quote:
Originally posted by Uschi:
quote:
Originally posted by Rue de Nocturne:
German and French are romance languages which stemmed from Latin. English came from an amalgamation of the romance languages. Read a book. Do you also think the civil war was about slavery?
OH. MY. GOD.

German and English are Germanic languages (I don't know about French so much), NOT romance. They did NOT sem from Latin. The Romans spoke Latin and when those damn nosey Christians went to convert the Germanic tribes, they had to translate their scriptures and stuff. Romance languages are like Italian and shit. Not English. My lord. Holy shit, dude. Have YOU read a book? Do YOU think Lincoln gave a shit about slaves?
I was in err to call German anything other than germo/slavic, but here..........................


A sample........................................

Johnson hints at one common choice for a model of properly pure English when he identifies the modern-day barbarians in his Dictionary. "The whole fabrick and scheme of the English language," he writes, "is Gothick or Teutonick"; but "Our language ... has ... been gradually departing from its original Teutonick character, and deviating towards a Gallick structure and phraseology."13 The French, then, are the invaders, the poisoners of the pure Saxon streams. English is in a unique position among the European languages in having two parents, one Germanic, one Romance. By comparison with such relatively homogeneous languages as German and French, English therefore has an obvious standard of purity. The fit was indisputably imperfect, but the need for an authorizing corpus of pure diction was enough to put Old English, at least tentatively, in the position of Augustan Latin. Interest in Saxon antiquities, to be sure, was never really popular, but scholarly interest in the roots of the English language was considerable; and from at least the late sixteenth century this study was associated with British national identity. Against such a background, additions to the language from French sources could be seen as impurities. So Johnson calls souvenance "A French word which with many more is now happily disused." Gout ("taste") is "An affected cant word"; the second sense of to transpire is "a sense lately innovated from France, without necessity"; and ruse is "A French word neither eloquent nor necessary."


Any questions?