1 |
On Wednesday 30 Apr 2014 14:00:40 godzil wrote: |
2 |
|
3 |
> Yes that true, lots of English words came from old French, and funnily |
4 |
> some word that were "lost" goes back into French :) |
5 |
> But I don't agree, on the origin of "Old English" it is more a |
6 |
> germano-celtic language than a latino-greek one. French clearly come |
7 |
> from Latin and Old Greek, like Spanish or Italian. On the contrary, the |
8 |
> German language have nearly no roots in Latin and Greek. |
9 |
|
10 |
I wasn't thinking so far back, but yes, Old English did derive from the |
11 |
Angles, Saxons, Jutes and others. The words of theirs that we still use are |
12 |
all the little words that no-one ever looks up in a dictionary. I'm not so |
13 |
sure about Celtic though; I think there was very little mixing, and nowadays |
14 |
the remains of Celtic are in Cornish, Welsh and Irish and Scottish Gaelic, not |
15 |
English to any great degree. There ought to be a Breton language descendant of |
16 |
Celtic in north-west France as well, and perhaps there is, but I'll have to |
17 |
leave that to others. |
18 |
|
19 |
Before the Normans (whose ancestors were also from Scandinavia!) the major |
20 |
invader was the Vikings. Surprisingly, although the place is littered with |
21 |
Viking place names, as far as I know few language words survive from that |
22 |
period. |
23 |
|
24 |
There are also many traces of Old German and Dutch, but I still maintain that |
25 |
most of the longer words come down from our long and complicated relationship |
26 |
with France, with scholastic regulation (if that's the word) according to |
27 |
Latin and Greek. |
28 |
|
29 |
> Le 2014-04-30 12:47, Peter Humphrey a écrit : |
30 |
> |
31 |
> > The spelling differences you mention are I think a result of attempts |
32 |
> > to "simplify" the language by your founding fathers. |
33 |
> |
34 |
> Wikipedia have a nice article on this: |
35 |
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differenc |
36 |
> es (I tried to read it, but now my head is hurting!) |
37 |
|
38 |
I'll have a look at that - thanks. |
39 |
|
40 |
-- |
41 |
Regards |
42 |
Peter |