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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Get a grip, ol girl.
| It's been attributed by some to the Calvinist ethic , |
Oh, right, I see, the Scots become Calvinist in 1750. Fascinating.
| seriously bookish (having to read your Bible on Sundays). |
You mean they changed their habits in 1750?
| The leading lights of Edinburgh, the thinkers who formed a coterie, may well have benefited from an outstanding Scottish education system |
Oh, right, so the Scottish education system changed just before 1750?
Please, please, the orthodox version is where you start not where you finish. Now can we have some proper reasons why the Scottish Enlightenment happened. Rather than "One hundred things I know about the Scots that has something vaguely to do with intellectual stuff."
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On the origins of the French literary tenses:
| It was...during the 1600s that the past historic and the imperfect subjunctive began to disappear from use in spoken French on account of their complexity. The past historic (the passé simple or the 'simple past', so-called because it is made up of one verb) was replaced by the perfect (the passé composé or 'compound past') which was much easier to form. And the imperfect subjunctive was replaced by the present subjunctive, creating a sequence of tenses that goes against expectation for the English speaker: J'étais contente qu'il soit (rather than fusse) lé -- I was pleased that he was there. Both forms are still used in written French today, but only in very formal or literary contexts. |
When these tenses disappeared from spoken French, did anyone actually write down at the time that they observed this phenomenon? English has parts about it that are complex, but I don't see how you would get everyone to decide in a very short time period to agree on which parts are too complex, and then to drop them.
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On page 178 of THOBR it shows the unorthodox language evolution diagram with English at the top, French branching down on the left (and all of its children branching down), German branching down on the right, and then Anglo-Saxon branching off of German, so that the right side of the tree is like this:
English->German->Anglo-Saxon
I was wondering where Swedish and Dutch would go on this diagram? Do Dutch and Swedish branch off of Anglo-Saxon?
Branches like this?
English->German->Anglo-Saxon->Dutch
English->German->Anglo-Saxon->Swedish
Or maybe something like this?
English->German->Dutch
English->German->Swedish
Or like this?
English->German->Anglo-Saxon->Dutch->Swedish
Or nothing like any of these?
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DPCrisp
In: Bedfordshire
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| When these tenses disappeared from spoken French, did anyone actually write down at the time that they observed this phenomenon? English has parts about it that are complex, but I don't see how you would get everyone to decide in a very short time period to agree on which parts are too complex, and then to drop them. |
Your intuition is correct, I'm sure. Linguistics seems to operate on the principle that written documents are a complete and faithful record of what was said and therefore minute details of pronunciation and grammar can be discerned. If there is evidently a "mass movement" like the Great Vowel Shift in English, a couple of Consonant Shifts in German or the shedding of grammatical complexity from Old English to Middle English or in early modern French, theirs is not to reason why: they just say "look: it happened".
But writing isn't a complete and faithful record, it's a version or representation of what is said; it's a system of conventions that are subject to fashion, revision, standardisation, rationalisation...
They gleefully announce that the cause of the Great Vowel Shift is unknown, but it happened anyway: people began pushing long vowels to the fronts of their mouths or something (inconsistently, mind, coz some underwent the change and others didn't). I gleefully announce that the Great Vowel Shift is the standardisation of certain spelling conventions and is not evidence of a change in pronunciation at all.
The only evidence we have of what was spoken in France around the 1600s is what was written, which is, um, literature. Praps what they mean is that relaxed, informal speech began to be recorded around that time. Do people think everyone spoke as Shakespeare wrote, or are there reasons for books, plays, court records, wills and whatever else made up the bulk of documents to use formal language that is unrepresentative of the ordinary vernacular?
E.g. "People pushed long vowels to the front of their mouth": people speak like this at the very same time that I chose to write the grammatically complete form. We write for different purposes, the range of purposes has expanded over time and the range of uses appearing on record has changed over time. That says nothing about the uses that were not written. At one time, French was spoken but never written.
What is written is not necessarily what is said.
E.g. Regional accents.
E.g. The famous Phoenician alphabet had no vowels (so they call it an abjad, not an alphabet), so it can only have been a representation. Every word was "close enough for them to tell what you mean". Like military/business style abbreviations today: PLS = please, PP = polypropylene or per pro, MTG = meeting or mounting, RoHS = "rose"/"ross"/"rosh"/"rohass"/"restriction of hazardous substances".
