XPost: alt.usage.english, alt.language.latin
From: Silvano@noncisonopernessuno.it
Steve Hayes hat am 17.09.2024 um 07:19 geschrieben:
> On Mon, 16 Sep 2024 09:10:15 +0100, Ed Cryer
> wrote:
>
>> Steve Hayes wrote:
>>> On Sat, 14 Sep 2024 22:58:09 +0100, Janet wrote:
>>>
>>>> In article ,
>>>> ed@somewhere.in.the.uk says...
>>>
>>>>> I can't help but wonder how to account for that, since, when Latin was
>>>>> the lingua franca of European education, German scholars used it too.
>>>>> But Germany had never become a Roman province; unlike Spain, France,
>>>>> Britain.
>>>>
>>>> Quite aside from Roman occupation, Latin was the
>>>> language of the Catholic Church and many legal documents.
>>>
>>> I don't think either of those had much influence on English.
>>>
>>> The English arived in Britain after the Romans departed, and they
>>> conquered the Romano-British, and so imposed their language rather
>>> than adopting the language of those they had conquered (though their
>>> cousins the Franks did the opposite when they conquered Gaul).
>>>
>>> But when the Norman-French conquered England in the 11th century they
>>> brought their laqnguage as the overlords, and it exerted a strong
>>> influence on the English, so many Latin words came in via French.
>>>
>>> And the Renaissance was another infuence, bringing in a lot of Greek
>>> and Latin words, which had higher social status.
>>>
>>> So four-letter Anglo-Saxon words were rude, crude, common, vulgar and
>>> churlish, while much longer words derived from Greek and Latin were
>>> refined, upper-class (at least until the middle-class started to
>>> emulate the upper-class, when some of them became non-U).
>>>
>>> So a refined and educated female had a uterus, while a churlish one
>>> had a womb. A refined and educated male had a penis, while a peasant
>>> yobbo had a cock.
>>>
>>> One could make a long list of them:
>>>
>>> shit -- faeces
>>> fuck -- copulate
>>> and so on.
>>>
>>> It's one of the reasons why English has so many different words for
>>> the same thing, with the Germanic ones having a lower class status
>>> compared with the Greek/Latin/French ones.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> I think you've hit the answer here with the Normandy French invasion. It
>> was complete and utterly changed Britain And it brought in a very strong
>> class divide. The feudal serfs tended cows, pigs, sheep; the Norman
>> masters ate beef, pork, mutton.
>>
>> To step up the social ladder you had to use French language.
>
> Yes, or to Frenchify your English.
>
> The Latinisation of English happened in two stages, both driven by the
> upper class, who were largely of Norman-French origin.
>
> The first stage was the invasion itself, and the subsequent control of
> England through ousting the local Anglo-Saxon nobility and replacing
> them with Norman-French ones, who built castles to control the
> populacve and put down resistance movements.
>
> The second phase was the Renaissance, which aroused, in the upper
> class, an admiration for Latin and Greek classical antiquity, and so
> pupils at public schools were taught Latin and Greek in their presumed
> classical forms (rather than the altered form perpetuated by medieval
> bureaucracy) and so classical Latin and Greek regarded as high-status
> languages and many consciously adopted neologisms were based on them,
> including such words as television, automobile and the like.
>
> Purists and nationalists of Germanic languages tried to plug more
> native-sounding words -- in Afrikaans, for example, television was
> "beeldradio", but eventually "televisie" won out.
>
> In English there was a battle in publishing, which hasn't yet been
> decided, between:
>
> foreword preface
> handbook manual
>
> and so on.
Please note, however, that Chaucer wrote before the Renaissance began,
but his Middle English had already lost the Old English declination
system and most of the OE conjugation.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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