On 4/18/2015 3:32 AM, Bob W-PDML wrote:
On 18 Apr 2015, at 04:47, Bill <[email protected]> wrote:
On 17/04/2015 4:51 PM, Bob W-PDML wrote:
On 17 Apr 2015, at 23:17, Daniel J. Matyola <[email protected]>
wrote:
On Fri, Apr 17, 2015 at 5:38 PM, Bob W-PDML
<[email protected]> wrote: according to the French English is
just French, badly pronounced.
Quite untrue.
It's what passes for humour over there, but it's not entirely
inaccurate.
Danish is the closest language to English, and for good reason.
That's not entirely accurate. English is West Germanic, which
includes Frisian, Dutch and German ; Danish is a North Germanic
language, which includes the other Scandinavian languages.
As for the French connection, something like 30% of our vocabulary
comes from French, and even more of it comes from Latin, far
outweighing our Germanic vocabulary. You could indeed say we have a
Romance vocabulary grafted onto a sorta Germanic grammar (which is
now quite different from modern German grammar). I've never studied
Dutch or Friesian, so I can't say how much our grammar differs from
their's.
B
I can't believe the amount of stuff that you know.
My knowledge is broad but shallow. On any given subject it usually
doesn't take long to expose the depths of my ignorance. In this case
I've been learning French for nearly 50 years and have quite a
substantial vocabulary; I did 6 years each of German and Latin at
school and I did 2 years of degree-level linguistics. I've forgotten
most of it, but I'm still quite good at identifying which bits of
English come from where.
Here's Eddie Izzard talking Old English to a Friesian farmer:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OeC1yAaWG34
Not entirely sure that he's proved his point, but of course Friesian
has changed in the centuries since it and OE separated. I've had
similar conversations in Italy and Romania just by making something
up out of bits of Latin, French and Spanish. That's why my herd of
cattle is so multinational.
B
All you really need to get along today is an open, inquiring mind; an
internet connection and a bookmark for your local lending library's
on-line catalog.
--
Science - Questions we may never find answers for.
Religion - Answers we must never question.
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