Portreve wrote: ⤴Tue May 10, 2022 12:36 pm
Actually, English is a Germanic language with a significant number of French loan words, and then a (comparative) smattering of words and ideas of how words should be spelled from a variety of other sources. For example, certain words which begin with the silent letter K (knife, knob, etc.) have a Dutch printer behind their origin.
But it's much more complicated than that. I have a very interesting book, which I just re-read a few months ago:
"Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue - The Untold History of English" by John McWhorter. Here's a quote from this book summarizing what happened to English even before the Norman conquest:
"The History of English we are usually given is rather static. Some marauders brought Old English to Britain. The Celts scampered away. Pretty soon the Brits went cosmopolitan and started gathering baskets of words from assorted folks, such that now we have a bigger vocabulary than before. The only thing that happened to English grammar during all this time, other than minutiae only a linguist could love, is that it lost a lot of endings, and this made word order less flexible.
The History of English is more than that. An offshoot of Proto-Indo-European borrowed a third of its vocabulary from another language. That language may have been Phoenician; certainly, there was some language. Its speakers submitted the Proto-Indo-European offshoot to a grammatical overhaul. As adults, they could not help shaving off a lot of its complications, and rendering parts of the grammar in ways familiar to them from their native language. This left Proto-Germanic a language both mixed and abbreviated before it even gave birth to new languages -- and meant that it passed this mixed, abbreviated nature on to those new languages.
One of them was Old English, which morphed merrily along carrying the odd sound patterns, vowel-switching past marking, and mystery vocabulary from Proto-Germanic, just as organisms morph along through the ages carrying and replicating mitochondrial DNA patterns tracing back to the dawn of life. Old English was taken up by speakers of yet another language -- or in this case, languages: Celtic ones. As Celts started using English more and more over the decades, English gradually took an infusion of grammatical features from Welsh and Cornish, including a usage of
do known in no other languages on earth.
Not long afterward, speakers of yet one more language filtered English yet again. Vikings speaking Old Norse picked up the language fast, and gave it a second shave, so to speak, after what had happened to Proto-Germanic over on the Continent more than a thousand years beforehand. English's grammar became the least "fussy" of all of the Germanic languages, impatient with "nuance" as Edward Sapir had it, and leaving its speakers, like Mark Twain, with a special challenge in mastering the complxities of other Germanic languages.
The result: a tongue oddly genderless and telegraphic for a European one, clotted with peculiar ways of using
do and progressive
-ing -- with, in addition, indeed, a great big bunch or words from other languages. Not only Norse, French, Latin, and Greek, but possibly Phoenician -- or if not, some other language, but surely that."
Portreve wrote: ⤴Tue May 10, 2022 12:36 pm
English's biggest problem is that it never was standardized like, for example, French was. There's no single definitive standard for spelling or grammar.
I read somewhere that at the time the printing press was introduced into Britain the pronunciation of many words varied in different regions so words were spelled differently in different parts of Britain and these "weird" spellings were "locked in" so to speak by being widely printed. I don't remember the details, or even if this is really what happened, but it sounds plausible.
Portreve wrote: ⤴Tue May 10, 2022 12:36 pm
I come from an America of a time when there was no broad effort to teach (for purpose of actual use) multiple different languages. Just like
AZgl1800 who is 30 years my senior, I am natively monolingual
When I was in high school (early 60's - Fort Worth, Texas), languages were taught - as I recall, Latin, French, German, and Spanish. I took two years of Spanish there, then when I was in university I took two years of German and one year of Russian (and if you think German grammar is complicated, try Russian - LOL). I have forgotten all the Russian except for a handful of words, but I remember a bit of German, probably due to brushing up on the language prior to a couple of business trips to Germany (Kaiserslautern in '83 and Munich in '85). Still trying to learn more Spanish now and then - I can read it fairly well, but not speak or understand it (being hard of hearing doesn't help).
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they ain't.