Linguistic origins, The origins of various languages.

So essentially, you're interested in etymology. I think your second sentence oversimplifies things a little. English has Germanic roots and French roots, but there's a bunch of Italian, Greek, Spanish, and Latin there too. Interestingly, English is a Germanic-Romantic hybrid.

As for me and languages, I plan to teach myself German and Latin at some point in the future once I'm done with some stuff; then, I plan to create my own inflectional language. I've started already (a few words and the pronouns, which, for the third person, have grammatical gender though there needs to a (biological) gender-neutral pronoun).

I think perhaps phonetics or the like might interest you because the phonemes of different languages (I'm thinking of African languages here with their different sounds).

Most languages derive themselves from another or are similar to another. Such as Ukraine has their own language, but it is very similar to Russian. The Dutch have their own language, but again very similar to German.

Me personally I know some words in French and German. I can hold very easy conversations in Spanish and Russian and a little in Japanese. I can cuss you out in all 5 of those languages though lol. Also still trying to learn Ebonics which is a mix of retarded and English.

From what I heard, England had a French king for a while, thus "modernizing" it a bit and making it more Romance then Germanic.

Latin is the father language of Spanish, Italian, French and Portuguese.

Last I heard, Klingon is an official actual language, just that it can't be used in official documents since it's a small number of people. Elvish is real also.

Um, Ebonics is a dialect, so I don't see why you'd want to learn it. To me, it seems strange. And not to be the PC police here, but people might be offended by that given Ebonics' history of racism. It's preferable to use African American Vernacular English (AAVE).



Although I would say that I am not very, very, very knowledgeable of the influence of French on English, I have difficulties believing that French and other languages had any significant influence over English grammar, which is a subject that I love. I mean, Old English had an inflectional system that had practically disappeared by Shakespeare's time, with slight exceptions of verb and pronoun inflections. French, German, Latin, Spanish, and Greek had and still have inflectional systems in place. English simplified while French became adopted as the ≈lingua franca there and most likely simplified because of that.

Most of the influence the other languages had was vocabulary. Avocado, armada; Spanish words. Philosophy, psychology, psyche, topology, cosmos; Greek words. Etc. Italian, French, Greek, and Latin were added to the language primarily by Chaucer and Shakespeare (a good deal of our vocabulary is thanks to him).



I agree. I suck when it comes to pronouncing words.

I keep rambling on about this stuff and feel slightly didactic, so let's revisit your question. I like grammar and, with my reading of Quirk et al, I believe that what I love about grammar is primarily its syntax, although I do love verb and pronoun morphology. Grammar is a wonderful treasure that is misunderstood. People are afraid of it and think it's worthless to fully learn when it is evidently not (if you've read Proust or Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher", you will know why). This actually goes back to that lingual influence thing. I'm sure you've heard of split infinitives and ending a sentence with a preposition, correct? Those rules are from active manipulation of English by rather moronic grammarians in the 18th century who were trying to force English (grammar) to emulate Latin (grammar).

You really took that seriously? The whole retarded and english mix didn't push the joke? I work in the "African American" highly populated and no one there calls it AAVE, and I don't if I told them their style was AAVE they would know what the letters stood for.

One language that seems to have a heavy influence is Latin. Has influence in English, French, Spanish, and Italian if I am not mistaken. And it is even influence by another older language called Etruscan. Almost all languages you can find an influence and almost work your way through history with those influences.

Ehh... I don't want to say that you're wrong exactly, however, English is clearly a Germanic language with some Romantic influences. There is a reason to why etymologists and linguists ponder whether to put Modern English as a Northern Germanic (Scandinavian) language rather than West Germanic (Which it is classified as right now.)

English didn't "simplify" it's grammatical syntax, Old English died out and Middle/Modern English largely use Scandinavian grammar.

EDIT: To clarify. Grammatical structure is a large part of what makes a language. The change in grammar between Old English and Middle/Modern English is what makes them become more or less separate languages. Old English use grammar sharing similarities with West Germanic languages (Like German or Dutch, not grammar from Romantic languages like French or Spanish) while Middle/Modern English share more similarities with North Germanic languages.

In my defense, this is the internet and I can be very obtuse sometimes. On Latin, I'm pretty sure that that is because of 18th century grammarians trying to force Latin into English. Vocabularically (neologism), English does have a lot of Latin words.



