Re: Scandinavia and the Germanic tribes such as Goths, Vandals, Angl

At 6:35:57 PM on Tuesday, November 4, 2008, Andrew Jarrette
wrote:

> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott"
> <BMScott@...> wrote:

>> At 1:14:37 PM on Tuesday, November 4, 2008, Andrew
>> Jarrette wrote:

>> [...]

>>> And anyway this basically supports my point that English
>>> has always had a strong foreign element in its identity
>>> (OK, I didn't say it in so many words in my last posting
>>> but this is what I meant).

>> But it's not true: OE wasn't particularly receptive to
>> foreign words, tending rather to use its own resources.
>> The techniques include extending the meanings of existing
>> words, creating new compounds (e.g., <leorning-cniht> for
>> <discipulus>), and calquing.

> I said "foreign element in its _identity_", meaning the
> ancestry,

That's not a way in which I would use or understand the word
'identity'.

> and therefore allegiances and identity, its speakers were
> held to have (variously from the Danish Scefings, from the
> Geats, from the Goths, from Seth, as well as the Angles,
> Saxons, and Jutes, plus Alfred's accomodation of
> less-foreign Mercians and later the Northumbrians and
> their Danish element). I suppose I should have said "the
> English" rather than "English".

It would certainly have helped, since I took 'English' at
face value as referring to the language.

As for the English, I think that you're barking up the wrong
tree altogether. Alfred (notably, though among others,
including his remarkable daughter) did an impressive job of
turning Angles and Saxons into Anglo-Saxons, and the English
are notable for their rather early development of strong
senses of identity as a nation and then as a state. I don't
see much basis for 'identity-challenged' at any point, let
alone a dubious connection with the high proportion of
borrowings in the English lexicon.

> It seemed to me that the English developed a "xenotropic"
> tendency early on that developed into a torrent through
> much of the history of their language (as mentioned,
> English is now only about 20% English).

I prefer to look for less fuzzy reasons. For instance,
there's a layer of borrowings from Latin that came with
Christianity. The borrowings from Scandinavian look to be a
fairly normal result of language contact. Early loans from
French are generally of the kinds that one would expect in
the situation that obtained after the Conquest; the much
more numerous later medieval loans from French owe much to
French cultural prestige, and the English were by no means
the only borrowers; and so on. Note too that we sometimes
underestimate the percentage of loans in some other
languages. French, for instance, borrowed quite extensively
from Latin at various times, but because it's a Romance
language, we tend not to notice this.

I'm not denying that English has for some time borrowed
rather freely from a wide variety of languages. It wouldn't
surprise me if such a tendency were self-reinforcing. But
tracing it back to the ethnogenesis of the English seems
hard to justify.

Brian