A Linguistic Alternate History of Old English

According to Sanders (EDIT: actually Saunders), English lost 85% of its Germanic vocabulary after the Old English era. This is due to it borrowing foreign words, rather than continuing to add compounds and affixes to original words, German style. He also cites a sort of alternate history style list of words-'what might have been' if English had still used the old method. (e.g. aeroplane= 'flything'.)

So, AH dot com: how will Old English continue to predominately use the Germanic method, rather than predominately getting loan words? And what sort of language would emerge?
 
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My take on the subject.

According to Sanders, English lost 85% of its Germanic vocabulary after the Old English era. This is due to it borrowing foreign words, rather than continuing to add compounds and affixes to original words, German style. He also cites a sort of alternate history style list of words-'what might have been' if English had still used the old method. (e.g. aeroplane= 'flything'.)

So, AH dot com: how will Old English continue to predominately use the Germanic method, rather than predominately getting loan words? And what sort of language would emerge?

Sanders, huh?

Truth is, though, it was really an amalgam of languages from the very beginning........mostly Celtic & Frisian, to be exact; and it appears, if anything at all, most of the other 'Germanic' vocabulary, not of Frisian origin, doesn't seem to have really come into prominence, until sometime afterwards, particularly with the Danish & Norse invasions; English DID heavily borrow from these two languages for some time{and their influence is still around today, it seems}.

However, though, without the Viking influence..........particularly if the French end up invading England as they did IOTL, then I honestly don't see any Germanic influence surviving at all, apart from the Frisian core.
However, though, if we instead see, say, a mass invasion from the Vikings{an even bigger one than what already happened, that is.}, or even the mainland Germans, then yes, we could in fact, see a truly Germanic English surviving into the present day{Although there's one thing I'd like to point out; certain place names, like Lancaster or London, for example, probably wouldn't survive, at least probably not in a form we in OTL could recognize}, instead of something that's just half-Frisian.
 
So, AH dot com: how will Old English continue to predominately use the Germanic method, rather than predominately getting loan words? And what sort of language would emerge?
You'll have to remove entirely the Norman influences. Which would mean much more Frisain / Platt-Deutch grammar and snytax, and a higher incidence of native langauges in the mix.
 
Sanders, huh?

Truth is, though, it was really an amalgam of languages from the very beginning........mostly Celtic & Frisian, to be exact; and it appears, if anything at all, most of the other 'Germanic' vocabulary, not of Frisian origin, doesn't seem to have really come into prominence, until sometime afterwards, particularly with the Danish & Norse invasions; English DID heavily borrow from these two languages for some time{and their influence is still around today, it seems}.

To my knowledge there were barely any borrowings from Brythonic Welsh in Old English; in total something along the lines of only a hundred words, that can be definitively proven to be of Brythonic origins. I know there was a relatively recent suggestion that Old English borrowed its structure from Old Welsh, but it ended up as something of a fringe theory.

Frisian is a given however since the tribes would originally have been close neighbours along the coast of the North Sea.
 
Sanders, huh?

Truth is, though, it was really an amalgam of languages from the very beginning........mostly Celtic & Frisian, to be exact; and it appears, if anything at all, most of the other 'Germanic' vocabulary, not of Frisian origin, doesn't seem to have really come into prominence, until sometime afterwards, particularly with the Danish & Norse invasions; English DID heavily borrow from these two languages for some time{and their influence is still around today, it seems}.

However, though, without the Viking influence..........particularly if the French end up invading England as they did IOTL, then I honestly don't see any Germanic influence surviving at all, apart from the Frisian core.
However, though, if we instead see, say, a mass invasion from the Vikings{an even bigger one than what already happened, that is.}, or even the mainland Germans, then yes, we could in fact, see a truly Germanic English surviving into the present day{Although there's one thing I'd like to point out; certain place names, like Lancaster or London, for example, probably wouldn't survive, at least probably not in a form we in OTL could recognize}, instead of something that's just half-Frisian.

To my knowledge there were barely any borrowings from Brythonic Welsh in Old English; in total something along the lines of only a hundred words, that can be definitively proven to be of Brythonic origins. I know there was a relatively recent suggestion that Old English borrowed its structure from Old Welsh, but it ended up as something of a fringe theory.

Frisian is a given however since the tribes would originally have been close neighbours along the coast of the North Sea.

I have to agree with Condor here. The Anglo-Saxon languages/dialects are strongly Germanic and related to the Frisian dialects (indeed to my ears a Frisian farmer sounds very much like a drunk yorkshireman ;)).

What tends to differentiate late Old English from the continental Frisian and early Old English (ie the AS dialects) is the influence of Danish and Latin.
Due to the proximity of the Old Danish speakers in North England Old English was experiencing a reduction/levelling of its declension & conjugation. This is considered due to similar words being used in Old Danish and Old English (from their Germanic inheritance) that only differed in their inflectional endings. A kind of rough near-creolisation.
Old English also borrowed heavily from Church Latin.

What the Norman invasion did was accelerate this process and add an upperclass vocabulary.

With the lack of a Norman Invasion would you could get would be similar to Middle English minus all the French additions. And possibly still mutually intelligible with Frisian.

EDIT: it seems to me that Old English already used more Latinate words than its continental cousin. I see no reason why this wouldn't continue.
 
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