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A Big Hit in France

 
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Originally posted by HS Thomas:
Charlemagne always sounded more German to me. But those wins you listed Bela are impressive and definitely not to be dismissed.


HS, the Merovingian and Carolingian dynasties were traditionally crowned at Reims in Champagne. They were Charlemagne's forebears. Charlegagne set up his capitol at Aachen in the Rhineland on the border between Germany and the Dutch province of Limburg (Maastricht). Very close to Belgium as well. But Charlemagne was definately a Frank.
The strategic magnitude of the French victory in the wars of unification is that we no longer to remember that cities like Djion, Lille, Carcassonne, Mulhouse, Nice, and Strasborg were decidedly not French, being respectively Burgundian, Belgian, Spanish, Swiss, Austrian, and Alsatian.
 
Bela Bardak
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Originally posted by herb slocomb:

Secondly, Napolean was not French.
And lastly, Napolean did eventually lose, so it seems the French did not win any war (although they did win battles).


Culturally Napoleon was an assimilated Corsican. The Austrians and Prussians were forced to sign peace treaties favorable to France (the Austrians twice). I count that a successful war.
The French Republic beat the crap out of several invasions by the monarchical powers of Europe which counts as a major victory any way you look at it. Especially given how badly they were outnumbered.
While the Spanish crown was forced also to sign an unfavorable peace treaty with France that war didn't end, so I don't count it as a victorious war for the French. Even so the record was a mixed one.
 
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Originally posted by herb slocomb:

Secondly, Napolean was not French.
And lastly, Napolean did eventually lose, so it seems the French did not win any war (although they did win battles).


No, Napolean was a little Corsican. And Hitler was an Austrian.
And the Austrians lost more people . A very confusing message against
agrandisement of others' cultural values.
[ January 05, 2004: Message edited by: HS Thomas ]
 
Bela Bardak
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Originally posted by HS Thomas:

No, Napolean was a little Corsican. And Hitler was an Austrian.
And the Austrians lost more people . A very confusing message against
agrandisement of others' cultural values.


Hitler also tied his shoes in little knotsies. Were you aware of that?
 
HS Thomas
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No. So that he could trip over himself to slow down ?
[ January 05, 2004: Message edited by: HS Thomas ]
 
Bela Bardak
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Originally posted by HS Thomas:
No. So that he could trip over himself to slow down ?



Possibly, I'm not sure. Especially if he tied the two of them together.
Do you think the origin of the Nazi salute was actually a violent balancing gesture meant to keep him from tripping over his shoelaces?
[ January 05, 2004: Message edited by: Bela Bardak ]
 
HS Thomas
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Originally posted by Bela Bardak:

Do you think the origin of the Nazi salute was actually a violent balancing gesture meant to keep him from tripping over his shoelaces?



Talking of balancing, I remember once seeing Charlie Chaplin's parody of Hitler, The Little Dictator. People who had fought in the war (in their late teens )were roaring with laughter.
I'll be attending one of them's funeral this Friday. He'd have been 22 when the war ended. France was where he fought and he loved France - spent many a holiday there since with his family, often with a French family who have a Naval Commanding traditon behind them.(No relation of Napolean BTW). He'd have laughed at your joke though he didn't talk much about the war.
I just got the knotsies joke.
[ January 06, 2004: Message edited by: HS Thomas ]
 
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A small gentle re-re-hijack.
Philippe: Hi Map,
I think that HS Thomas was right

Hi Philippe,
Depends on how we define "derived". I would rather use "influenced" here.
The borrowed words are the abstract ones, and generally speaking the words which were used by the "high society".
This page confirms your proposition:

In 1066 the Normans conquered Britain. French became the language of the Norman aristocracy and added more vocabulary to English.
Because the English underclass cooked for the Norman upper class, the words for most domestic animals are English (ox, cow, calf, sheep, swine, deer) while the words for the meats derived from them are French (beef, veal, mutton, pork, bacon, venison).
http://www.krysstal.com/english.html


