Maybe English would not be called English but Anglo Saxon and there is no Norman French influence, English language would became mutually intelligible to Icelandic or Norwegians.
Okay! You have just managed to freak me out...
Maybe English would not be called English but Anglo Saxon and there is no Norman French influence, English language would became mutually intelligible to Icelandic or Norwegians.
"Anglo-Saxon" is a modern term. At the time it was just called Englisc, pronounced English, and it would continue to be called that up to the present day if it had never been influenced by French.
... I seem to recall being told that prior to 1066 English didn't contain curse words...
Seems highly unlikely to me. English 'shit' and German 'Scheisse', for example, are cognate - they're both descended from the same 'parent' word. It seems to me far more likely that the word has remained in use in English ever since it became more a language and less a dialect, than that it was borrowed from the Dutch or the northern Germans (i.e. Plattdeutsch speakers).
Not that I can remember any concrete examples off-hand, mind. It's a long time since I last tried reading Beowulf in Old English, which is the least religious Old English text that springs to my mind.
Seems highly unlikely to me. English 'shit' and German 'Scheisse', for example, are cognate - they're both descended from the same 'parent' word. It seems to me far more likely that the word has remained in use in English ever since it became more a language and less a dialect, than that it was borrowed from the Dutch or the northern Germans (i.e. Plattdeutsch speakers).
Not that I can remember any concrete examples off-hand, mind. It's a long time since I last tried reading Beowulf in Old English, which is the least religious Old English text that springs to my mind.
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The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology gives the Old English form scitan (pronounced roughly shitan) meaning, surprisingly, to defecate. So the word itself is apparently recorded in use before 1066. Mind you, it probably only became a taboo word later on.
Its one of those strange arguements I've heard trotted out a lot and I'm not enough of a language expert to know the truth of the matter.
From my own old English, most of the insults seem to be more of 'putdowns' (such as 'your manhood is little according to your wife') than anything else.
I'm not a language expert but I seem to recall being told that prior to 1066 English didn't contain curse words, the English cursed people but didn't swear in the way we do today; isn't there the old story that all the swear words that people call 'anglo-saxon' are infact post-Conquest words?
IIRC, Englisc used a lot of words which we now consider swearwords (hence the old thing about most swearwords being Anglo-Saxon) but they were not used as swearwords. I remember reading once that f--k was used in common conversation, analogous to modern 'make love'.
IIRC, Englisc used a lot of words which we now consider swearwords (hence the old thing about most swearwords being Anglo-Saxon) but they were not used as swearwords. I remember reading once that f--k was used in common conversation, analogous to modern 'make love'.
That's because (according to the old theory), the animals were encountered by the English peasants raising them, and the meat was eaten by the Norman overlords Hence why English has different names for the animals and their meats, unlike most languages.That makes sense. I've read that words such as 'pig', 'cow', 'sheep' and 'deer' are Englisc, while 'pork', 'beef', 'veal', 'mutton' and 'venison' are from Norman French.