docoflove1974

...Indivisible...with liberty and justice for all! Oops, this isn't the pledge of allegiance.

Anch'io ti spero buon compleanno!

You, sir, paint a beautiful picture. By beautiful, I mean vivid to all senses...damn good bit of writing, Don Tomato.

You black-hearted human scum, we will mercilessly crush you with the weapon of singlehearted unity!

Lief Eriksson, his son, I believe...but I could be wrong on that.

The jury is still out on that.

*puts on Chris Farley/Chicago hat*oooooookeeeeeeeeay. Well, dis here is a tough one, as JC was a heckuva gen'ral...but it's Ditka...so I think it'll be a close one. Ditka 5007, JC 100. I think da Roman Army could pull off a minor rush of action, but overall....DAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA BEARRSSSSSS *takes off hat*

I would agree with this. I think it's just a matter of labelling; the various Romance languages grew out of Latin, and because Latin was so associated with the Roman Empire and, later, the Catholic church, and people were aware of the fact that what they spoke was different than the language of the Church, they labeled their language as being different. With Greek, while I'm not positive of this, I would imagine that the constant connection with the Ancient Greek societies--starting with the time of Roman conquest over Greek lands, and continuing through to the Byzantine times--resulted in the Greek-speaking peoples reinforcing that connection and continuing the label. I'm sure that the rise of the Greek Orthodox church further that link. So, in sum, I would say it's a question of identity, culture, and historical awareness.

If you're a regular and you don't let PP know, he'll send the Hounds after you! Nah, really, the Pater Arcanae has a point to be made, I'm sure...and a reason behind it. I'm sure.

My two favorite modern books are by Umberto Eco: The Name of the Rose and Baudolino. When he hits...man, the books just grab your attention! However, I hate most of his other books--in particular Foucault's Pendulum and The Island of the Day Before...way too long, boring, and inane. There are three American writers who always have my attention: Mark Twain, Edgar Allen Poe, and John Steinbeck. Their short stories are awesome!

In the linguistic realm, that's exactly what the perspective is. This says nothing about the culture of the different groups at that time, only that, when dealing with different languages, there's always the one you're working with, and 'outside'/external influences. And that's it. There's no subjectivity when it comes to linguistics: it's pretty much black or white (or so they say). A good point, but I would counter that we have accurate records of this impact of these areas...for anywhere from 150-300 years, and more in some cases. Remember, this is linguistic data that I deal with, not so much the sociological/cultural data. While a historical linguist does understand the sociological/historical/ethno-cultural data of a given time frame, we use it to paint a fuller picture of what we see in the linguistic data, but is not a true factor in a linguistic analysis. For example, we know the history of the Vikings, the Normans, and the Anglo-Saxon/English peoples and understand the cultural intricacies, but it only helps us to understand what happened with the language...but the data in the text is usually straightforward and tells the story about the language, which is what we're interested in.

I love the Spanish phrase best: No hay de que, which is kinda like saying "Fuggedabawdit!" The dissertation at times comes in handy!

