On Wednesday 30 Apr 2014 14:00:40 godzil wrote: > Yes that true, lots of English words came from old French, and funnily > some word that were "lost" goes back into French :) > But I don't agree, on the origin of "Old English" it is more a > germano-celtic language than a latino-greek one. French clearly come > from Latin and Old Greek, like Spanish or Italian. On the contrary, the > German language have nearly no roots in Latin and Greek.
I wasn't thinking so far back, but yes, Old English did derive from the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and others. The words of theirs that we still use are all the little words that no-one ever looks up in a dictionary. I'm not so sure about Celtic though; I think there was very little mixing, and nowadays the remains of Celtic are in Cornish, Welsh and Irish and Scottish Gaelic, not English to any great degree. There ought to be a Breton language descendant of Celtic in north-west France as well, and perhaps there is, but I'll have to leave that to others. Before the Normans (whose ancestors were also from Scandinavia!) the major invader was the Vikings. Surprisingly, although the place is littered with Viking place names, as far as I know few language words survive from that period. There are also many traces of Old German and Dutch, but I still maintain that most of the longer words come down from our long and complicated relationship with France, with scholastic regulation (if that's the word) according to Latin and Greek. > Le 2014-04-30 12:47, Peter Humphrey a écrit : > > > The spelling differences you mention are I think a result of attempts > > to "simplify" the language by your founding fathers. > > Wikipedia have a nice article on this: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differenc > es (I tried to read it, but now my head is hurting!) I'll have a look at that - thanks. -- Regards Peter
