A magnificent linguistic mess
On Saturday's I enjoy PowerLine's "The Week in Pictures." This morning the meme roundup highlighted an essay by Bernard Cerquiglini claiming that English doesn't really exist, it's just badly pronounced French. This quip is recycled Clemenceau, who is also said to have quipped (or quoted Dumas's d'Artagnan as quipping) that England is only a French colony that turned out badly. By the same token, the U.S. could be called an English colony that turned out badly, which I guess makes us a disappointing venture twice removed.The Cerquiglini argument is mostly a tongue-in-cheek rehash of John McWhorter's excellent book, "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue," which sorts through English's complicated roots in Germanic, Scandanavian, French, and Welsh roots. Cirquiglini adds some interesting information about old Provençal vowel shifts and spelling that still show traces in English.
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6 comments:
No doubt that the Norman conquest put a lot of French words into the English language. But like McWhorter writes, ours is a bastard tongue.
But regarding English as basically French ignores the fact that Germanic origin words are the most commonly used in English. Lot easier to construct what you want to say using only Germanic origin words than using only French origin words.
Similarly, the Spanish language shows trace of all the conquerors of Spain--mostly Roman, some Arabic, and even some words traced to the Visigoths. I recently read that among the Germanic origin words in Spanish are guerra (war), robar (rob, steal), and rico (rich). Fitting language additions from the Visigoth barbarian conquerors.
My experiences with the French have been at best ambivalent, either here in the US or in Latin America.
Gringo
“Lot easier to construct what you want to say using only Germanic origin words than using only French origin words.”
Yes, that’s right. In fact it’s been a pet project of some:
https://anglish.org/wiki/Anglish
Languages are classified by the most basic roots: the pronouns, the numbers, the parts of the body, geographic features, basic foods (bread, water, fish), common verbs like "go" or "hold." It is true that French, Greek, and Latin brought a lot of words into English, but if that were our criterion, most languages would have an asterisk.
Jackson Crawford (NorseBySW) often notes that a lot of basic English words were taken from Old Norse, which would fit the Germanic origin but from a slightly different direction.
I meant to add that Cerquiglini quotes the possibly apochryphal remark by George W. Bush that "the problem with the French language is that they don't have a word for 'entrepreneur.'"
That's true; but he also did a video showing just how close Old English and Old Norse were anyway.
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