Sorry for the delay...as I told The Augusta via PM, I didn't have any links at work, only at home...and I was waiting for this thread to be created (thanks, PP!). So, just for refernence, this link is for the Doomsday book, which is from the late 11th century England...that's the language we're talking about when we refer to the time of the Norman Conquest...and really the crux of the question, in my mind. This link is to the University of Texas Indo-European Linguistics Research Center's page, and mirrors much of what Asclepiades has stated. How inflected was the langauge at that time, and what were the other influences, if any? Old French: this link (which, I admit, is not only from the University of Texas, but co-written by one of my dissertation directors, Prof. Brigitte Bauer) has a very thorough but accessible outline of Old French, both as a language and as a 'culture'. Morpho-syntactically and syntactically, Old French was highly inflected: 1) noun phrases: nominative and oblique/object cases, masculine and feminine genders, singular and plural; 2) verb phrases: much more analytical than synthetic Latin (aka more order and one-to-one correlation with inflection and use), use of most all of the verbal categories of Latin. What is considered "Old French" is rich in literature and textual documentation from the 9th through the 13th century (starting with the 14th century we get into either Middle or Renaissance French), so definitely the Norman Conquest and the subsequent generations are part of 'Old French'. Old Norse: Another great link to the UT Indo-European Linguistics Research Center on Old Norse, which was roughly spoken from 500-1000 CE (after that we have Old Icelandic and the Old Scandinavian languages); the page has a great background on Old Norse and several links to sources. Again, the language of the Vikings was highly inflected, much like Icelandic is now. There was a shift or simplification of declensions in the late 14th century (Bennediktsson, Hreinn. "OIcel. oxe, uxe: Morphology and Phonology." NOWELE 1986:49) but this is well after the Viking raids and impact in the British Isles. Regardless, there is even more inflection in Old Norse than in Old English--more declension classes, a stronger tripartite gender system (which is still vital in Icelandic), and a full-blown tense and aspect system. To say the least, it was highly inflected. So, to sum up: Old English, Old Norse, and Old (Norman) French at the time of the Viking raids and Norman Conquest were all highly-inflected languages. French has lost some inflection, phonologically more than morphologically; English has almost completely lost most inflection. But I would caution against anyone saying that Old French and Old Norse had something to do with that loss of inflection in the history of English; there are so many phonological changes to English--mostly internal changes, but perhaps there are external pressures--that are more popularly thought to have lead to the changes. There are some great links to texts of various periods of English, and one can note not only the lack of inflection but the change of spelling--this notes the changes of phonology. --History of the English Language (HEL-L) Dan Mosser's site --Another HEL-L out of the University of Toronto --*GULP* Wikipedia!? Yes! They have an accurate version of the Lord's Prayer over various versions of English. Sorry for writing a book!

Duh me...forgot about that one...hehe Pretty much, yep. I know there are exceptions to this, but I can't recall them off the top of my head...but *usually* the more inflected the language, the less reliance on word order, as well as the reverse. Like I said, I'm sure there are counterexamples, but this is the general scale.

Sorry Doc, but there's one thing that you and other linguists are forgetting: the Vikings were not an 'external pressure'. After the intial attacks many of them settled in England and became 'internal'. The need for a common language was not due to 'invaders' wishing to make their demands known, but of the 'neighbour-to-neighbour' variety used on a daily basis. The continuous interaction is likely to have embedded changes in the language rather than being relatively uncommon and so unlikely to have a great effect. If they are not part of the original culture, they are external pressure. Even if they assimilate, as the Vikings did, they're still not part of the original culture. That's the linguistic perspective. The same is true of the Spaniards who 'colonized' (perhaps 'took over' is a better term) of the Naples kingdom in the late Medieval period; Spanish and (Sicilian/Neopolitan) Italian are sister languages, yet the Spaniards are an external pressure, since they are not Sicilians/Neopolitans. That argument doesn't make any sense with respect to Old Norse and Old English. Now, if one wants to argue that there was a type of pidgin or lingua franca created by the two cultures, perhaps that is true. But the creation of a pidgin or lingua franca does not impact necessarily the original languages of the parties involved. The French spoken in Haiti, for example, is still 'standard' French; no doubt that French is the base language of Haitian Creole, and that is reflected in the various sociolects of the creole, but does not affect the French language. Same is true in Argentina, where a 'creole' (it's status is argued frequently) called Latifundo is spoken in the Porte

hehe, as a spanish native speaker I know that's not a trouble, but the examples are quite exagerated and the man elongates too much each word with long vowel Es verdad, galiciano...es verdad. The examples in the site are quite exaggerated.

I myself didn't do so well with German...and the course I took was 'for reading knowledge'. I kept trying to make sense of it, but the subordinate clauses and verb particles really threw me! Then again, I wasn't into it much...just wanted to get a requirement done and over with. Next up for me is French; I can read it, but can't speak/understand it, and that's really not good in my field. I'm trying to figure out a way to study in France (perhaps the south of France?) and make it count for some academic reason...but first I think I need to find a tenure-track position. Then I can play with this idea more!