Is English still germanic ?
I bet it is! Just like we are still children of our parents, even if we undertook a cosmetic surgery and have little to do with them in intellectual, spiritual or whatever else plane.
There is a bigger language family - Indo-European, to which such languages as English, German, French, Russian, Farsi, Hindi belong. They all are very different languages, but they all are "Indo-European".
But I just made a random choice of 4 abstract words in French. Here are the translations in English and German :
Hm. I replaced German with Russian:


Now it looks that English is closer to Russian than to German.
[ January 05, 2004: Message edited by: Mapraputa Is ]
 
Mapraputa Is
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HST: "ginger" has Dravidian origins but we all think the word is English. If the site is to be believed.
The American Heritage dictionary confirms "Dravidian origin" version. Also check this post, which has a link to the site that lists "ginger" word in ~100 languages (Ok, I did not count them ).
 
Bela Bardak
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Is English still germanic ?
I bet it is! Just like we are still children of our parents, even if we undertook a cosmetic surgery and have little to do with them in intellectual, spiritual or whatever else plane.


In what sense is English still Germanic? Vocabulary? That seems like a melting pot. Grammar? Both French and German sentence structure seem laughable when the words are translated into English. Perhaps from a academioc linguistic POV English remains a Germanic language.
 
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In what sense is English still Germanic?
Germanic English: "Somethin' to drink?"
English English: "Would you care for a beverage?"
 
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If you look at books written for pre-schoolers (age 2 thru 5), you'll find that most of the words are of germanic origin. This is the language core, upon which all other words are added.
By analogy, Persian remains an aryan language, despite the heavy influence of Arabic on its vocabulary.
 
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Originally posted by HS Thomas:
Charlemagne always sounded more German to me. But those wins you listed Bela are impressive and definitely not to be dismissed.
[ January 05, 2004: Message edited by: HS Thomas ]


He came from what is now Germany (or was it Luxembourg, it's been 20 years...).
 
Bela Bardak
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I googled on him and it seems that Charlemagne's birthplace is unknown but is thought to be either Aachen (Germany) or Liege (Belgium). The core of the Carolignian kingdom seems to have straddled the borders of modern day France and Germany and included portions of Belgium and the Netherlands as well. Much of modern day France were vassal states ruled by members of his dynasty.
More of a Burgundian or a Belgian than anything it would seem. When I visited Alsace I noticed that they often have mixed names. French first name and Germanic last name or the other way around. Borderlanders.
The Duchy of Burgundy was once very powerful. Had Charles the Bold had a bit more luck history might have worked out very differently.....
 
Mapraputa Is
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BB: Both French and German sentence structure seem laughable when the words are translated into English.
It's like to say "Chess rules seem laughable when translated to poker".
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Interesting that early school readers for English have German root words.
That suggests these words weren't borrowed but the English language is "derived" from German. I assume there is no other influence. Wonder who settled here before the Germans came.
The fact that Norwegian has a similar word for ginger in Tamil must mean the word has been borrowed. I doubt very much that Norwegian pre-schoolers learn a Tamil derivative.
 
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BB: Perhaps from a academioc linguistic POV English remains a Germanic language.
Perhaps from an academic linguistic POV you are still a son of your father! From any other, real, POV you are, of course, not!
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Originally posted by HS Thomas:

Another discovery: German prisoners of war held in Japan were treated like guests and had a good time and more than a few remained to open beer halls and German restaurants and they thrived. By WWII the treatment of prisoners of war went to the other extreme. So what happened in Japan in the space of 30 years


I believe it was the re-emergence of the Bushido (Japanese warrior) culture that accompanied the surge of nationalism in post WW1 Japanese military and government. It held the follower to a high moral standard which included courage among its pillars. To die in battle was glorious. To surrender was a horrible disgrace. These ideals also explain why so few Japanese prisoners were taken as the US island hopped across the Pacific in WW2.
 
Bela Bardak
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Originally posted by Mapraputa Is:
BB: Perhaps from a academioc linguistic POV English remains a Germanic language.
Perhaps from an academic linguistic POV you are still a son of your father! From any other, real, POV you are, of course, not!


