From: Brian M. Scott
Message: 61404
Date: 2008-11-05
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott"No, I don't think so. Ancestry might well play a role in
> <BMScott@...> wrote:
>>> 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"?
>> As for the English, I think that you're barking up theI think that you're misreading both the history and Davis.
>> 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 anyI'm not at all sure that I agree with this, but in 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 aA fact for which perfectly good historical reasons can be
>>> "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 underestimateNot really, no, especially in the case of the later
>> 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 borrowedFor starters, they had very different historical
>> 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.