On your first point, yes, my meaning seems very ambiguous without that clarification, thank you. Although I know of the influence, I just generalize it and thus problematic for others. Again, thank you.

On your second point, you seem more knowledgeable than me, so I'll take your word for it, but I still wish to press this. Anglo-Saxon is definitely different than Middle/modern English (and can be classified as a separate language), no argument there, but it's still a stone in English's history. To say that Anglo-Saxon didn't eventually morph, through multiple stimuli (Norman influence, Scandinavian influence, as you say (Note: I'm not questioning your knowledge here), etc.), into Middle English. I would like to say that because it was a vernacular language during this period that that is why it gradually simplified into Middle English.

I'm also very curious to know where you found the information, primarily books, because now I really wish to know more about the the transitional period between Old and Middle English.

Oh, Anglo-Saxon (Which I'll refer to as Old English from here on out.) did absolutely morph, and that is partly what I mean by "died out". Intermingling of languages is what in the end "created" Middle English. However, Old Norse kind of rolled over Old English like a steamroller, changing Old English a lot more than Old English changed Old Norse. This is largely because of obvious reasons; The English didn't invade the Norse, the Norse invaded England. A continuous flow of new viking settlers coming down from Denmark/Norway bringing their own language with them paired with the introduction of Anglo-Norman(Old French, kind of) through the Norman Invasion a couple hundred years later eventually suffocated Old English by making drastic changes in the language.

What was left of Old English is what we see today as influences on Modern English rather than seeing the Norman and Norse influences in a language based of Old English, if you see what I mean. The transition between Old, Middle and Modern English is fuzzy at best and it's still up to speculation why Old English got as suppressed as it did. It's clear that Old English took on a lot of the vocabulary of Old Norse (Some say as much as 80-90% of the words adopted already existed in Old English) and Old French, more so than what is standard when languages collide in this way. The change in grammar is also a quite unique scenario but is believed to be partly because of simplification, as you said. Partly because Old Norse and Old English had similar words, but it was harder for Old Norse speakers to adopt Old English deviations than the other way around, partly a thousand other reasons.

I studied linguistics and English (As in English language, not geographic) literature at my local University after I graduated high-school before I went on to study stuff to get me an actual job, and this is where almost all of my knowledge comes from. I'll admit that I'm not 100% of all my sources, but I'll provide a list of some of my course literature at the end of the post alongside some studies that I still got saved.

Books on linguistics and etymology:

An Introduction to Language by Victoria A. Fromkin
The Study of Language by George Yule
The Story of English by Robert McCrum & Robert MacNeil
Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue by John H. McWhorter

Some studies about the correlation between Old Norse and Old/Middle/Modern English:

http://www.apollon.uio.no/english/articles/2012/4-english-scandinavian.html
http://linguistics.osu.edu/sites/linguistics.osu.edu/files/Hope-WPL.pdf
http://skemman.is/stream/get/1946/17234/40268/1/Old_Norse_Influence_in_Modern_English.pdf

If anyone is interested this Beowulf in Old English

Nehrims great but learning a fullblown language for one title seems a little extreme. The english subtitles werent that far off were they? I suppose by the time you learn the language Endertal or whatever its called will be out so itd have some use. Learning a second language is easier said than done though.

But yeah, it is neat how language develops and grows and borrows from other languages. Words like algebra, amber, lute, elixer, cotton, saffron, sheriff and syrup all have an arabic origin.

Our days of the week are actually references to norse gods. Wodinsday, Thorsday. Which makes sense given Old English was brought by the Anglo Saxon peoples who migrated from the scandenevian/germanic part of the world into Britian. The great English epic Beowulf is about a Geat (modern sweden) slaying beasties in Denmark I believe? Kind of interested that it isnt even set in Britian. Says alot about the cultural identity the Saxon people had at the time esspecially considering it is dated around 800 - 1000.

From there, Latin influenced it through the church and then later on the Normandy occupation saw the French language do the same. All the while other languages in the region likely also contributed. Breton, Welsh, Gaelic Irish and Scottish plus the other languages both these regions have, and the now lost Pictish.

Theres also the whole http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages thing that points out common links between many languages of today. Divine is Diva in many Sanscritic languages for example. Gnosis and Prajna, two parallel concepts describing a type of wisdom that trancends conventional knowledge share a similar gn and jn sound.

Frisian is like the sister language of old english if anyone wants to look that up.