Huh? Gentlepeople, I think I have just been called a bastard. For what reason I'm not sure.....
 
HS Thomas
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From an academic linguistic POV it sounded Freudian to me.
 
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Hi Map,

Hi Philippe,
Depends on how we define "derived". I would rather use "influenced" here.


Agreed ... though.
If most of the "french" words in English are there since - let's say 1066 and the 300 years wich followed -, they are not "french" anymore, they are now just plain English. Just an influence ? A borrowing ? Borrowing ... loan ... even at a rate of 2.5%/year since 1066 ... let me think ... waow, could solve the France's economical problems !
Stop kidding Phil, MD is a *serious* forum !
Time is an argument, but a better one IMO to prove that English is a germanic/latin mix is to make this test :
  • Take a random "one page" text
  • "Overstrike" in it all words which have a latin/french origin.
  • Try to replace them with an *English* germanic synonym
  • And finally count the remaining "holes" in the text.


  • That makes the difference between simple borrowings and real integration I think. In the examples I gave above :

    the big difference between the German and English columns is that German speakers still may *choose* a germanic word to avoid the french ones if they want so, while English speakers cannot.
    Anyway Map, I agree that "derived" was not correct.
    Regards,
    Phil.
     
    Jeroen Wenting
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    Originally posted by Joe Ess:

    I believe it was the re-emergence of the Bushido (Japanese warrior) culture that accompanied the surge of nationalism in post WW1 Japanese military and government. It held the follower to a high moral standard which included courage among its pillars. To die in battle was glorious. To surrender was a horrible disgrace. These ideals also explain why so few Japanese prisoners were taken as the US island hopped across the Pacific in WW2.


    Correct. The Japanese considered surrender a huge disgrace, it effectively made you loose any right of being called a human being.


    Originally posted by Bela Bardak:
    Do you think the origin of the Nazi salute was actually a violent balancing gesture meant to keep him from tripping over his shoelaces?


    The Nazi salute was modelled on the Roman salute, as was a lot of their culture.
    When you look at pictures (and especially movies) of Nazi Germany in the 1930s you see a lot of troops parading with standards that are modelled more or less directly (replacing only Roman insignia with Nazi ones) on ancient Roman designs.
    Their sculpture also was very Roman in origin, which itself was a mockery of ancient Greek sculpture.
    The Swastika as used by the Nazis originates in India as a fertility symbol of all things and is also found (but rotated through 45 degrees) in ancient Nordic culture (and was still in use as the insignia of the Finnish armed forces up until the end of WW2).
    The name Aryan which they claimed the Germans to be is actually a people from NE Persia (present day Iran) who according to Nazi race laws would have been exterminated as non-Aryan...
    Hitler himself was 1/8 Jewish and should under his own laws have been prevented from marriage and having children (his grandmother on the mother's side was married to a Jew).
     
    Frank Silbermann
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    BB: Both French and German sentence structure seem laughable when the words are translated into English.


    I don't know about French sentence structure, but German sentence structure is very similar to that of archaic English, and forms used in poetry.
    English sentence structure became more restricted as we lost most of the word endings for conjugation and declension. The BBC special "The Story of English" posits that this happened when the Vikings settled in such large numbers. Norse and Middle English had such similar vocabularies that the peoples could _almost_ understand each other, but the word endings had diverged since ancient days. The simplest way to merge the languages was to drop the word endings. So English now relies more on word order. Modern German kept more of the word endings, so their sentence structure remains more flexible.

    HS Thomas: Wonder who settled here before the Germans came.


