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Are Romance languages some kind of Germano-Latin?
<<just the closest language to that thing, despite Engish is still far from being a mixture of German and Latin, just a Germanic language heavily latinized as far as vocabulary is concerned. >>
Okay. I agree with you there. : )
It's not a skewed percentage, it's taken from letters writen by businessmen in US. If we counted every word in the English language with Latin origin, this percentage would be bigger. For sure, the core vocabulary is mainly Germanic, but once you go further than "I", "you", "the", "table", "house", "father", "son", "hand", and words like these, most of English words are taken from Latin or its descendants.
Okay, but even business language is typically elevated speech; official sounding in nature.
and not all germanic words in English are so base. "knowledge", "witness", "enlightenment", "skillful", "anneal", "atonement", "understanding", "beholden", "unfolded" "bequeathe", "behest", "forsworn", "dearth", "trustworthy", "truthfulness", "deemed", "starvation" etc are all germanic. Now, these are not as "sophisticated" sounding as others of Latin derivation, but they're not monosyllables like "I", "you" "son", "hand" either. English lost all of its sophisticated language after the Norman Conquest, due to the masacre of the near totality of English intelligencia and nobility (all but one English cleric). With them went the more elevated terms and speech of previous days.
"Okay, but even business LANGUAGE is TYPICALly ELEVATEd speech; OFFICIAL SOUNDing in NATURE.
and not all germanic words in English are so BASE. "knowledge", "witness", "enlightenment", "skillful", "anneal", "atonement", "understanding", "beholden", "unfolded" "bequeathe", "behest", "forsworn", "dearth", "trustworthy", "truthfulness", "deemed", "starvATION" etc are all germanic. Now, these are not as "sophisticated" SOUNDing as others of Latin DERIVATION, but they're not monosyllables like "I", "you" "son", "hand" either. English lost all of its sophisticated LANGUAGE after the Norman CONQUEST, DUE to the MASSACRE of the near TOTALITY of English INTELLIGENTIA and NOBILITY (all but one English CLERIC). With them went the more ELEVATEd TERMs and speech of PREVIOUS days." I rewrote the Latin-based words in capital. I'm not sure whether the words "sophisticated" and "Germanic" have Latin origins. One can see why English can be called semi-Romance. ;-)
But because English is so heavily latinized it has brought English far away from all other Germanic language in Intelligibility. Most of the other Germanic languages with the exception of Icelandic or Faroese are highly intelligible to one another in spoken form. Most monolingual English speaker especially in the U.S would not understand a lick of German, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, or Finnish if those people would speak in there normal speed of voice while a German-Dutch-Afrikaans-Frisian-Flemish persons would get the gist of the conversation when spoken. Same goes for a Swedish-Danish-Norwegian persons. English maybe purely Germanic in grammatical form but in speech it a far away cousin of the Germanic tongues otherwise we would at least get a gist of what any of these people were saying if spoken to us yet we can pick out enough French or Spanish words of Latin origin in a paper to at least get a 15-20% understanding of a written format.
<<One can see why English can be called semi-Romance. ;-) >>
No. Because English doesn't have any grammatical features of Romance. Not a one. Only some vocabulary (if not a large part). I don't doubt the Latin lexicon in English. I know it all too well. All of English grammar is 100% germanic. And we use the Latin words as germanic words. English speakers often do not realize this. All we see are the Latinate words and think: Duh...English should be a Romance language. Look at all them words. There's more Latin than anything else. (these are actual words I heard someone say once in a French class. My teacher, a French native quickly corrected this person by retorting: "No. English is germanic." --She ought to know;) okay: TYPICAL is Greek. you left off the "en-" and the "-ment" of enlightenment. That's latin too. CLERIC is Greek. And so is SOPHISTIC of sophisticat (the -ed is English) btw, my "CONVINCE-you-with-my-ARGUMENT" LANGUAGE is also ELEVATed. do you realize that "Elevated" is a DOUBLE PASt PARTICIPLE? [-atus + another -ed?] (notice the germanic word order? adj.+adj.+noun?)? We didn't even borrow it CORRECTly...
