On 7/2/07, James E. Henderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Old French as the official language of the country
Official language of the government. And hence we have "beef", "pork", and "veal".
By the time of Shakespeare, the English language had become so hungry for new words to describe the new world that was developing that English speakers gobbled up words from the languages of newly discovered and exploited countries to supplement those English had inherited from French, Latin, Greek, German and Celtic. That's why English has so many more words than other languages.
Hungry for new words and with sources available. German is an acquisitive language, too. But Germany doesn't have the same history English speakers have of 1) colonizing the lands of non-English speakers, and 2) being colonized by speakers of other languages. It's kind of interesting, I think, that English and German are both like that. Is it something in Germanic languages that leads to that or makes that possible? Could we find the same thing in the other "acquisitive" languages of the world? An interesting difference between the two is that German speakers seem to take a word whole, accent and all. English (American anyway) is a melting pot. We cant do no nasal accent sorry. -todd -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