Well, I must say that the notion that that loss of inflection is due to contact is not one that is popularly held. ' External pressures' upon a language are often proven through internal means. IIRC, Germanic inflection is varied--from highly inflected (Icelandic, German) to a moderate amount (the Skandinavian languages, I believe) to little to none (Dutch, English). Note that with Dutch and English, both West Germanic languages, there is little in the way of inflection; certainly Dutch has been losing inflection at a much slower pace than English, which lost most of its inflection by the time Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales. Furthermore, when one makes the argument for external pressure causing a change, one must look at all languages involved at that time. In this case, we're talking about a highly-inflected Old English/Saxon and a highly-inflected Old Norse...so there most likely is no connection between the Vikings and the loss of inflection in English. The link you posted is an example of Creole Theory for English...and it's one that has been under constant critique for the reasons that I've given above, for starters. The other version of CT is that the Norman Conquest, with the increase of Norman French speakers at high levels, either caused or helped speed up changes in English. Again, there hasn't been much in the way of hard evidence of that time to support the claims, and so it is mostly avoided by historical linguists. Oh man...try teaching an ESL course...it's horribly hard! It's as hard to learn English as it is any other language. Particularly if one comes from a highly-inflected language, and is used to everything being 'labeled' in the language...when they learn a minimally-inflected language, they have the worst time in trying to understand what they're saying. The truth is that there is no 'hard' or 'easy' language to learn; it completely depends on the linguistic background of the 'student' and on the way that they learn language in general--if they can see the 'logic' in a language. No, the reason that English is so heavily taught is purely business...if you want to do business on any level outside of your country, you pretty much have to learn English. That, and American and British (and perhaps Australian) culture is popular around the world.

wow, this site is quite good

Really? This doesn't make sense linguistically, but that doesn't mean as much. What sources do you have for this? I'll leave Viking influence on England to other people (not my specialty). If you read the rest of the thread it is discussed, even linguistically by The Augusta and by sonic. Linguistically, Viking influence in Scandanavia is very obvious . Oh crud...I meant to specify further. I know about the Viking/Scandinavian link...I forgot to edit that part out of the text that I quoted from you. My apologies. This I really did not know. Thanks for the source...I'll look into this since, like I said, the linguistic side of that equation doesn't quite line up. The Balto-Slavic group and the Germanic group, while both Indo-European, are considered to be from very different waves of migration--the Germanic being quite early, and the Balto-Slavic coming quite a bit later. However, I should note, there is much controversy in that statement, but I do believe that much to be true. As to dates...that's where most of the controversy lies, and I won't pass along much of it.

Nothing gets past Don Tomato

Really? This doesn't make sense linguistically, but that doesn't mean as much. What sources do you have for this?

That's exactly what I was thinking of, in part, Nephele...just that I was doing it from memory! Thanks for the online citation! And, yes, for the most part masculine I-declension words were re-assigned to the declension that best matched their gender. But specific to the Greek ones...I think it depends on whether they were specifically male-masculine nouns (brabeuta 'judge, umpire') or just simply masculine-assigned words. Many of the male-masculine ones I know were re-assigned, often with the -tor suffix added to make it masculine-looking (vs. -trix), but as to all of those nouns, I don't know. I'll update this soon...but let me look some stuff up.

While not a scholar of the history of English, I do know that the North Germanic languages (aka Norse and its sisters) did leave a lexical mark on the Anglo-Saxon mix that was already in place in the British Isles, as well as contributed to the pronominal system--but I can't recall exactly how that happened. But as most linguists will tell you, in a situation where one culture conquers another, and the only linguistic mark left is lexical (and perhaps some phonological additions/changes in order to pronounce those words), there is true language maintenance between the cultures, or the 'conquered' language is the one that is dominant. There are plenty of examples in Western Europe of this: the Normans over the English; the Gothic tribes over the Ibero-Romance peoples; the Franks over the Gallo-Romance peoples; the Ostrogoths over the Northern Italian peoples; as well as others. It tells me that while there might have been (and probably were) cultural exchanges between the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxon-ish Brits, and therefore lexical exchanges, there was still a separation between the two groups. Otherwise, we'd be speaking a Northern Germanic, not a West Germanic language nor French!

Oh, I'm sure that there were puns to be had. But what I find interesting is that these two goddesses--Juno and Venus--are perhaps the most connected with femininity: the mother, and the lover. Perhaps Ceres would be another, but that's it. However, there are several cases of 'cross-dressing,' as I like to call it: nouns which are of one gender but in a declension which is dominated by another. Ex: nurus 'daugther in law', socrus 'mother in law' both of declension II; agricola 'farmer' (et.al.) in declension I. These get ironed out in the history of the Romance languages--indeed, they can be seen in the Appendix Probi, so with the 'vulgar' registers there is already a change--but because Juno and Venus are so known and are truly proper nouns, their forms don't really change.