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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| shallom777 Groupie United States Joined 6059 days ago 42 posts - 43 votes Studies: Spanish, French | Message 9 of 49 14 April 2008 at 2:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
I’m glad someone has asked this question. I believe the English language itself is a great mystery for a couple reasons. Here’s why. Every Germanic or Romance language is highly inflected, but English is barely inflected at all. English is what linguists call a Analytic language, and as it says on Wikipedia, a Analytic language “is any language where syntax and meaning are shaped more by use of particles and word order rather than by inflection. The opposite of an analytic language is a synthetic language.” As far as I know, the only other Analytic language is Chinese! So, here is the first mystery - how in the world did the grammar of the English language end up resembling the Chinese language? The second mystery is why English is still categorized as a Germanic language. I understand that hundreds of years ago English and German were very similar, but not anymore. In fact, as it has been mentioned on this forum many times that Spanish is the easiest language for an English speaker to learn. This is because there are thousands of English-Spanish cognates. According to Wikipedia, “Sixty percent of the English vocabulary has its roots in Latin”. If over half of the words in the English language are of Latin origin, than it could be argued that English is now a Latin language! What say you? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6450 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes  Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 10 of 49 14 April 2008 at 3:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
Afrikaans is just as analytic as English. Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish are pretty close to analytic as well, they're surely not highly inflected. The only Germanic languages that can really be called inflecting are Icelandic, Faroese, and German, and at least in the latter two, some declensions and conjugations are dying out (the genitive for example, and at least in German the subjunctive) and they are becoming more analytic. The Romance are developing in the same direction and they're certainly not highly inflecting. The noun declension has completely died out in almost all of them, word order is fixed (in some more than in others) and the verbal system is definitely simplifying in French and Italian (the simple past is dying out; the subjunctive is getting rarer and rarer). By the way, there are few languages whose historical development is as well understood as the development of English from Old English. You can find scores of books on this topic which explain precisely when those changes happened and how.
Languages are usually categorized by "genetic affiliation", i.e. English is a Germanic language because it shares a common ancestor with German, Dutch, Norwegian, Gothic, Icelandic, etc. It is not a Romance language, because it hasn't directly evolved from Latin, even if it has borrowed a lot of vocabulary over the centuries. Edited by Marc Frisch on 14 April 2008 at 3:35pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| shallom777 Groupie United States Joined 6059 days ago 42 posts - 43 votes Studies: Spanish, French | Message 11 of 49 14 April 2008 at 7:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Marc Frisch,
Thank you for your feedback. Truthfully, I have never looked at Afrikaans grammar (which I just did) and you are correct, it has a very analytic grammar. I know for a fact that German is very inflected because both my father and grandfather speak the language. I have studied the history of the English language and have never come across an author who gave an adequate reason for why English became an analytic language. There is a period between Old English and Modern English when someone or a group of someones decided to simplify the language and did not leave much detail as to why. One article I read (I can’t remember where) said it had to do with the invention of the printing press, which would make since. The point I wanted to make was if you look at 99% of all the languages in Europe, the grammar is highly inflected while English grammar is neat and straight forward. I wish all languages had English grammar. Spanish, for example, is a real pain when it comes to verbs and nouns. After two years of Spanish I think I have the rules down. I'm in no way saying English is a perfect language (ex, spelling), but all languages would do well to follow its example of a very simplified grammar. Personally, I believe the easy grammar is one reason for English’s success over the last few hundred years. Now, if Spanish simplified their verbs and nouns, they could have a potential Lingua franca on par with English since their spelling and pronunciation is just awesome. As for "genetic affiliation", I understand how the languages are categorized; I just don't think it's not very logical. If one was to compare the number of cognates between German- English verses Spanish- English there is no contest. German/English cognates are a few hundred and Spanish/English are tens of thousands. Thus, English is a Latin language. This is just my opinion. I would like to hear what others have to say about this. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Rameau Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5892 days ago 149 posts - 258 votes 4 sounds Speaks: English*, GermanC1, Danish Studies: Swedish, French, Icelandic | Message 12 of 49 15 April 2008 at 3:03am | IP Logged | |||||
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Genetic relation seems to me like the only logical way to classify languages. Every language is constantly borrowing oddles of words from other languages, but that scarcely changes languages they intially branched off of...
