what makes English Germanic?
what makes English Germanic when nearly all of the vocabulary is of Latin or French origin? And I would say that English is more related to French than to German and it doesn't sound German at all, and I don't understand any German! If English is not in the Romance language family, what is it then? It just can't be German (I can't understand that)
We have got so much from Latin and Greek
The th- sound in "that" and "thought" is from Greek, isn't it? (since the Greeks also have th-sound)
and the words night (from French "nuit"), light (from Latin "lux"), house (from Spanish "casa"), werwolf (from Latin "vir"= man+ wolf), ocean (from the French word "ocean"), See (from the Latin word "ecce"), fire (from Greek "pyro" like in Pyromane), star (from Spanish "estrella"), crown (from Latin "corona"), Great (from French "grande) etc
nearly all words are of Latin origin!
How about the so-called "Strong" verbs like:
sink sank sunk/sunken
freeze froze frozen
etc.
Point is that eventhough the bulk of English is of non Germanic origin, the core grammer and vocab are.
English started as a Germanic language (Old English) that's it's origin.It can never leave the Germanic language tree.No matter how big the latin or whatever language influence get's.
Some corrections regarding etymology provided by Ericka.
=>
and the words night (from French "nuit"), light (from Latin "lux"), house (from Spanish "casa"), werwolf (from Latin "vir"= man+ wolf), ocean (from the French word "ocean"), See (from the Latin word "ecce"), fire (from Greek "pyro" like in Pyromane), star (from Spanish "estrella"), crown (from Latin "corona"), Great (from French "grande) etc
<=
night = Germanic.Goes straight back to PIE.
light = Germanic.Goes straight back to PIE.
house = Germanic. Unknown origin.
see = Germanic.Goes straight back to PIE.
fire = Germanic.Goes straight back to PIE.
star = Germanic.Goes straight back to PIE.
great =Germanic.Goes straight back to PIE.*
*Except when used as a a prefix to terms denoting "kinship one degree further removed" such as ' Philip the great ' in that case it's loaned from Latin 'magnus' via French 'grande'.
sander you IDIOT !
STOP spelling "grammer " instead of grammar ! you did that for a year now !
Ericka,
You ask a legitimate academic question here. Of course, keep in mind that Welsh, Albanian, and even Berber and Maltese have all borrowed numerous words from Latin and / or the Romance languages too yet they are not considered Romance languages.
Often a language can borrow a considerable amount of foreign vocabulary and still maintain its basic generic identity. For example, Persian (Farsi) is still recognizably an Aryan or Indo-European type language despite heavy Arabic influence. Although 60% of its vocabulary is Arabic on paper, the 40% most often used in everyday speech is Indo-Iranian (a branch of Indo-European) in origin. Likewise, the most commonly used words in English are of Teutonic origin (although sometimes Dutch, Low German, Frankish, Old Norse even Yiddish rather than Anglo-Saxon).
Going further east, we find that languages like Korean and Japanese still sound more like their distant cousins in the Finno-Ugrian family of languages than they do like Chinese in spite of fairly heavy Chinese borrowing.
>>Going further east, we find that languages like Korean and Japanese still sound more like their distant cousins in the Finno-Ugrian family of languages than they do like Chinese in spite of fairly heavy Chinese borrowing.<<
To be a pedant, the hypothesis you seem to be speaking of is that Japanese and Korean are most closely related to the Altaic languages, and in particular the Tungusic languages (as whether there is an Altaic family genetically to begin with has come into doubt). The notion of a single Ural-Altaic group has been posited in the past, even though I thought that it had already been discredited for quite a while now amongst most linguists, so it is interesting that you speak as if the existance of such a group were fact.
Travis,
The current movement of thought, at least progressive thought, seems to be in the other direction... that Korean, Japanese, Eskimo-Aleut, Tungus, Ural- Altaic , Indo-European, Elamo-Dravidian (Whew!) and Hamito Semitic all go back to a common ancestral language called "Eurasiatic" (Maybe "Nostratic"). A second ancient language nearby, "Proto-Dagestanian", spoken in present day Azerbaijan, would later give rise to all the languages in the "Dene-Caucasian" macro-family (or superfamily): Basque, Etruscan, North Caucsasian, Sumerian, Sino-Tibetan, some Paleo-Siberian languages, Athabaskan (i.e. Navajo & Apache), maybe Uto-Atztecan etc.