<<But because English is so heavily latinized it has brought English far away from all other Germanic language in Intelligibility.>>
That is not true. That statement is only true given the Germanic languages you chose to cite. English is mutally intelligible with Scots, a Germanic language to the north of Britain, which did not experience the heavy Franco-Latinization that English did. English is also partially mutally intelligible with Frisian, a sister language on the continent. Frisian is almost purely Germanic, and *it* is not mutally intelligible with Dutch or German. Dutch and German form a Sprachraum, or dialect continuum. You cannot use this example when referring to English. It is not valid and absolutely does not carry weight.
<<<<One can see why English can be called semi-Romance. ;-) >> >>
Like someone said, if English had words like 'Jeo' for I and 'Vue' for plural you and the word 'the' was something like 'le' and our numbers went something like one duo three quart quince six seven oit neef ten then I would agree. Otherwise, the Latin based words in English represent a furbishing of English words. They are much used, and in order to sound intelligent are necessary (needful), they are embellishments...they're not core, and they *can* be supplanted by English speakers if they choose to. This might cause them to come off sounding funny, but it *can* be done. We can also borrow words from German if we want to: I can say "They can be *ersetzt* by English speakers if they choose to" -Big Deal. You make it sound like you WANT English to be Romance.
Is the English -ed (which denotes the participle) related in some way to the Spanish -ido,-edo,-ado, also used to mean the participle? Maybe a protoIE connection or just a coincidence?
< Like someone said, if English had words like
'Jeo' for I and 'Vue' for plural you and the word 'the' was something like 'le' and our numbers went something like one duo three quart quince six seven oit neef ten then I would agree. > No, it would still be vocabulary and nothing more. Granted that the pronouns have more significance that other words, but if English had those pronouns, it woud still be a pure Germanic language. In fact I (english) and Io (Italian) are already very similar.
<<Is the English -ed (which denotes the participle) related in some way to the Spanish -ido,-edo,-ado, also used to mean the participle? Maybe a protoIE connection or just a coincidence? >>
Yes! It is cognate. Spanish -ad-/-id-/-ed- come from Latin -at-/-it-/-ut- etc and the dental suffix is related to germanic -ath-/-oith-/-aith-, the ancestors of Old English past participle endings -d/-ed/-ad/-od. They are inherited from IE. Spanish -ando/-iendo is also cognate with English -ing (alter of ME -inde/-ende/-and) and Dutch-German -end(e).
Guest, saying that English can be called "semi-Romance" doesn't negate its being Germanic.
JGreco is right, an English speaker generally gets much more reading a French text than a German or Dutch or Frisian one.
<,JGreco is right, an English speaker generally gets much more reading a French text than a German or Dutch or Frisian one. >>
That's because culturally, we're taught Latin throughout our schooling, and you don't realize it. Do you remember vocabulary lists? And prefix and suffix lists the teachers used to make us memorize? And scientific names? Legal terms? We're educated in Latin all the time! If they had done all this in, say, Finnish, we'd all understand a Finnish text a little better for sure. Also, English has had language contact with French within recent history, and the spelling (if not the pronunciation) of words has remained fixed and the same. This makes for a greater similarity. But I do not get the gist of French or Spanish by seeing it in text (although I recognize many of the words because the spelling and meaning is often the same)...and I speak both! I have to consciously READ each. Otherwise, the passage is not understood.
<<an English speaker generally gets much more reading a French text than a German or Dutch or Frisian one.>>
More than a German text for sure. German is rather unique among germanic languages. Dutch I would have to agree. I have never studied Dutch, but I can read a webpage of it rather easily. It even "looks" like English at first glance. Frisian is hard because of the odd spelling. Once that's overcome, it's midway I think. Frisian looks even more like English than Dutch in some words: "dream" for dream; "him" for him, "as" for as, "is" for is, "it" for it, etc |