In any case, the raw number of cognates is a bit deceptive. While English may have more total cognates with the romance languages, many of these are legal or scientific terms, fields in which most of the other Germanic languages also borrow a great many Latin words. However, when you consider the most common and essential words (I, you, me, bed, cup, foot, go, open, cold, hot, red, feel, find, do, think, see etc.), it soon becomes evident that the vast majority of these are Germanic. Also, it's important not to confuse "German" and "Germanic"; it's rather unfortunate that these two terms are so similar in English (certainly not the case in many other languages, incuding German itself), as it seems to suggest that German is somehow the "default" language, which the others are variations on, instead of being a unique member with many of its own specific idiosyncracies. That said, German's still got barrels of cognates with English, even if some of them aren't so instantly obvious due to sound/meaning shifts (it's got quite a lot of French loan words, too, just like English). And the grammar (cases aside) is actually quite similar--far more than with the Romance langues. It never ceases to surprise me how similarly certain ideas are expressed in both languages--even in some moderately idiomatic circumstances. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Eriol Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6651 days ago 118 posts - 130 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Portuguese | Message 13 of 49 15 April 2008 at 3:39am | IP Logged | |||||
For some people it's apparently important to know whether Finno-Ugric or Germanic languages reached northern Scandinavia first. I don't really think it's that important. From a scientific point of view the people who followed the retracing ice north most likely spoke some now extinct tongue that didn't belong to either language group. And since there are no written accounts, all the evidence we could ever hope for will be merely circumstantial. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6224 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 14 of 49 15 April 2008 at 5:44am | IP Logged | |||||
Persian (another Indo-European language) is also quite analytic, and has been for even longer than English.
I'd recommend that you read "The Loom of Languages". It has some examples of entirely-Germanic passages in English. It's extremely difficult, if not impossible, to create English passages based entirely on vocabulary from the Romance branch. Essential words such as 'the' are Germanic. Beyond that, as others have said, the classification of languages into families is based on their history, rather than where the current words have been borrowed from. An example similar to English in this regards is Persian: it is still considered Indo-European, despite the huge flux of Arabic words into the language. Linguists use words that tend not to be borrowed (such as familial relations) to try to figure out these classifications. English is clearly Germanic in this regard as well. For instance, compare the English, German, and Italian for father, mother, sister, and brother. father, Vater, padre mother, Mutter, madre brother, Brüder, fratello sister, Schwester, sorella Taking historical sound shifts into account, the German and English are even more similar (the English f and German v, as well as the English th and German tt or d correspond). 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6553 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 15 of 49 15 April 2008 at 6:26am | IP Logged | |||||
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In some ways, the story of language is interesting because it's the story of peoples. It's amazing to think that as a speaker of a PIE language, my ancestors once belonged to the same tribe on the Russian steppes (or thereabouts) that the ancestors of Hindi speakers and the Hittites did. Or to look at the Finns and Estonians, the fact that their language is completely unrelated to Indo-European languages means their people took a completely different and individual path through history than all the other European tribes and civilizations, right back to the origin of humanity itself.
And all those mystery languages and undeciphered inscriptions are anthropological mysteries. Who were those peoples, and where did they go? Sometimes identifying the language only increases the mystery; we have learned that the Myceneans spoke archaic Greek, but why did they abandon their cities and disappear for two centuries until the emergence of ancient Greek civilization? Edited by Captain Haddock on 15 April 2008 at 6:27am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6488 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 16 of 49 15 April 2008 at 8:03am | IP Logged | |||||
It is not that simple. Low German ("Platt") had its own branch on the Germanic language tree, but has now been reduced to a dialect within High German because the people who are supposed to speak it speak something that has moved quite far in the direction of High German. And even this 'weakened' form hs become rare, - most people in Northern Germany speak High German with a few minor adjustments. Another example: Occitan was clearly an independent language until the Occitan civilisation was crushed by the (Northern) French rulers. Most natives in the relevant area now speak the language of the winners with some minor adjustments, and those who speak Occitan speak something that is heavily influenced by standard French. A third example: Norwegian is supposed to belong together with Icelandic and Faroese to the Western part of the Nordic language group. The reality is that it has moved along with Swedish and Danish not only in vocabulary, but also in morphology, and the only relevant dividing line within the Nordic group now runs between the 'insular' and the 'continental' languages. Edited by Iversen on 15 April 2008 at 4:56pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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