WI: More Germanic/Romance hybrid languages like english?

Heh, I did that exact experiment awhile ago in another thread. Anyway, note how FleetMac here occasionally formed sentences that ware nothing but Germanic, even though we were having a conversation about something as abstract as linguistics.
Bold= Germanic
Italics= French/Latin

Originally Posted by FleetMac
I'd never heard that about Dutch phonology[Greek], the pronunciation of their vowels and the "g" always seemed too different.

Regarding the vocab. issue, perhaps that concept involving more Spaniards moving to the Netherlands and leaving their mark on the Dutch language? The thing is, would they leave as big a splash on Dutch as the Normans did on English?

Quote:
Originally Posted by FleetMac
Indeed, even the grammar of Lowland Scots is different from English (retention of strong/weak verb distinction being the best example I've got, it's not just a question of how "Germanic" its vocabulary is). Regarding vocabulary, Scots has less Norman influence than English. In fact, how much more Germanic vocab. does Scots have? It's gotta be more than the paltry third English has.
 
Heh, I did that exact experiment awhile ago in another thread. Anyway, note how FleetMac here occasionally formed sentences that ware nothing but Germanic, even though we were having a conversation about something as abstract as linguistics.
Bold= Germanic
Italics= French/Latin

Originally Posted by FleetMac
I'd never heard that about Dutch phonology[Greek], the pronunciation of their vowels and the "g" always seemed too different.

Regarding the vocab. issue, perhaps that concept involving more Spaniards moving to the Netherlands and leaving their mark on the Dutch language? The thing is, would they leave as big a splash on Dutch as the Normans did on English?

Quote:
Originally Posted by FleetMac
Indeed, even the grammar of Lowland Scots is different from English (retention of strong/weak verb distinction being the best example I've got, it's not just a question of how "Germanic" its vocabulary is). Regarding vocabulary, Scots has less Norman influence than English. In fact, how much more Germanic vocab. does Scots have? It's gotta be more than the paltry third English has.

"Regarding" actually comes from Germanic roots, the same as the word "Guard", actually.
 
One of the reasons that the Normans managed to "frenchify" so much of English was that it was already undergoing simplification due to the Danish occupation in the North.
Old Danish having very similar words but different enough conjugation and declension that either language simplifying those would rapidly resemble either assimilating the other (ie a Danified Old English is remarkably like an Anglified Old Danish).
 
Yes English has may Anglo/Norse pairs; Rear/raise, Shirt/ Skirt for example. Most words in English starting with sk are from Norse the native English words started with sh. Many words were replaced at least in the north and east by norse words and some such as knife and egg have become the standard version. Otherwise we would by cutting our beefflish with a metter to cook with our eiers.
With the example of the Vandals the linquistic issues are interesting as there would be Vandalic, late North Africsan latin and probably Punic all spoken in the same area, Two of them would have been written liturigical Languages as long as the Vandals didn't convert.
 
In as much as a Germanic language area bing conquered by a romance speaking people leading to a Hybrid languages, yes it could, however the rest of it is very unlikely, as to be honest I can't think of any language that's as hyper-dynamic (certainly several languages are dynamic) as English and absorbs words en masse on the massive scale that English does, plus, unlike nearly all other European languages, English does not have an Official version or any group regulating it.
To be honest I find that a kind exaggeration, closely related languages like Dutch and German are not much different, with English and German being on the extremes and Dutch in the middle of these three.
Furthermore Dutch has the largest dictionary of the world.:)

I too find this phenomenon extremely unsettling; not so much the amount of French influence that English has absorbed, but rather how English seems to be the only major Germanic language to have had such influence imposed on it, even though by all rights Dutch and/or certain German dialects could've gone the same way.

(...)

Originally Posted by FleetMac
I'd never heard that about Dutch phonology[Greek], the pronunciation of their vowels and the "g" always seemed too different.

Regarding the vocab. issue, perhaps that concept involving more Spaniards moving to the Netherlands and leaving their mark on the Dutch language? The thing is, would they leave as big a splash on Dutch as the Normans did on English?

(...)

The pronounciation of the letter 'G' is one of elements to divide up Dutch, with the hard 'G' north (northern Netherlands) of the Rhine and Meuse rivers (actually with different local names in the Netherlands) and the soft 'G' south of the Rhine and Meuse rivers (southern Netherlands and Flemish Dutch).

