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How Germanic is English? | ||
Tags: Germanic Languages | English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Davy Putnam Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4626 days ago 5 posts - 37 votes Speaks: Spanish, English* Studies: German, Ancient Greek | Message 25 of 54 04 May 2012 at 3:23am | IP Logged | |||||
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Back to the thread's original topic, there are a few more things worth mentioning about how Germanic English is.
As many have pointed out, English has a great deal of words of Latin origin, mostly from Old French. This stemmed from the Norman invasion of England in 1066, which replaced the English speaking aristocracy with a French speaking one. What that means for the English language today is that there many synonyms where the more formal word is usually of Latin origin, and the informal one is of Germanic origin. For example, "enter" and "come in" are synonyms, and the first is from Old French and the second is Germanic, and "enter" seems to sound more formal than "come in." There are also legal terms that were influenced by French. For example, "attorney general" follows the French pattern of putting the adjective after the noun it modifies. The new French aristocracy had an interesting effect on words for food as well. Often the name of a particular dish will be of French origin, but the name of the animal from which it comes will be of Germanic origin. This is because the upper classes were the ones eating these dishes, while the lower classes were the ones actually tending to the animals. For example, "veal" is from Old French whereas "calf" and "cow" are Germanic. So English does have a huge number of French borrowings. But grammatically, the language is truly Germanic. English forms its strong verbs by ablaut, which is actually present in every Indo-European language, but rarely as consistent and systematic as in the Germanic strong verb paradigm. Thus there are obvious similarities to modern German: drink, drank, drunk vs. trinken, trank, getrunken; or eat, ate, eaten vs. essen, aß, gegessen. English also forms the simple past as well as the participles of weak verbs by adding a dental suffix to the stem: end, ended, ended vs. enden, endete, geendet. English forms comparatives and superlatives practically identically: rich, richer, richest vs reich, reicher, reichst. English verbs can only be inflected for the simple present and the simple past, whereas French verbs can form a variety of different tenses and aspects without using auxiliaries. For example, to express the future in English we use a modal construction: "I will go to the store tomorrow"; we don't have an inflection to add onto "go" that indicates future tense, whereas in French this is not the case. As someone already mentioned, English's function words, such as prepositions are Germanic. For example, compared to modern German: to vs zu, in vs in, by vs bei, on vs an, of vs ab, if vs ob, through vs durch, etc. And even with phrases influenced by French, like attorney general, we still treat them as though they were English phrases. That is, most people would pluralize attorney general by saying attorney generals, not attorneys general, although that would presumably be correct, since attorney is the noun. It has been basically reanalyzed as though it were an English noun phrase, and the -s plural formation is merely added to the end. Modern German too has many French borrowings, (but not nearly as many as English) but at any rate it has retained more distinctive Germanic features than English has, so it's more obviously Germanic. English has lost its cases except for the personal pronouns. It has also lost most of its noun classes, save for a few exceptions like foot/feet, but even there it lost the umlaut (compare modern German Fuß/Füße). So on the surface English might seem more French/Latin influenced than it really is. But it's really mainly the vocabulary that has been heavily influenced, whereas at its grammatical core it has remained Germanic. It has simply lost or simplified a lot of the grammatical features that characterized earlier stages of English and other Germanic languages, but hasn't picked up the French/Latin ones in their place. Edited by Davy Putnam on 04 May 2012 at 3:25am 18 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| sipes23 Diglot Senior Member United States pluteopleno.com/wprs Joined 4658 days ago 134 posts - 235 votes  Speaks: English*, Latin Studies: Spanish, Ancient Greek, Persian | Message 26 of 54 04 May 2012 at 5:50am | IP Logged | |||||
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I have another Germanic point to the English ledger. English does not verb raise the way French does:
•I always work. • *I work always. •Je travaille toujours. I think a more interesting question to ask is how Celtic is English? But that's off topic. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4560 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 27 of 54 04 May 2012 at 9:26am | IP Logged | |||||
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If Brahui can be considered a Dravidian language despite having a 75% non-Dravidian vocabulary, then English is also pretty secure in its Germanicness. Also, as someone has mentioned before, it may have undergone one crazy vowel shift, but it still has one of the most conservative consonant inventories among Germanic languages - even Icelandic has lost /w/ while some dialects of English have even preserved /ʍ/ or /hw/.
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| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 4844 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 28 of 54 04 May 2012 at 12:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
French distinguishes between stressed pronouns which are real pronouns and unstressed ones which are actually verbal prefixes, while in English object pronouns seem to replace the subject, that's what happened with ye and you. About double negatives, how often can one hear something like I don't do nothing instead of I do nothing? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6697 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 29 of 54 04 May 2012 at 1:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think English is the odd-man-out here. I can think of many languages where the adverb "always" is placed after the verb (in main clauses, that is). Edited by jeff_lindqvist on 06 May 2012 at 2:13pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4653 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 30 of 54 04 May 2012 at 5:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
An earlier post linked to a famous article called "Uncleftish Beholding" (which can also be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding ) This is an example of English with Romance vocabulary removed. I think the more interesting question, though, is could English survive with all the Germanic vocabulary removed? Aside from needing replacements for a lot of short functional words, I think it could function quite well. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Zireael Triglot Senior Member Poland Joined 4439 days ago 518 posts - 636 votes Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, Spanish Studies: German, Sign Language, Tok Pisin, Arabic (Yemeni), Old English | Message 31 of 54 05 May 2012 at 10:50am | IP Logged | |||||
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Has someone seen this book?
How we'd talk... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| sipes23 Diglot Senior Member United States pluteopleno.com/wprs Joined 4658 days ago 134 posts - 235 votes Speaks: English*, Latin Studies: Spanish, Ancient Greek, Persian | Message 32 of 54 05 May 2012 at 6:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
Maybe I'm misunderstanding: If French moves the verb ahead of "always" and so do many other languages, how is it the odd man out? That would seem to make French typical and English odd. But even if French is odd in this sort of verb raising, I think it is fair game to pick on French. It has been a source of many English words and is likely the reason that people may think that English isn't Germanic. If English is borrowing lots of French words, why not French syntax too? I guess that was my underlying and unspoken point for bringing up verb raising in French. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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