E.g. Medieval Latin documents (in England at any rate) were heavily abbreviated and you just had to know the system. Punctuation and upper vs. lower case letters were brought in at different times and you just had to know the system.
E.g. Kids get conflicting stories about whether punctuation is meant to represent how to read aloud, where to breathe.
E.g. "e.g." You might say "ee gee", "exempli gratia", "for example", "what the hell does 'egg' mean?" I don't know or care how it comes out.
E.g. I'm not sure these need to be pronounced at all, but they can be read:
t/here
a(nti)-social
;-)
E.g. You can say "dot dot dot" for "...", if you like, or just understand that it's leaving something unsaid...
Pronunciation is a serial process, but you can read and write more than one thing at a time.
(Historical) linguistics is structurally unsound because they only have the text to go on but they use it to equate spelling and pronunciation. X = X is never a useful equation. We, on the other hand, have independent grounds for saying we know what was said, as well as direct evidence of how it was written: the argument per THOBR is that the earliest written English is ordinary English. Therefore we can usefully equate two different things, X = Y, and see how much has really changed.
A linguist is someone who says "I know how tall I am" and puts his hand on his head to prove it.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| The only evidence we have of what was spoken in France around the 1600s is what was written, which is, um, literature |
It would seem reasonable to assume that these particular developments (or as may be, non-developments) were triggered by printing. Let's remember that the sequence was
1. very few people literate -- all sources 'formal'
2. printing comes along
3. lots of people literate -- sources both formal and informal.
So, agreed, the artefacts were different since after 1600 we're getting testimony from the lower orders but what is not agreed is the difference that literacy itself has on the lower orders' speech patterns. We have reason to believe that literacy changes everything on a much speedier time-frame than before (though not the dizzying coupla hundred years to change the entire language beloved of linguists trying to explain Anglo-Saxon into English or Latin into French).
On the question of how the Germanic side evolved I am in some difficulty because Anglo-Saxon's status as an 'alphabetical' ie non-natural language wasn't in my mind when I produced the table. But I'm perfectly happy for the present congeries to help in working out the most likely sequence. (This can include the dethroning of English itself if you wish.)
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This is what it says about Dutch vocabulary on wikipedia:
The Dutch vocabulary is one of the richest in the world and comprises at least 186,000 headwords.[13] Like English, Dutch includes words of Greek and Latin origin. Its number of Romance-based loanwords is higher than in German, but much lower than in English. Even more than in English, a Romance alternative exists for many Germanic words, and the Romance word is primarily used in more formal contexts (e.g. "rechtvaardigheid" and "justitie", "verdediging" and "defensie").
Somewhat paradoxically, most loanwords from French have entered into Dutch vocabulary via the Netherlands and not via Belgium, in spite of the cultural and economic dominance exerted by French speakers in Belgium until the first half of the 20th century. This happened because the status French enjoyed as the language of refinement and high culture inspired the affluent upper and upper-middle classes in the Netherlands to adopt many French terms into the language. In Belgium no such phenomenon occurred, since members of the upper and upper-middle classes would have spoken French rather than Frenchify their Dutch. |
The part where it says "a Romance alternative exists for many Germanic words, and the Romance word is primarily used in more formal contexts", I assume they mean that basic words like water and house and pig don't have an equivalent Romance word, and that they mean mostly military and political terms - is that a correct assumption? And where it says "Even more than in English", do they mean that the proportion of overlap between Germanic/Romance is greater than in English, or that both the proportion and the magnitude of overlap between Germanic/Romance is greater?
From their explanation of how Dutch got a lot of French words, can it be assumed that most of the French words are genuine (late in the game) loanwords, or is this orthodoxy making up an explanation, because it's not sure of where the French words came from?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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The problem is that there would seem to be several sources for Latinate words and these sources apply to Dutch as much as to English.
1. THOBR claims that most of these Latinate words were there in the original language and, if it's true there are fewer in Dutch, this would seem to indicate that Dutch/English (either way) happened earlier than French/English. [Or do I mean 'later', I get easily confused.]