More Spaniards moving to the Netherlands (Low Countries) wouldn't helped, since the Habsburgs (including the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs) always kept French as the prestige court language in the (Southern) Netherlands, which was instituted by the dukes of Burgundy. Famous people from the area like Charles V and William the Silent both spoke better French than Dutch.
If anything the influence of French might have been even larger in the Low Countries, but it would have reached English Norman-Angevin French levels. Besides during this era the elite in many Western European nations was quite Francophone are at least bilingual (native language and French).
Just like in the 20th century French was replaced by English as the international (western) cultural language.
 
Then of course their's the fact to that English has never been shy about borrowing word outright or forming anglicized version of them, and to give you an idea of what I mean the below pie chart shows the percentage of words in English based on their origins;

How do these researchers distinguish words of "Latin" origin and words of "French" origin? Shouldn't they really be the same category, since nearly all French vocabulary comes from Latin? Or does the "Latin" category refer to all Romance languages other than French? (I'm assuming they aren't suggesting that 29% of the vocabulary of English came directly from Latin itself, because that's pretty hard to believe - it would have to mean that most of the words were borrowed way back in the Anglo-Saxon period.)
 
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It was Norman French, not Parisian French. Only once the Normans had assimilated into English society did "Law French" become more like the standard dialects of French.

Only the first couple of English kings following the Norman Conquest were really Norman in terms of language. Stephen (who reigned 1135-1154), for instance, was from Blois, in the Loire valley. And then the Angevins (Plantagenets) came to power - a family from Anjou. Under Angevin/Plantagenet rule, the prestige dialect of England was essentially the same as that of France - Old French.

The influx of French terms into English isn't just due to William I. What a lot of people don't realize is that from 1066 to 1189, nearly all of England's monarchs were born and raised in France, so there was a continual reinforcement of the use of French in the royal court. In fact, some linguists believe that the bulk of the French terms that were absorbed into English came into the language after 1154.
 
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Deleted member 67076

Could the Ostrogothic or Vandalic language become "hybrids" if their respective kingdoms survived?

With the Latter, I could see a Latin language with Germanic and Berber influence.
 
Well, that's not exactly right, there was plenty of stuff written between Beowulf's time (rather early on in the Anglo-Saxon era) and Hastings. But your point is well made, I forgot that English almost died out until Chaucer brought it back into vogue.

So really, it's not so much the Normans winning that needs to be butterflied away to keep the English language true to its roots (although that would help), but rather keep English alive as a written language in the period between Hastings and The Canturbury Tales. I wonder if a TL where the Normans won, but just by the skin of their teeth, and the English stayed unique has ever been done?

In any situation where the Normans come that close to losing Norman rule will probably only last a generation, the only reason Norman rule lasted as long as it did was because the native english upper class was effectively wiped out, leaving their rule unopposed. In this case I suspect the English nobles lick their wounds, live with William, and then swiftly throw out Robert. I don't think this idea has been done, but it'd be interesting to try.
 
How do these researchers distinguish words of "Latin" origin and words of "French" origin?

In nearly all cases it's pretty easy to see when a word had Franco-Norman origins, for instance the English Parliament is derived from Parlement while others, like Government (Old French spelled it the same way as modern English) were direct borrowings.


Shouldn't they really be the same category, since nearly all French vocabulary comes from Latin?

You could combine them if you wanted to, but French is show seperately on account of it being the single largest source of words of any Romance language as well as the single largest source from any one language.


Or does the "Latin" category refer to all Romance languages other than French? (I'm assuming they aren't suggesting that 29% of the vocabulary of English came directly from Latin itself, because that's pretty hard to believe - it would have to mean that most of the words were borrowed way back in the Anglo-Saxon period.)

All the other Latin-derived languages except Normano-French account for a very small amount even combined which is why they're listed with Latin, which itsel does in fact provide a very large amount of words in English either directly or through anglicization, however in these cases the big thing to remember is that the vast majority of these are words not used by the general population but rather are things used in science, math and ecclestical matters.
 
Then en vision an Iberia speaking a group of Germanized romance languages, Romantized germananic and Basque
 
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