What makes a language Romance or Germanic?

Woozle   Wed Aug 19, 2009 6:33 pm GMT
"why then are you the only one who declares English a creole?"

It was some British linguist who called English a creole as a joke decades ago. I'll repeat: linguistics has no official definition of a language as opposed to a dialect, and no strict definition of creole languages. Our discussion has nothing to do with science. Scientists are concerned with studying the development of languages and language families, not sticking them with labels of questionable scientific usefulness.

So the creole moniker cannot be 'debunked' for the same reason that it cannot be 'proven'. You can call Ukrainian a dialect of Russian, or you can call it a separate language. Again, this is a matter of ideology, not science.

Some of you seem to be genuinely upset at the word 'creole', which I find amusing. This is the sole reason I insist on calling English a creole language.

Creole languages are not "inferior" to er.. home-grown languages, and in fact may be richer and more expressive. English is certainly richer than Medieval Latin.
visiteur   Wed Aug 19, 2009 7:14 pm GMT
"This is the sole reason I insist on calling English a creole language."
_____________________________________________________

ainsi ce qui êtes vous l'énonciation est que vous êtes un cul. gentil.
Woozle   Wed Aug 19, 2009 8:16 pm GMT
And that's why French is the language of culture and sophistication.
skcollob   Thu Aug 20, 2009 11:09 am GMT
<<2) Many words are being left out. According to your percentage, the word 'take' (for wis in the top 100) counts as one word one time, but you actually use it as several different words, several times over, and the frequency of its use is much higher than what is indicated by the inverse of that 62%.

For instance, you say
'take' but also
'take on' = assume, accept
'take over' = conquer, apprehend, assume chanrge of
'take in' = accept, receive, lodge
'take off' = leave, depart
'take out' = subtract, extract
'take to' = devote, pledge, respond favorably
'take up' = accept, assume, occupy, fill, lift
'take up with' = befriend, accompany, keep company with
'take down' = record, register
'take after' = resemble, mimmick
'take away' = remove, subtract >>

Thats a good point. It seems that because said words are not stuck together as one word they aren't counted as one word. In German, there are equivalents such as aufnehmen, ubernehmen, annehmen etc but because the elements are compounded together they are counted as a separate word even though the meanings of these compounds are often similar to those of the words above such as take on, take up etc. I can see how this might affect such statistics as 62% of the top 10,000 English words as being Latinate.
Guest   Thu Aug 20, 2009 10:35 pm GMT
If a language sounds ugly then it is Germanic and if it sounds nice it's Romance.
PARISIEN   Thu Aug 20, 2009 10:46 pm GMT
<< If a language sounds ugly then it is Germanic and if it sounds nice it's Romance. >>
-- Ridicule.

<< What makes a language Romance or Germanic? >>
-- Les listes Swadesh, par ex.
Pour l'anglais, sur plus de 200 mots, seule une douzaine est romane.
Pour le français, moins de 10 sont germaniques.
greg   Fri Aug 21, 2009 12:21 pm GMT
Lobo : « Qu'est-ce qui peut le mieux distinguer les deux groupes ayant la même racine indo-européenne et avec quels exemples? »

C'est reparti comme en 40, alors allons-y ! À mon avis ce qui permet de distinguer à coup (presque) sûr deux familles de langues issues d'une même souche, c'est la connaissance de leur diachronies respectives — non les comparaisons faites à partir des synchronies du XXIe siècle.





PARISIEN : « En anglais il est possible de tenir une conversation en n'employant que des mots germaniques, alors qu'il est difficile de construire une seule phrase avec seulement des mots romans. »

Je pense que les deux options sont également impossibles car le fonds romanolatin concerne aussi le lexique usuel, même s'il épargne assez largement les mots dits grammaticaux.





PARISIEN : « Donc l'anglais reste une langue germanique. »

Le <donc> ne colle pas : ce n'est pas parce que fonds lexical est plutôt/entièrement roman/latin/germanique que l'anglais est une langue germanique. L'anglais est une langue germanique car le vieil-anglais était une langue germanique → voir plus haut la réponse à Lobo sur le thème diachronie/synchronie. Même si l'anglais du XXIIe siècle était francisé à 95 % (avec un taux à 80 % pour les mots dits grammaticaux), l'anglais resterait malgré tout une langue germanique. Voir d'ailleurs tes propos plus loin : « De même, un dauphin ressemble plus à un poisson qu'à un renard, mais reste génétiquement un mammifère ! ».