    When the Romans conquered England, it had been settled by Picts and Celts. The Pict language died out two or three hundred years ago with no written record, so no one knows what language family it belonged to. The Celts arrived about 2,500 years ago. The "Germans" (Angles, Saxons, Jutes, etc.) arrived about 1,500 years ago. (King Arthur was a legendary Celtic king who resisted the invading Saxons). Celtic languages did not much influence English, but they are still spoken in parts of Ireland, northern Wales, and maybe even parts of Scotland. The Cornish variant of Celtic died out maybe two hundred years ago.
    At the time of the Saxon invasion, the Germanic languages had three main branches: northern (Old Norse), western (Old German), and eastern (Old Gothic). Gothic died out; the only record we have of it is a translation of the Bible. Old Norse, largely the same as modern Icelandic, became Swedish, Danish and Norwegian. Other dialects are still spoken in a few very northern islands of Great Britain.
    While Old English (essentially the same as Old German) changed into Middle English (e.g. Chaucer) under the influence of Old Norse, sound shifts in the mountainous areas of the continent created High German (southern dialects of German, standard German, Yiddish). The Low German languages and dialects (Dutch, Frisian, Platt Deutch) which did not experience this sound shift remain more similar to English. I've heard that Frisian is the closest.
    I once had a record by singer Lale Anderson called "Songs of the Waterfront" (Hamburg dialect). One lyric went:


    "Ower de stille straaten,
    de Glocken klingen laut:
    `Goode nacht, dein hert wilt slaapen,
    un morgen is wieder en Dag'"


    The Hamberg dialect is probably closer to Dutch than to standard German. An imprecise translation that maximizes the use of English cognate words would be:


    "Over the still streets,
    the clocks ring loud:
    `Good night, thine heart willt sleep,
    and tomorrow is again a day.'"


    A more precise translation would be:


    "Over the quiet streets,
    the church bells ring out loud:
    `Good night, your heart want to sleep,
    and tomorrow is another day.'"


    (Originally, the only clocks were in bell towers; that's why the word `Glock' means `bell' in German. This is sort of like the way "Tisch" in German means "table" but is related to the English word "dish" -- 1,500 years ago food was placed into hollows carved into tables. Later, when tables and dishes became separate items, German used the word to refer to the table, English used it to refer to the dish.)
    Notice how close the English cognates are in both sound and meaning. Now compare the Hamburg Platt German lyrics to the High German version:


    "Ueber die stille Strassen,
    die Glocken klingen laut:
    `Gute nacht, deine Herz willt schlaffen,
    und Morgen ist wieder ein Tag.'"


    This looks nothing like English, and yet one can see the similarity to the Hamberg dialect (which in turn is very similar to English).
    [ January 07, 2004: Message edited by: Frank Silbermann ]
     
    Frank Silbermann
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    French............English.........German.......English-cognate-of-German
    ----------------------------------------------------------------
    psychologie.......psychology......Seelenkunde..Soulcraft
    langage...........language........Sprache......Speech
    contro^le.........control.........Steuerung....Steering
    Generally, one finds that not only are the words used by small children most often derived from Old German, but so are the older "more poetic" words.
    [ January 07, 2004: Message edited by: Frank Silbermann ]
     
    Philippe Maquet
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    Nice shot, Frank !
    My own English is too poor to have made me any relation between Sprache / Speech, Steurung / Steering and Speelkunde / Soulcraft. I did know "speech' (borrowed back by French BTW ) and "steering" as well, but not "soulcraft". I did know what "soul" means ("�me" in French) and "craft" as well (like in "handycraft"), but not "soulcraft" (which my eletronic dictionary doesn't know either BTW ).
    Thanks,
    Phil.
    PS: Are you German, Frank ?
    [ January 07, 2004: Message edited by: Philippe Maquet ]
     
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    Originally posted by Jeroen Wenting:

    The name Aryan which they claimed the Germans to be is actually a people from NE Persia (present day Iran) who according to Nazi race laws would have been exterminated as non-Aryan...


    The word Aryan (where the 1st A is pronounced as in car) has its etymological roots in Sanskrit which means "noble, nobility". Further digging of the root word indicates that this nobility has nothing to do with birth, social status etc but is of the Spirit; meaning spiritual nobility. The ancient name for India is Aaryavarta.
     
