Admit it. English is probably the strangest Indo-European language in existence. Here are some reasons why -
Here's some of the strangeness of English that you discover when you wash away the soil and examine its roots.
The bulk of the core vocabulary of English is made up of recognizable Indo-European root words, shared by most languages from Iceland to India. But there also are a number of words from a hypothetical "Northwest European" provenance, which would be a cluster in the Indo-European family that comprises the ancestral tongues of the Italic, Celtic, Baltic, Slavic, and Germanic languages. These words presumably descend from a common Bronze Age culture, and they consist of roots not found elsewhere in Indo-European languages, or which have different meanings in them. The vocabulary itself is largely cultural -- many of the words are agricultural terms or names of animals and plants found across this range. "Grain," "apple," "sow" (the pig) and "seed" are among them. But we can't know whether these words were borrowed from some long-extinct language of the pre-Indo-European inhabitants of these lands, whether they developed independently, or whether they were words from within the Proto-Indo-European lexicon that have been lost by all the other languages (this seems the least likely explanation).
English is a Germanic language, under the French, but a surprising number of our most basic words are unique to the Germanic languages -- "bath," "boat," "drink," "drive," "evil," "finger," "hand," "sea," and possibly "earth" and "little."
Learning an ancient tongue brings strangeness into the world. The familiar turns out to be exotic. Take colors, for instance. "Frigg Spinning the Clouds" (left) is blue. Blue is blue, right? The word ought to be recognizable and unchanging over millennia. But names of colors turn out to be among the most slippery words. I had already encountered Homer's "wine-dark" -- oinopos -- an adjective which Homer uses 17 times of the sea and twice of oxen, and Sophocles uses once to describe someone's arm. And ancient Greek references to the star Sirius, an icy blue to us, as "red." When I started reading Anglo-Saxon, I saw that the spectrum of color there, too, was not divided as it is now. In Beowulf, yellow is the color of linden wood (used to make shields). The favorite color-adjective for gold, however, is red.
Many surviving color words from Old English -- dun, wan, sallow, bleak, dusky, swarthy, bright, murky, dark -- refer to colors which are not hues. These words have more to do with chroma (reflectivity, brightness, quality of light) than with hue (wavelength). We tend to think of color only as hue. Out of all this you can get an insight into that world. Look around you and subtract all the artificial, man-made pigments from your world. Then look at what is left, and you may see why glitter and dark mattered more than pink and purple in naming what you see. Northern Europe through most of the seasons is a landscape of brown, gray, and dull green. The eruptions of color in spring and fall must have been brief and amazing, with an almost hallucinogenic intensity.
Old English brun and hwit both meant "bright, shining," though now both are used to mean hues (although we still speak of "burnished" wood or metal). One of the knottiest linguistic problems in Old English is blaec, which is the common ancestor of the seemingly irreconcilable modern words black and bleach. The Old English word seems to have been used to refer to a type of colorlessness.
Numbers, also, are surprisingly strange. English, like many other Germanic languages, retains traces of a base-12 number system. This duodecimal system, according to one authority, is "perhaps due to contact with Babylonia." The most obvious instance is "eleven" and "twelve" which ought to be the first two numbers of the "teens" series. Their Old English forms, enleofan and twel(eo)f(an) are more transparent: "leave one" and "leave two." Old English also had hund endleofantig for 110 and hund twelftig for 120. One hundred often was hund teantig. The -tig formation ran through 12 cycles, and could have bequeathed us numbers "eleventy" (110) and "twelfty" (120) had it endured, but already during the Old English period it was being obscured. However, in measures of some specific products (including boards and certain types of fish) the "great hundred" of 120 persisted into the 16th century, and hundredweight often meant 112 or 120 pounds.
The Scandinavian branch of the Germanic languages (preserved in Old Icelandic) used hundrað for 120 and þusend for 1,200. Tvauhundrað was 240 and þriuhundrað was 360. Older Germanic legal texts distinguished a "common hundred" (100) from a "great hundred" (120). In Old Norse, the distinction was hundrað tolfrøtt "duodecimal hundred" and hundrað tirøtt "decimal hundred."
www.etymonline.com
Here's some of the strangeness of English that you discover when you wash away the soil and examine its roots.