There's lots of information on the internet about this but the best information about it is still copyrighted material in books, scientific magazines and academic journals; therefore, some of it cannot be displayed on the internet.
>>Travis,
The current movement of thought, at least progressive thought, seems to be in the other direction... that Korean, Japanese, Eskimo-Aleut, Tungus, Ural- Altaic , Indo-European, Elamo-Dravidian (Whew!) and Hamito Semitic all go back to a common ancestral language called "Eurasiatic" (Maybe "Nostratic"). A second ancient language nearby, "Proto-Dagestanian", spoken in present day Azerbaijan, would later give rise to all the languages in the "Dene-Caucasian" macro-family (or superfamily): Basque, Etruscan, North Caucsasian, Sumerian, Sino-Tibetan, some Paleo-Siberian languages, Athabaskan (i.e. Navajo & Apache), maybe Uto-Atztecan etc.<<
Oh, yes, I know all about Nostratic-type and Dene-Caucasian-type hypotheses and trying to form things into massive language groups in the manner of Greenberg, which I tend to be rather skeptical about, considering the practical unreliability of the methods used to establish such groups, such as Greenberg's mass comparison, as opposed to the proven reliability of the comparative method. Consequently, I'm not exactly inclined to throw my lot in with mass comparison and methods of its sort, especially considering the major tendency of languages which are not genetically related at all to have superficially similar words which cannot be explained in terms of borrowing, such as English "name" and Japanese "namae", which is something that the comparative method can deal with and mass comparison cannot.
And by the way, you do realize that your use of "progressive" here is a clearly loaded word meant to imply that such ideas are "better" than the more, yes, conservative comparison method, even though just because something is newer does not mean that it, in and of itself, is better in any fashion, I presume.
Le français a contribué à l'enrichissement des verbes forts ou iréguliers en anglais :
An <strive — strove — striven> : verbe fort (apohonie du radical) inconnu du germanique occidental ; on trouve aussi la suffixation dentale pour les formes du passé (verbe faible)
An <can — could — been able to> : prétérito-présent défectif avec remplacement des formes manquantes par une locution verbale dont le noyau est un adjectif français 1/ réécriture à la française de VA <cuðe> modifié en MA <coud> / <coude> (puis adjonction d'un <l> sur le modèle de An <would> & <should>) — 2/ <able>
An <pay — paid — paid> : verbe faible (suffixtation dentale, pas d’apophonie) graphiquement irrégulier mais phonétiquement régulier
An <hurt — hurt — hurt> : verbe irrégulier mais étymologiquement faible (suffixe dental amalgamé avec le phonème final du radical, pas d’apophonie)
An <cost — cost — cost> : verbe irrégulier mais étymologiquement faible (suffixe dental amalgamé avec le phonème final du radical, pas d’apophonie)
An <quit — quit — quit> : verbe irrégulier mais étymologiquement faible (suffixe dental amalgamé avec le phonème final du radical, pas d’apophonie) ; on trouve aussi la suffixation dentale régulière (non-amalgamée avec la dentale finale du radical) pour les formes du passé (verbe régulier)
An <catch — caught — caught> : verbe irrégulier mais étymologiquement faible (modèle An <teach — taught — taught> ; présence d’un suffixe dental graphique et phonétique ; l’apophonie du radical est due à des changements phonologiques postérieurs au système des verbes forts ; VA <tæcan — tæhte/tahte — getæht/getaht> & MA <teach/teache/techen — taht/tahte/taught/taughte —itaht/taht/ytaught/ytaughte/yetaught>).
English is a mix between Germanic and Romanic and there are similaritis between German and English and even between other Germanic languages and English. Take the word "word" it´s "Wort" in German for example. You can see that English is a mix between Germanic and Romanic clearly, an other word bloom is Germanic it´s from the same orign as the German word "Blume" or Swedish "blomma", take the synonym word flower it´s Romanic. So therfore you can say that English has big influences from both Germanic words and Romanic words.
I heard there are examples in the English Language which was Latin words of Germanic origin. I hope you understand what I'm trying to say.
mmm I'll illustrate it
eg.
German -------> French -------> English
Can you give me examples and how the word developed as it was loaned from one language to the other?
I heard there are examples in the English Language which was Romanic language words of Germanic origin. I hope you understand what I'm trying to say.
mmm I'll illustrate it
eg.
German -------> French -------> English
(GER) (ROM) (GER)
Can you give me examples and how the word developed as it was loaned from one language to the other?