From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 2803
Date: 2000-07-09
----- Original Message -----From: chriscrawford@...Sent: Sunday, July 09, 2000 5:37 PMSubject: [TIED] Re: IE, AA, Nostratic etc.Some linguist are receptive to cladistic ideas; cf. P. Gasiorowski. 1999. ‘The Tree of Language: a Cladistic Look at the Genetic Classification of Languages’. Dialectologia et Geolinguistica 7.
Lexical borrowing can take the shape of massive influx if there is a prestigious culture to borrow from. The proportion of Romance words in the modern English vocabulary will vary depending on how many learned and technical terms you choose to take into account. I'd put it at ca. 80%, including Graeco-Latin vocabulary. Middle English survived the invasion of French words and remained a vigorous language (Chaucer was active shortly after the influx had reached its peak).
On the other hand, lots of Old French words borrowed into Middle English (blue, bacon, harness, marshal, war, etc.) were of Germanic origin. The French had no mediaeval Academie Française to fend off foreign influence. Lending and borrowing is a perfectly natural process.
Piotr
Chris wrote:The word that I'm not seeing in this discussion is "cladistics".
This is a study developed mostly by the biologists in formalizing
the taxonomy of life. They've accomplished a great deal here; I
wonder if linguistics could profit by snatching some of its ideas.
The main obstacle would be linguistic crossover (you have a term
for it) -- words from one language being adopted in a completely
unrelated language. This would be analogous to a horse mating with
plankton in biological cladistics. I wonder, do you have any
estimates of the degree to which linguistic borrowing takes place?
I would think that English would show lots of borrowing -- but
how much of the modern English vocabularly is French?
Which reminds me, after all the borrowing we've done from French,
you'd think they'd appreciate our efforts at partial repayment,
but they remain incomprehensibly unappreciative.