The bulk of the core vocabulary of English is made up of recognizable Indo-European root words, shared by most languages from Iceland to India. But there also are a number of words from a hypothetical "Northwest European" provenance, which would be a cluster in the Indo-European family that comprises the ancestral tongues of the Italic, Celtic, Baltic, Slavic, and Germanic languages. These words presumably descend from a common Bronze Age culture, and they consist of roots not found elsewhere in Indo-European languages, or which have different meanings in them. The vocabulary itself is largely cultural -- many of the words are agricultural terms or names of animals and plants found across this range. "Grain," "apple," "sow" (the pig) and "seed" are among them. But we can't know whether these words were borrowed from some long-extinct language of the pre-Indo-European inhabitants of these lands, whether they developed independently, or whether they were words from within the Proto-Indo-European lexicon that have been lost by all the other languages (this seems the least likely explanation).
English is a Germanic language, under the French, but a surprising number of our most basic words are unique to the Germanic languages -- "bath," "boat," "drink," "drive," "evil," "finger," "hand," "sea," and possibly "earth" and "little."
Learning an ancient tongue brings strangeness into the world. The familiar turns out to be exotic. Take colors, for instance. "Frigg Spinning the Clouds" (left) is blue. Blue is blue, right? The word ought to be recognizable and unchanging over millennia. But names of colors turn out to be among the most slippery words. I had already encountered Homer's "wine-dark" -- oinopos -- an adjective which Homer uses 17 times of the sea and twice of oxen, and Sophocles uses once to describe someone's arm. And ancient Greek references to the star Sirius, an icy blue to us, as "red." When I started reading Anglo-Saxon, I saw that the spectrum of color there, too, was not divided as it is now. In Beowulf, yellow is the color of linden wood (used to make shields). The favorite color-adjective for gold, however, is red.
Many surviving color words from Old English -- dun, wan, sallow, bleak, dusky, swarthy, bright, murky, dark -- refer to colors which are not hues. These words have more to do with chroma (reflectivity, brightness, quality of light) than with hue (wavelength). We tend to think of color only as hue. Out of all this you can get an insight into that world. Look around you and subtract all the artificial, man-made pigments from your world. Then look at what is left, and you may see why glitter and dark mattered more than pink and purple in naming what you see. Northern Europe through most of the seasons is a landscape of brown, gray, and dull green. The eruptions of color in spring and fall must have been brief and amazing, with an almost hallucinogenic intensity.
Old English brun and hwit both meant "bright, shining," though now both are used to mean hues (although we still speak of "burnished" wood or metal). One of the knottiest linguistic problems in Old English is blaec, which is the common ancestor of the seemingly irreconcilable modern words black and bleach. The Old English word seems to have been used to refer to a type of colorlessness.
Numbers, also, are surprisingly strange. English, like many other Germanic languages, retains traces of a base-12 number system. This duodecimal system, according to one authority, is "perhaps due to contact with Babylonia." The most obvious instance is "eleven" and "twelve" which ought to be the first two numbers of the "teens" series. Their Old English forms, enleofan and twel(eo)f(an) are more transparent: "leave one" and "leave two." Old English also had hund endleofantig for 110 and hund twelftig for 120. One hundred often was hund teantig. The -tig formation ran through 12 cycles, and could have bequeathed us numbers "eleventy" (110) and "twelfty" (120) had it endured, but already during the Old English period it was being obscured. However, in measures of some specific products (including boards and certain types of fish) the "great hundred" of 120 persisted into the 16th century, and hundredweight often meant 112 or 120 pounds.
The Scandinavian branch of the Germanic languages (preserved in Old Icelandic) used hundrað for 120 and þusend for 1,200. Tvauhundrað was 240 and þriuhundrað was 360. Older Germanic legal texts distinguished a "common hundred" (100) from a "great hundred" (120). In Old Norse, the distinction was hundrað tolfrøtt "duodecimal hundred" and hundrað tirøtt "decimal hundred."
www.etymonline.com