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Are romance languages unclassificable? | ||
Tags: Occitan | Germanic Languages | Catalan | Romance Languages | Linguistic relationships | Dialect | English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| CS Groupie United States Joined 5129 days ago 49 posts - 74 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Icelandic, Latin, French | Message 17 of 35 04 April 2011 at 7:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
Probably not. I am aware of the etymology of the words that I use. I also lack the knowledge of another modern Germanic language to make appropriate controls. I do know that English and Icelandic are probably extremes as borrowing goes. Try to create an English sentence using only Romance words, and better yet Romance grammar. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| JW Hexaglot Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/egw Joined 6123 days ago 1802 posts - 2011 votes 22 sounds Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Biblical Hebrew Studies: Luxembourgish, Dutch, Greek, Italian | Message 18 of 35 04 April 2011 at 8:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
Here is something you will find interesting: "The following item shows what English would look like if it were purged of its non-Germanic words, and used German-style compounds instead of borrowings to express new concepts." http://groups.google.com/group/alt.language.artificial/brows e_thread/thread/64be1eddf0fb796d/69250bac6c7cbaff?#69250bac6 c7cbaff Edited by JW on 04 April 2011 at 8:15pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| OliSayeed Triglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 4985 days ago 4 posts - 8 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, Latin Studies: German, French, Ancient Greek | Message 19 of 35 04 April 2011 at 8:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
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http://anglish.wikia.com/wiki/Headside
This is also interesting, and un-English sounding, but it would definitely be even harder to create a similar example using only Romantic vocabulary (and, I suppose, grammar). 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| JW Hexaglot Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/egw Joined 6123 days ago 1802 posts - 2011 votes 22 sounds Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Biblical Hebrew Studies: Luxembourgish, Dutch, Greek, Italian | Message 20 of 35 04 April 2011 at 8:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, that's another good one. Anglish reminds me very much of Frisian. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| GREGORG4000 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5524 days ago 307 posts - 479 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish Studies: Japanese, Korean, Amharic, French | Message 21 of 35 04 April 2011 at 8:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I love my cookie, it's so bulky and fresh. Have a bite of the cookie if you wanna. You will need strong teeth and a tough jaw, for it's full of nuts, berries, eggs, bugs, dirt, truly all kinds of muck. If you're a weakling, you won't have a way to deal with it. You'll stammer, wobble about, go berserk, then spit it all over my new tiling. It'll bother me, so I'll yell at you and smear mint frosting on your forehead. Then I'll kick you out of my house. But don't worry too much. Just go for it, kid!
I wonder how right this is... Edited by GREGORG4000 on 04 April 2011 at 8:53pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| JW Hexaglot Senior Member United States youtube.com/user/egw Joined 6123 days ago 1802 posts - 2011 votes 22 sounds Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Biblical Hebrew Studies: Luxembourgish, Dutch, Greek, Italian | Message 22 of 35 04 April 2011 at 8:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
Nice one. See how choppy, strange, and childish it sounds? Additionally, you really can't write anything the least bit sophisticated using only Germanic words... Edited by JW on 04 April 2011 at 8:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| GREGORG4000 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5524 days ago 307 posts - 479 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish Studies: Japanese, Korean, Amharic, French | Message 23 of 35 04 April 2011 at 9:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Indeed it is so. I'm quite eager to learn more about Anglish though, seems heedworthy.
2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 24 of 35 04 April 2011 at 10:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This thread is really about the Romance family, but English has for better or worse dominated the last part of the discussion, so I would like to add a few comments.
I would not kick English out of the Germanic family, but it has deviated far enough from the other representatives of this family to warrant that it gets its own subfamily - at least when you look at things from a contemporany angle (the historical linguist criteria will of course still put it as a branch weering off from the Westgermanic subfamily). It is NOT primarily the humonguous number of loanwords that can justify this, although the loans from French and Latin definitely are more numerous than in any other Germanic language, but rather the systematic phonological, morphological and syntactical changes. The sound system of English has gone a far way from Anglo Saxon, and the changes since then are just as fundamental as those used to justify the division of the Germanic languages in an Eastern, Northern and Western branch. Add to this the special developments in the English grammar, such as the obligatory uses of "do" and the parallel verbal system built on present participles (the "continuous" forms). The loss of morphological markers is not unusual in the Germanic family - actually only High German and Icelandic have kept something like the full sets of forms), and a language like Afrikaans has shed even more of its morphology. But as a consequence of this loss of morphological constraints English has introduced a blurred separation between verbs and substantives, which has gone a lot further than in the other Germanic languages - actually it reminds me more about Bahasa Indonesia. But it has kept important features like the separation between strong and weak verbs, and all the 'grammar words' are of Germanic origin. If I look at the Germanic family as I did with the Romance languages in my first post in this thread, then my personal feeling is that the Nordic languages still constitute a valid subfamily, but the historical division between Icelandic/Norwegian on the one hand and Danish/Swedish on the other has become totally irrelevant - now the separation goes between the very conservative Icelandic/Faroese versus Norwegian/ Swedish/Danish. Disregarding the extinct Eastern branch, something similar has happened with the 'continental' Germanic languages. The main representatives now are Dutch and High German, but these are just the centres around which a bewildering number of dialects has clustered - the whole range of Western and Central Germanic languages once formed an immense dialectical continuum. If you had look at the situation around 1500 you would have had at least an additional 'conglomeration centre' in Low German, but today it is more like a bipolar situation, with Swiss German, Letztebuergisch, Platt (and Plautt) plus Frisian as fringe phenomena - interesting in their own right, but not on the level of Dutch and High German. And German is the 'grandma' of this bipolar subfamily, just as Icelandic is in the Nordic subfamily. Frisian is a special case because it might have formed a bridge to English if Wilhelm the Conquerer hadn't invaded Britain, but now it is just a splintered and moribund remnant of a formerly important language. And Afrikaans is of course still closer to Dutch than to anything else, but unlike the Dutch/Flemish and German dialects its geographical isolation will virtually guarantee its independence - or rather, if it loses out then it won't be to Dutch or High German, but rather to English. And English is on its own now, but still within the Germanic family. Edited by Iversen on 04 April 2011 at 10:48pm 9 persons have voted this message useful |
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