SC - table manners

[Charles McCathieNevile]

This seems to be a bit of an over-simplification. So here is another, but 
more complex, simplified version of the story.
When the Anglo-Saxons invaded (They were a bunch of folks, from around 
Northern Germany and Denmark and the Netherlands, mostly) they brought 
their languages with them. These languages were germanic, and the british 
language of the celts they pushed into wales and the north (welsh is an 
anglo-saxon word meaning foreigner!) were displaced. Those celtic british 
languages, along with Irish, go under the catch-all name Gaelic. In the 
8th - 11th centuries, the Anglo-Saxon languages became closer, as England 
was slowly united under the west-saxon and a few other kings. In 
addition, a great deal of danish came into the language from the areas 
where vikings settled. At one time, danish was a second language, and the 
first lagauge of much of the north (Old Danish, this is). in 1016 King 
Cnut of Denmark and Norway became king of England, following his father 
Svein Forkbeards campaigns. In this situation Danish would have been 
doing well, but it should be noted that old danish and anglo-saxon 
languages were pretty closely related, and more or less mutually 
comprehensible. Following the conquest in 1066, the language at court 
became Norman French - and there followed a number of kings who could not 
speak english. By the time english became a status language again it had 
included lots of french words. It had also collected, from the time of 
Alfred or so onwards, a fgrammar that was not native to the language, but 
was required to translate Latin philosophical and religious works. From 
this point (see for example Chaucer in, in London, or Piers Plowman in 
the North) to modern English there were a whole lot of new words added - 
usually derived from Latin or greek, or coined from those languages (eg 
televison, depopulation) with a mixture from a fw other places (the raj, 
the New World, Arabic, etc)

So it usually is possible to work out where a word comes from. Most of 
our 'small words) me, him, the, and etc are Anglo-Saxon. 'It' is Norse 
(so is take - the anglo-saxon 'nim' died out in the early modern period, 
but most people will have seen it in cookbooks of the period) as are a 
numberof other words for common things, especially geography, family, 
etc. Things that look like french are likely to have been brouoght into 
the language in the iddle-english period (~1100 - 1500), and if in doubt 
about a modern word the answer is probably shakespeare (the linguistic 
equivalent of heat and light in physics exams).

But note that this will not get you through more than a dinner-party exam...

Charles Ragnar


On Mon, 5 Jan 1998, Mordonnade wrote:
> But that just puts the question back a few generations, as "Anglo-Saxon" is
> itself mostly Germanic.  Were the original verbs that different in meaning?  
> 
> The modern English language is a totally "borrowed" language with roots in
> almost every corner of the planet.  Sorting out where the root of a word lies
> is sometimes difficult and intricate.  Somewhere on the order of trying to
> uproot a single strand of crabgrass.
> 
> Mordonna 
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