    Frank Silbermann
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    Sadanand Murthy: The word Aryan (where the 1st A is pronounced as in car) has its etymological roots in Sanskrit which means "noble, nobility". Further digging of the root word indicates that this nobility has nothing to do with birth, social status etc but is of the Spirit; meaning spiritual nobility. The ancient name for India is Aaryavarta.


    A hundred years or so ago comparative linguists adopted the name "Aryan" to refer to the Indo-European language family. This family includes Persian, Sanskrit-derived Indian languages, Celtic, Slavic, Greek, Germanic and Romance languages, and maybe Hittite. Anthropologists have found a very strong (but far from perfect) correlation between language and race. It is believed that _most_ speakers of Indo-European languages are descended _at_least_in_part_ from common ancestors of a region somewhere in western Asia. Maybe it was near Persia; maybe from north of the Black Sea, and maybe from the Baltic region. I don't think anyone really knows.
    (Hitler promoted the ridiculous idea that Germans were descended _purely_ from this hypothesized people, and that this population group was inherently superior to all others. On the contrary, it's quite likely that the Germans had quite a bit of prehistoric mixing with speakers of non-IndoEuropean languages such as the Basques, Lapps and Huns, and others whose descendents are still in Europe but which have left no linguistic trace. And the great spread of IndoEuropean speakers was probably due to having been one of the first northern peoples to have learned agriculture from the Semites, followed by their pioneering use of iron weapons.)

    Philippe Maquet: PS: Are you German, Frank ?


    Nope. I had four semesters of German in junior college back in the early 1970s, and used to look through my sister's books when she was getting her M.A. degree in Linguistics around the same time. My father was born in Eisenach, but spoke only English at home (as that's all my mother speaks). His parents were from Lithuania and Poland; not being a citizen, he had to leave Germany in 1938. Other relatives who came to America directly from Poland spell their name "Silverman" or "Silberman."
    [ January 07, 2004: Message edited by: Frank Silbermann ]
     
    Philippe Maquet
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    Hi Franck,

    and used to look through my sister's books when she was getting her M.A. degree in Linguistics around the same time.


    I now understand why you impressed me so much with your posts above ! My own posts were only based on "guesses" (and some logical deduction), which has nothing to do with "knowledge". Thanks for all your posts, they were very interesting.
    Best,
    Phil.
     
    HS Thomas
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    Ok, I've attended the funeral and found that he joined the army in 1942 aged 18 years old and served not only in France but Belgium and rebuilding in Germany and was preparing to be transferred to Japan when the Atom Bomb was dropped in Hiroshima. His rank was never mentioned but I suspect it was a bit more than Corporal.
    Having happily worked for an American company that was headed in Britain by a German but managed locally by British management I can say it wouldn't have been possible without efforts by such men who contributed for a better world aged 18 . I hope some of that gets passed on. Possibly it did as we may never have had NetBeans from central Europe and neither a global Eclipse.
    Or other things like....
    [ January 09, 2004: Message edited by: HS Thomas ]
     
    Wanderer
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    [Also sprach Mapraputa]:
    Depends on how we define "derived". I would rather use "influenced" here.

    OK. Considering both those words are of French origin (as are "depends", "define", and "use"), I'd say heavily influenced. HST may have overstated things initially in saying English was mostly derived from French - but saying English is Germanic rather than Italic is a gross oversimplification too. Well, I guess many examples have already been cited while I was away - but I couldn't help noting the irony in Map's statement, thick as it was with French-based words.
     
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    [/qb]
    </blockquote>
    Those words do have slightly different meaning in german. Too late for examples. In german in a lot of contexts in you just can't replace the word "Kommunikation" with "Verkehr" or "Kontrolle" with "Beherrschung". The terms with latin origins are those which fits best in those contexts. There is a m-n mapping between word and significance in different languages. For example Verkehr can adopt a meaning of "communication", but the most important meaning is "traffic".
    [ January 09, 2004: Message edited by: Axel Janssen ]
     
