where the language comes from. But if you were to look at the HIGH FREQUENCY words in English, the ones that are like Romance languages aren't THAT provelant. The words we use, the main part of the language, is from Old English, and Germanic origins, which makes sense. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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