2. French and Latin were geniune sources of 'civilised' loanwords ever since Latin and then French became high-culture languages in Britain and the Netherlands. (Hence the erroneous belief that Latinate words are posh versions of Germanic ones. A few actually are.)
3. Latinate terms were deliberately coined by both English and Dutch scientists/ technical innovators/ litterateus etc etc (of which both were right up there in the front rank) and then borrowed from one another.
All this could probably be sorted out if only the linguists in both countries didn't believe in false paradigms. However, since English- and Dutch-speakers are both word-besotted, hope springs eternal.
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Is English closer to Old Saxon or Dutch? Or can you not really quantify such a comparison?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Such a comparison would be a piece-of-piss. But it is one of the more damning criticisms of academic linguists that they make no attempt at any mathematical (and therefore objective) measurements of languages. Indeed, you would be drummed out if you evinced any kind of scientific attitude. Basically they're just a bunch of crossword puzzlers.
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| If you look on a map of France, just across the English Channel from England is an area still known as Normandy, although today it has been divided into modern départements. The Normans who conquered England in the year 1066 came from this area, but "Norman" is a version of the word "Norseman." A few centuries before the Norman Conquest of England, these people had migrated down from Scandinavia to settle the warmer and more fertile lands of north west France. The Normans were, in fact, Vikings once removed. By 1066, though, they had adopted European customs, the French language and Roman Catholic Christianity. The Normans who conquered England were, for their time, very modern Western Europeans. |
Does anyone know what the explanation is for why the Norseman dropped their own language and started speaking French?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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| and started speaking French? |
French or Norman-French? This is slightly important.
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| Mick Harper wrote: | | and started speaking French? |
French or Norman-French? This is slightly important. |
Well, I looked at that before I posted. What I was originally googling was whether or not Norman French was actually French and not something like the French equivalent of Anglo-Saxon.
I don't know that much French, but Anglo-Norman looks pretty French to me. Though, it apparently has a fair amount of Norse vocabulary.
I thought that Norman French looks as close to Modern French as Middle English does to Modern English. Can someone who knows French well confirm whether this is true or not?
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The French kings, even Charlemagne, were unable to stop the [c.896 Viking] plundering [of the area in and around Paris]. When the French noted the increasing number of Viking settlements along the coast, they feared the worst. But the Vikings were wearying of the raids. French defenses were becoming more effective and Viking losses were increasing.
So a deal was struck in 912. The French would recognize the Vikings possession of the land they had already settled (plus a bit more) and make the Viking leader, one Rollo, a French noble. In return, the Viking duke would convert to Christianity, acknowledge the French king as his overlord and, protect France against wilder Vikings. Thus was born Normandy.
The Normans were quick to become French...[and then they attacked England]. |
This sounds like a creation myth. I just can't figure out whose it is.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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Norman French is a dialect of French. The reason why the difference is important here is that 'French' ie the dialect spoken around Paris became a written language just before Rollo and his chums pitched up. We presume that they were speaking a Scandinavian language, we also presume that they had switched over to the local dialect ie Norman French by the time they invaded England but they did not write in French until some time later, when they wrote in the Paris version (in England at any rate, I don't know the situation in Normandy.
But Norman French became a written language too at some point and became quite prestigious in the sense that it was used for legal purposes in the Channel Islands and also in Rouen. It might be worthwhile trying to figure all this out.
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Hatty
Site Admin
In: Berkshire
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| But Norman French became a written language too at some point and became quite prestigious in the sense that it was used for legal purposes in the Channel Islands and also in Rouen. It might be worthwhile trying to figure all this out. |
Yes, legal parlance was, and is, a sign of 'education' and knowledge of French was, and is, a sign of 'education'; in pre-Conquest times the Anglo-Saxons were keen on writing up laws (in 'English').
Interestingly as far back as 1362 the 'Statute of Pleading' made the point: The law, written in French, recited that French was much unknown in the realm; it therefore required that all pleas be "pleaded, shewed, defended, answered, debated, and judged in the English Tongue."
English law is based on an unwritten (though written down) constitution and the Church in its battle against the state tried to claw back influence through ecclesiastical courts using Latin. Even in the time of James I and Charles I with their absolutist leanings the king was obliged to abide by (common) law.
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