Re: English a romance language, not germanic?!

In article <timberwoof.spam-CF9364.00035605122007@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Timberwoof <timberwoof.spam@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <13lcdbh79cc0a75@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
josephus <dogbird@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Ye Old One wrote:
On Tue, 4 Dec 2007 22:10:11 +0100, first_name@xxxxxxxxxxxxx (Florian)
enriched this group when s/he wrote:

josephus <dogbird@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

English is from old French and that is a romance language. the fact
that it uses a Germanic grammar does not make English Germanic.
Ouch! That last sentence is a killer!
That's is quite painful to watch people completely sink in denial.

unless people in talk.origins agree with your claim that english is not
a germanic language?

After all nothing surprises me no more.

I know that wikipedia is not very reliable, but I'll stick to it for the
matter:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romance_languages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_languages

English English may have its grammar roots in Insular Germanic.
However, it still has some of its word roots from Latin, Celtic,
French, several Indian languages and some Nordic influence.


a word count of Saxon yields about 10000 or so one and two syllable
words. the lions share of the vocabulary is from OLD FRENCH ie we have
warantee and Guarantee and candle and chandelier which we borrowed the
pairs at different times from OLD FRENCH depending on where the capital
was. and we borrow freely unlike German.

our verb structure is German-like but we have strong verbs and week
verbs and gerund tenses called continuing tenses. which the last time
I looked had a complete set of IE tenses including a future tense. a
big shortcoming in English was no future tense.

our spelling is old French,

No, it isn't.

our vocabulary is old French

No, it isn't.

and our place
names are often French.

No, they're not.

I always found town town town on hill town to be funny but there are
places like that that are older even than Saxon names and all the
speakers just keep sticking ton on one end and hill on the other end.

If you were to actually study Modern English, Middle English, Old
English; Modern High German, Middle High German, and older varieties;
Modern French, Middle French, and Latin; then you'd realize the form of
the lineage. Yes, there's a lot of French in English. That comes from
the Norman Conquest. I spoke French and German before I learned English.
Both languages were helpful, but English is more similar to German than
it is to French. (I will grant you that the war words are all French.
Even the German war words are French.)

Blitzkrieg (krieg itself) is French? How?

Came up recently in another group, and I'll repeat: mere vocabulary
can't be the basis for deciding language change. If it were, every
time I learned a new word, I'd be speaking a different language.

josephus there is an interesting writer. As long as I don't know
much about what he's writing about, he seems a reasonable science-oriented
poster. As he get closer to things I know about, I see a lot of
almost, but not really correct, to what he says. Plus the occasional
wildly incorrect, as here.

--
Robert Grumbine http://www.radix.net/~bobg/ Science faqs and amateur activities notes and links.
Sagredo (Galileo Galilei) "You present these recondite matters with too much
evidence and ease; this great facility makes them less appreciated than they
would be had they been presented in a more abstruse manner." Two New Sciences

.

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