Posted: 10/17/2005 4:48:56 PM EDT
| I've been thinking about the origins of the english language recently. Back in Latin class during high school, I was taught that english was derived from old high germanic. However, if english from old high germanic, why do we have so many latin and romance language bases? In a diagram we were often shown, germanic and the romance languages were separate. Could anyone explain this? |
Norman Invasion of 1066 led to an influx of Latin based words. The invasion, which originated from the region of France, where the native language was Latin-based, resulted in importation of Latin-derived words into the language. |
Thanks! |
|
Romance languages and words tend to dominate most of western europe and have extensively altered english and other european languages because the Romans kicked these peoples asses and dominated their culture for about 500 years. If you want to get along with the powers in charge you gotta be able to speak the language and I do not think the Romans were going to get rid of theirs. Hence, you modify yours to fit. Greeks dominated the med for an equally long period and had a written language that was easy to learn and has a fairly simple alphabet. These are languages based on a series of symbols(letters) and these symbols are combined to create the words. This is a fairly simple way to have a uniform written product all over an extensive empire. Once you know the letters you can at least sound out words and get them close enough for others to understand. A pretty easy system. Chinese has a different charactor for EACH WORD, just like many other old languages. They have over 10,000 characters that mean different things. A swipe instead of a swoosh changes everything. I recall a professor of mine commenting that the symbol for mom and horse and the way they are pronounced are only a matter of inflection. How miserable would it be to have to know 500 different symbols to write this silly paragraph?  |
The Roman influence in England, which reached its peak under Emperor Hadrian, was not the causative factor of the introduction of Romance (Latin) words into the English language - it was primariliy the result of William the Conqueror who took over England in 1066. England was on the outskirts of the Roman Empire and never really got assimilated into the Roman culture, being largely controlled by the Picts and other barbarians during Roman rule. The Roman influence was much stronger in Continental Europe, hence the the Latin origiins of man words spoken in France. Prior to the Norman Invasion, the language of England was more closer to modern German. |