    Mapraputa Is
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    Jim: HST may have overstated things initially in saying English was mostly derived from French - but saying English is Germanic rather than Italic is a gross oversimplification too.
    Depends on how we define "is". In my understanding of "is" English belongs to the Germanic language family and does not belong to the Italic (Romance) language family.
    If we are interested in how many words in contemporary English have Latin and how many Germanic origin, or how much English grammar resembles grammars of Italic languages, then of course, we may say that English is an Italic language, or whatever else we are pleased to say.
    To bring us on the same page:
    A Brief Look at the History of English
    Well, I guess many examples have already been cited while I was away
    Like this one:


    Frank: If you look at books written for pre-schoolers (age 2 thru 5), you'll find that most of the words are of germanic origin. This is the language core, upon which all other words are added.
    By analogy, Persian remains an aryan language, despite the heavy influence of Arabic on its vocabulary.



    --------------------
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    Since Rome/Italy was fonded by the Greeks, why is it that many romance languages are attributed to Latin instead of Greek?
    Many english words are derived from Greek, but Latin seems to get all the glory despite being dead. Didn't latin derive from Greek? It seems it should have. In fact some words attributed to latin are in fact Greek.
    Can someone fill in my history gap?
     
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    Although most language "trees" show English as a Germanic language, they almost always show a dotted line to French since there is so much about English that is derived from French.
    If this were not the case, you'd expect English to be very like its closest "cousin", Frisian. Have you actually tried the English/Frisian dictionary? I just did - using man, woman, girl, blue, yellow, strong, think, tree, grass, flower, dog and horse. I only got three of what I consider to be matches.
    Joe
     
    Jim Yingst
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    Depends on how we define "is".
    Yeah, that tactic went over really well the last time someone tried it.
    I'm aware that linguists have traditionally classified English as Germanic rather than Italic/Romantic/Whateveric - I maintain that for English at least, such classification is an oversimplification. "English is Germanic" is more accurate than "English is Italic", sure - but we're still missing some key info if you just state one without some acknowledgement of the other.
     
    Mapraputa Is
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    When a certain clear-thinking but somewhat superficial French
    philosopher asked the profound but obscure German philosopher
    Hegel to state his views in a concise form, Hegel answered him
    harshly, "These things can be discussed neither concisely nor in
    French."
    Vladimir Nabokov's Lecture on "The Metamorphosis"



    --------------------
    "Russians are a very logical people: but their logic is often based on mad premises."
    My A-level hell, by Lord Skidelsky
     
    Mapraputa Is
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    Joe: If this were not the case, you'd expect English to be very like its closest "cousin", Frisian. Have you actually tried the English/Frisian dictionary? I just did - using man, woman, girl, blue, yellow, strong, think, tree, grass, flower, dog and horse. I only got three of what I consider to be matches.
    I got 6. (I marked them "+", and added French words for comparison)
    +man
    Middle English, from Old English mann
    Frisian: minske
    man
    French: homme
    +woman
    Middle English, from Old English wimman, variant of wifman : wif,
    Frisian: frommes, frou, minske, wiif
    French: femme
    -girl
    Middle English girle
    Frisian: famke
    French: fille
    +blue
    Middle English blue, bleu, from Old French bleu, of Germanic origin.
    Frisian: blau
    French: bleu
    +yellow
    Middle English yelow, from Old English geolu.
    Frisian: giel
    French: jaune
    ?strong
    Middle English, from Old English strang.
    Frisian: kr�ftich, sterk
    French: fort
    -think
    Middle English thenken, from Old English thencan.
    Frisian: achtenearje, achtsje, miene
    French: pensez
    -tree
    Middle English, from Old English trow.
    Frisian: beam
    French: arbre
    +grass
    Middle English gras, from Old English gr�s.
    Frisian: gers
    French: herbe
    flower
    Middle English flour, flower, best of anything, flour, from Old French flor, from Latin floos, floor
    Frisian: blom
    French: Fleur
    Disqualified, as of not Germanic origin.
    +Dog
    Middle English dogge, from Old English docga.
    Frisian: dogge, h�n
    French: chien
    ?horse
    Middle English, from Old English hors.
    Frisian: happe, hynder
    French: cheval
    --------------------
    "Russians are a very logical people: but their logic is often based on mad premises."
    My A-level hell, by Lord Skidelsky
    [ January 09, 2004: Message edited by: Mapraputa Is ]
     
