From: Andrew Jarrette
Message: 41235
Date: 2005-10-10
At 4:40:36 AM on Monday, October 10, 2005, Andrew Jarrette
wrote:
> You fellows really seem to be ganging up on me. I seem to
> have hit a raw nerve.
Obvious errors tend to produce multiple responses.-- I still don't see it as an error really, certainly not obvious. I see it simply as a difference of opinion.
[...]
> "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...> wrote:
>> At 8:18:46 PM on Sunday, October 9, 2005, Andrew Jarrette
>> wrote:
>> [...]
>>> david_russell_watson <liberty@...> wrote:
>>>> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Andrew Jarrette
>>>> <anjarrette@...> wrote:
>>> Only English among Indo-European languages has examples
>>> like these - where originally rhyming words have
>>> diverged, with no apparent reason.
> MHG bruoder, muoter > NHG Bruder, Mutter
>> There are several partial changes like this in the
>> passage from MHG to NHG, though I'd have to do some
>> digging to track them down; it's not something that I
>> keep at the top of my head.
> But bruoder had "d" and muoter had "t" - though I
> acknowledge they are near-rhymes.
This appears to be grasping at straws, unless you can show
that MHG uo is regularly shortened before /t/. Never mind,
though; try MHG dîchte, lîchte > NHG dicht, leicht instead.
NHG dicht is from northern dialects, while leicht is from southern dialects (I am aware that this does not disprove your point).
> Another is NHG Futter from OHG fuotar - but here the -ar
> stands for originally consonantal r that became syllabic
> in final position,
So what? The input to NHG is MHG <vuoter> and <muoter>,
which are exactly parallel.
> unlike bruoder which always had a vowel before the r (but
> also unlike muoter which nevertheless developed like
> fuotar!).
>>>>> Plus spellings like "ough" with its myriad pronunciations.
>>>> But as I wrote before, a spelling system is not a
>>>> language. The only justification you have in citing
>>>> English spelling is the manner in which it, having
>>>> fossilized, is a reminder of past sound changes in
>>>> English, not as a linguistically atypical feature
>>>> itself of the English _language_.
>>> But English spelling is atypical among Indo-European
>>> languages. No other Indo-European language has a
>>> spelling system that is as inconsistent and
>>> exception-rich as does English.
>> But as David has now pointed out twice, this has nothing
>> to do with the English LANGUAGE. The writing system is a
>> separate matter altogether.
> -- I always thought language had both a spoken variety and
> a written variety, but both called "language".
Yes, but the linguistic differences between them have little
if anything to do with the writing system; they're the
differences that allow people to say that So-and-so 'talks
like a book', which are obviously independent of the
notation used to write the language.
>>>> Properly, you should cite only those sound changes
>>>> which you consider atypical, not the spelling system
>>>> that merely _happens_ to reflect and remind us of some
>>>> of those changes.
>>> But I am recounting all aspects of English that make it
>>> nonconforming among Indo-European languages.
>> This isn't one of them, since -- once again -- it isn't
>> an aspect of the English LANGUAGE.
> -- I beg to differ. I have never heard anyone say that
> when one is writing English he is not using "language" or
> "a language".
Differ all you like; the fact remains that the English
language wouldn't change one whit if tomorrow we adopted one
of the umpteen spelling reforms that have been proposed.
Serbian is Serbian whether you write it in Roman or in
Cyrillic script.
-- Yes it would still be English but it would have changed in one aspect of it, namely, its writing system. Is it so essential in describing the characteristics of a language to leave out its written form? As I have said, I don't believe that it is something to be ignored -- when we learn a foreign language, in today's world, we almost always learn its written form as well (unless one is only being introduced to a language, not learning it completely). So much of modern communication is absolutely dependent on the written word.
> [...]
>>>>> Moreover the fact that it's called "English" though at
>>>>> least 60% of its vocabulary is French or Latin, if not
>>>>> more, though I am aware that languages such as
>>>>> Albanian and Farsi also have a high foreign content.
>> How much of the French lexicon do you think is Frankish
>> in origin? And what on earth has the name of the language
>> to do with anything linguistic?!
> -- I don't know how much of French is Frankish in
> origin, do you?
Henriette Walter (trans. Peter Fawcett), _French Inside
Out_, cites Louis Guinet, _Les emprunts gallo-romans au
germanique_, Paris, 1982, for the assertion that some 400
words of Germanic origin have been identified in Old French,
of which about a third still survive; the bulk of these will
have been Frankish. But even rather minimal exposure to the
language suffices to show that its lexicon is predominantly
of Latin origin.
-- Thus my point, that other languages do not have as high a foreign content as does English.
> Is it more than 50%?
Obviously not.
> -- The name "English" tells us something of where the
> language originated and who originally spoke it. Because
> it is named "English", we know it was not originally
> spoken by the Franks, yet the Franks have contributed a
> greater portion of our vocabulary than the Angles.
It appears that you completely missed the point. The
(ancestor of the) language named <English> was spoken by the
Angles, but the (ancestor of the) language named <Français>
was not originally spoken by the Franks, but rather by the
Gallo-Romans; the Franks gave up their own Germanic
language, Frankish, in favor of Gallo-Roman, which then
developed into Old French. Frankish has contributed almost
nothing to the vocabulary of English; French has contributed
a good deal, but only long after the Franks had ceased to
exist.
-- Yes, I acknowledge I made a blunder here. My point was that modern English only retains a small portion of its native vocabulary, and modern educated English looks a lot like French on paper. But I recognize that even early stages of a language contain foreign words, and some other languages have a high proportion of foreign vocabulary, and one need not change its name to reflect its foreign content. But Latin changed its name to French in France, to Spanish in Spain, etc. after the changes it underwent in the Middle Ages; yet English still remains "English" despite being much more unlike "Englisc" than Spanish is unlike Latin or Italian is unlike Latin.
Andrew