Lobo : « Donc, le point de jonction se trouve à être le néerlandais et le frison qui se rapprochent un peu plus de l'anglais quoique je soupçonne ces deux langues et plus spécifiquement le néerlandais d'être influencées par le latin ou le français, ce qui ferait de l'anglais une langue métissée. »

Confirmé pour le néerlandais : influences médiolatine, paléofrançaise & française.





Ouest : « Lobo´s original question was "What makes a language Romance or Germanic?" Shouldn´t the question be "What makes a language Latin or Germanic?" Romance languages being Romance is redundant ... »

Non, n'y vois aucun pléonasme à partir du moment où la latinité du romanisme est non-démontrée. La question de Lobo était bel et bien fondée et formulée.





Woozle : « With 62% of the top 10,000 most used words in English being of French or Latin origin, English *is* a creolized language. »

Pour affirmer cela, il te faut au préalable définir :
1/ ce qu'est un créole
2/ ce qu'est l'anglais moderne
3/ ce que furent le vieil-anglais et le moyen-anglais
4/ en quoi le moyen-anglais tardif fut un créole
5/ en quoi son avatar, l'anglais moderne, est demeuré un créole.
Ça fait du pain sur la planche !
Jorje Christophe   Fri Aug 21, 2009 3:40 pm GMT
"And that's why French is the language of culture and sophistication. "

Yeah, in Franceit is; nowhere else.
werty   Fri Aug 21, 2009 3:47 pm GMT
French WAS the language of culture and sophistication ....
PARISIEN   Fri Aug 21, 2009 4:03 pm GMT
<< ainsi ce qui êtes vous l'énonciation est que vous êtes un cul. gentil.

Woozle Wed Aug 19, 2009 8:16 pm GMT
And that's why French is the language of culture and sophistication. <<

-- Woozle, with a basic expertise in languages you could realise the aforementioned sentence wasn't written by a Francophone.

It looks like a direct translation from Spanish, and doesn't make any sense in French.
TaylorS   Wed Aug 26, 2009 5:13 am GMT
The Romance element of English is purely superficial, English is Germanic through and through.

The VAST majority of the every-day vocabulary of us English speakers is Germanic. Phrasal verbs with Germanic roots are much preferred in normal conversation over verbs of Old French or Latin origin, over-using Latinate vocabulary is considered pompous and makes you look like a snobbish twit.

English is not a creole, the collapse of the old inflectional system of Old English and the loss of grammatical gender is the result of all the Old Norse speakers that settled in various scattered spots in Northern England, which is where the first evidence of the decay of word endings appear. Old Norse and Old English, both being Germanic languages, had the same word roots but different endings, and so the intermingling of the Old English and Old Norse speakers led to an increased usage of a stricter word order to aid understanding, making the word endings less necessary and more vulnerable to being lost by sound change. French had nothing to do with it.
JGreco   Wed Aug 26, 2009 9:12 am GMT
What I funny is that with English being a language so Germanic that I can't understand when spoken hardly any Dutch, German, Swedish, or any other of the Germanic languages. Most monolingual English speakers that I know especially in the U.S can't understand spoken forms. Even written forms are difficult to decipher. How come a language so Germanic in origin can be so distant in pronunciation. If Leasnam tries to claim that we can understand them he has lost the battle with me because the proof is in the hearing of the language. Also, please Leasnam stop using those weird obscure Germanic converted English words that will never come back into style. Those words are not obvious to anybody and they look weird anyways.
JGreco   Wed Aug 26, 2009 9:13 am GMT
"What I funny is that "

I meant to say "What's funny is that" it is too early in the morning for me.
Guest   Wed Aug 26, 2009 10:15 am GMT
JGreco, it's not that difficult to understand that it's hard for English speakers to decipher writen Dutch or German. For instance consider a Portuguese speaker trying to understand writen Romanian, I doubt he will understand more than in the case of the English speaker. I think that appart from vocabulary the real similarity between English and Romance languages is that both evolved in a sort of similar way (loss of noun declensions) whereas typical Germanic languages are more conservative.
ungermanic English   Wed Aug 26, 2009 2:03 pm GMT
I absolutely agree with JGreco.