Moonhead
Posts: 16520
Joined: 9/21/2009 Status: offline
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I don't want to come over all medication boy, but you've got that slightly wrong. Anglo Saxon started as a Germanic language, and Latin had very little (if any) influence on that. Medieval French was a more significant influence (though it tended not to mix that much with Saxon for class reasons: the French aristocracy spoke French and the serfs spoke Saxon). Modern English (or even middle English) is a far more recent development, and is distinguished by the fact that it's dumped all of the rigid grammatical rules (mostly to do with tenses and genders) that mark the other Germanic languages. You wouldn't have a prayer of getting through Beowulf in the Anglo Saxon without a lexicon, but you could take a fair crack at Piers Ploughman or The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. To refer to the point I made in my earlier post: most contemporary Germanic languages are spoken like R&B in rigid twelve bars, while modern English is free jazz. More flux, more flexibility, more definition by context rather than word order or a dozen different endings to the same noun or verb.
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I like to think he was eaten by rats, in the dark, during a fog. It's what he would have wanted... (Simon R Green on the late James Herbert)
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