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

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

>
> At
> > 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'.
>

Not even "cultural identity"? "National 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.

After Alfred had merged various different peoples, i.e. had joined
peoples who, though closely related, were to a certain degree foreign
to each other. Alfred liked to incorporate foreign elements and liked
to believe (not that it was untrue) that he was of foreign extraction,
just as Beowulf celebrated the foreign ancestry of its hero; hence the
"xenotropic" tendency I allude to.


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.

I just meant that we English have always seemed rather eager to
celebrate, praise, pay tribute to, or adopt foreign elements, whether
in words, ancestry, or political affiliations.

> > 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

But by far we borrowed the most and in the highest proportion.

; 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.

Yes, but that's only going back to the language of one's ancestors, as
though English would have borrowed from Anglo-Saxon.

>
> 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.
>

OK, it's not related to the ethnogenesis of the English. But I would
like to know why then have we borrowed so profusely from outside
sources, compared to other Germanic languages for example? Germany is
close to France, the Netherlands are close to France, not separated by
an arm of the sea, yet they have borrowed nowhere near as many words
from French and Latin as we have. Why are we so special (I know you
will disagree about us being "special", but from what I've seen of
European languages, I think I am justified in using that word)?
Italian and French were conquered by foreigners speaking Germanic, but
they have nowhere near the proportion of words from Germanic that we
have from Latin and French. I know that Latin still enjoyed prestige
in Europe, while Germanic did not, but again German and Dutch don't
have similar numbers of words from Latin as English does. The Greeks
were conquered by the Romans but there are very few words from Latin
in Greek. Why were we so happy to take on words from outside languages?

Andrew

Andrew