    HS Thomas
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    Modern English to Old English Vocabulary
    Olde English definitely looks more German than French-English.(Norman French).
    What is the proportion of English words of French, Latin, or Germanic origin?
    "They reckoned the proportions as follows:
    Latin, including modern scientific and technical Latin: 28.24%
    French, including Old French and early Anglo-French: 28.3%
    Old and Middle English, Old Norse, and Dutch: 25%
    Greek: 5.32%
    No etymology given: 4.03%
    Derived from proper names: 3.28%
    All other languages contributed less than 1%"
    English was originally a Germanic language, related to Dutch and German, and it shares much of its grammar and basic vocabulary with those languages. However, after the Norman Conquest in 1066 it was hugely influenced by Norman French, which became the language of the ruling class for a considerable period, and by Latin, which was the language of scholarship and of the Church. Very large numbers of French and Latin words entered the language. Consequently, English has a much larger vocabulary than either the Germanic languages or the members of the Romance language family to which French belongs. English is also very ready to accommodate foreign words, and as it has become an international language, it has absorbed vocabulary from a large number of other sources. This does, of course, assume that you ignore `agglutinative' languages such as Finnish, in which words can be stuck together in long strings of indefinite length, and which therefore have an almost infinite number of `words'.
     
    HS Thomas
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    English words from Arabic
    "Some words are borrowed directly from Arabic; but most of these words have taken the scenic route, through Spanish, Italian, and/or French; or through Turkish, Persian, or Urdu; or through Hebrew or Latin. This produces a good deal of phonological deformation; as does the dialect variation within Arabic."
    Words in English from Amerindian Languages
    Chilli is originally from an Amerindian word -
    chile, chili - Nahuatl chilli
    chocolate - Aztec xocolatl
    dory - Miskito d�ri
    Isn't dory a Fish ? John Dory ? Dory in Finding Nemo ?
    This unusual-looking fish is yellowish-olive or grayish in color with a flat, compressed oval body. I always presumed the John Dory was English.
    From Miriam-Webster :
    Inflected Form(s): plural John Dories
    Etymology: earlier dory, from Middle English dorre, from Middle French doree, literally, gilded one
    Date: 1754
    : a common yellow to olive food fish (Zeus faber) of Europe and Africa with an oval compressed body, long dorsal spines, and a dark spot on each side; also : a closely related and possibly identical fish (Z. capensis) widely distributed in southern seas
    *---------------*-------------*
    Inflected Form(s): plural dories
    Etymology: Miskito d�ri dugout
    Date: 1709
    : a flat-bottomed boat with high flaring sides, sharp bow, and deep V-shaped transom
    [ January 10, 2004: Message edited by: HS Thomas ]
     
    Mapraputa Is
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    They reckoned the proportions as follows...
    Interetsing statistics, HS!
    Map: Depends on how we define "is".
    Jim: Yeah, that tactic went over really well the last time someone tried it.

    Actually, it's a serious question. Some people argue that English would be a better language, it it got rid of "to be".

    Dr. David Bourland coined the term E-Prime, short for English Prime, to refer to the English language modified by prohibiting the use of the verb "to be." E-Prime arose from Alfred Korzybski's General Semantics and his observation that English speakers most often use "to be" to express dogmatic beliefs or assumptions or to avoid expressing opinions and feelings as such.
    Its advocates assert that the use of E-Prime leads to a less dogmatic style of writing that reduces the possibility for misunderstanding and conflict. One might speculate on the usefulness of E-Prime in constructing encyclopedias concerned with maintaining a neutral point of view.
    From an article in Wikipedia, now deleted.


    At least this page is intact:
    WORKING WITH E-PRIME: Some Practical Notes
    --------------------
    "Russians are a very logical people: but their logic is often based on mad premises."
    My A-level hell, by Lord Skidelsky
     
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