LL-L "Lexicon" 2009.11.02 (03) [EN]

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L O W L A N D S - L - 02 November 2009 - Volume 03
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From: DAVID COWLEY <DavidCowley at anglesey.gov.uk>
Subject: LL-L "Lexicon" 2009.11.01 (02) [EN]

Yes, interesting comments from a number of folk here

The likeness to other Germanic tongues is of course no surprise, but it's a
funny thought that one can be saying things in Afrkaans (like
'vredebemiddelaar', as quoted by Mark), Frisian or whatever that are more
like OE than Modern English is! One could go down the road of deliberately
working out new words by analogy with modern Germanic tongues, though the
book takes Old English only as its starting point, an approach which has
yielded a surprising number of words to date.
'Way Out' is of course rightly pointed out as an English way of saying
'Exit', though its sad to see how often the latter is chosen rather than the
former (b.t.w., 'ootgang' is still used in Scots it would seem).

The keen-ness  with which English often uses Latinate and French forms does
I'm sure go back past the 1500s, through the high middle-ages and, due to
the high status use of French, right back to 1066. Had the Norman and later
kings wed into Scandanavian kingly lines rather than largely French-speaking
ones, and had the Angevin empire not linked England even more strongly to
French influence from the mid 1100s, the Normans themselves might have had a
relatively small influence on English. The copying of many OE texts right
through into the early 1200s shows that OE hung on as a meaningful part of
culture for quite some time. If we consider the 150 years or so before
English began bouncing back in the mid/ late 1300s - these 150 years were a
time when somehow there was a break with the past and many of the OE terms
were lost. When Latin-trained scribes began using English for official
writings again, they tended to use the Latin or French technical words with
they were familiar, rather than the OE ones.

David

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Lexicon

Hi, David!

Was this not at least in part because during the Norman period many
non-Normans in Britain became Norman speaking, i.e. switched to the more
prestigious language at the time, and those that were bilingual allowed or
encouraged their English to be Norman-influenced because of the prestige
associated with it?

Besides, the two languages seem to have influenced each other. I assume that
Old English (and Celtic?) substrata led to the development of Anglo-Norman,
a British dialect group of Norman (a.k.a. "Norman French").

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron
Seattle, USA

•

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