Beauty Of Language

One thing is that, for starters, one cannot equate Old Norse and Old French influence upon English, even though you tend to treat them in the same sentences when speaking about outside influence upon English. While the former has contributed far less "dictionary words" to English than the latter, these words are generally a far more integral aspect of the core of the English language, and are generally not identifiable by most people as not being native, unlike many words from Old French, which are clearly non-native or at least "literary" in nature. Furthermore, there is clear Old Norse influence upon core "grammar words", such as the copula and the personal pronouns, in English, as shown by "are" and "they"/"them"/"their", which in themselves indicates a very deep impact of Old Norse upon English, whereas Old French has no influence upon English that is so fundamental in its impact upon it. Lastly, one should probably treat influence by other Germanic languages, such as Old Norse and Dutch, upon English separately from that of non-Germanic languages, such as Old French, for the very reason that such is still fundamentally from within the same general language group, and thus is likely to not be as clearly "different" as that from outside the same overall language group.

As for what you say about analysis in English, you are just looking at English versus *standard* Hochdeutsch, for the most part. English is not that anomalous when one looks at other Germanic languages besides them, such as the Frisian languages, Dutch, Low Saxon, and the continental North Germanic languages (besides some islands of very significant synthesis, such as Dalecarlian). Even though English, along with Afrikaans, is notable for its level of analysis, many of the other Germanic languages, and dialects of such, are actually not that far behind such, once one stops focusing on just English and standard Hochdeutsch. For example, in practice spoken Dutch uses a one-case system for nouns (formal Dutch uses a two-case system for nouns, the "other" case being genitive) and a two-case (or three-case, if you look at things a certain way) system for pronouns, Low Saxon and various Allemanic dialects (which most would call "German", even though they are not such in the way that standard Hochdeutsch is) use a two-case system (with a nominative and a common case and no genitive; however, Low Saxon does have a separate genitive clitic, like English), and the "standard" continental Scandinavian languages have a two-case system (common and genitive) for nouns and a three-case system (nominative, common, and genitive) for pronouns. Similarly, when one looks at the "standard" continental Scandinavian languages, they have lost marking of verbs for person and number, which actually goes *further* than English in such a regard, even though they do have some things that English lacks like marking verbs for passiveness.

In this regards, the only case where English has at all made it truly distinct from the rest of the Germanic languages, save maybe Scots, with respect to fundamental core grammar, rather than just being a very progressive example of trends that can be found elsewhere throughout the Germanic languages, is that it has lost verb-second-ness, for the most part, even though it still retains traces of it in places. If there is anything else that makes it notable amongst the Germanic languages, besides Scots and Afrikaans, is its loss of grammatical gender (no, gendered pronouns in English ARE NOT *grammatical* gender), but even then there are signs of at least partial collapse of the gender system in Germanic languages other than English, Scots, and Afrikaans; for instance, all "standard" Danish and Swedish have reduced their grammatical gender system to being a common-neuter system, and Dutch seems quite on the way to having such a system as well, with many people not knowing which verbs are "masculine" and which verbs are "feminine" in it (no, just because Dutch uses "de" for both masculine and feminine does not mean that these are necessarily the same; the same applies to Low Saxon as well, except I don't know of any indications in Low Saxon of an actual loss of the masculine-feminine distinction in it).

<<Generally I agree with what you say, especially regarding Korean (It is still basically a Ural-Altaic language)>>

Korean's genetic/linguistic typological affiliation is still hotly debated but whatever family it is it's certainly not Sino-Tibetan even tho a huge portion of its words have come from Chinese over the millennia. The amount of Chinese words doesn't change its linguistic affiliation one teency little bit. Lexical borrowings spur little or no underlying change in important areas like syntax and morphology, and this case is no exception. Changes to Korean syntax and morphology have almost always been home-grown.

<<but one caveat regarding this one: "Brennus, it wouldn't matter if 75% of English words were of Celtic origin--the underlying structure of the language is clearly Western Germanic." You don't have an air-tight argument here.>>

Only one supported by mounds of serious linguistic research and fact going back a couple centuries. Its linguistic affiliation as a Western Germanic language is not debated by scholars.

<<The syntax of English has changed a lot since the Anglo-Saxon period.>>

Yes. That has nothing to do with lexical borrowing, however (just like with Chinese and Korean). The syntax of Spanish has changed a lot since Classical Latin (which it came directly down from) yet it's still clearly an Italic-Romance language. Syntactical changes do not oust members of a language family.

<<It has followed an analytical drift that is somewhat reminiscent of Chinese (as pointed out by Bodmer & Hogben in "The Loom of Language" - and by other writers too).>>

Yes, that's very true, but this hasn't been due to lexical borrowing. Also, this has happened in most modern Germanic languages. The continental Scandinavian languages have definitely drifted towards the analytical side of things and they're also clearly Germanic languages. Even Standard German has been moving more towards analysis, especially in the spoken language (but even in the written as well). However, this is all irrelevant to what language family these languages are in.

<<On the other hand, German has an archaic grammar which is still much like Old and Middle English, even Latin and Ancient Greek where the verb often comes at the end of the sentence rather than near the beginning like modern English.>>

You're thinking of conservative formal written Hochdeutsch, but even with that form compared to Modern English they're still both clearly Western Germanic languages. Also, grammars cannot be "archaic" unless they're not really used by people anymore.

>>You're thinking of conservative formal written Hochdeutsch, but even with that form compared to Modern English they're still both clearly Western Germanic languages. Also, grammars cannot be "archaic" unless they're not really used by people anymore.<<

Of course, what is usually really meant by most people when they say "archaic" in such a context is "conservative", in most cases "very conservative".

Travis,

Hello. I have no disagreements with much of what you wrote in your previous post but have a differing viewpoint about one comment you made:

" Lastly, one should probably treat influence by other Germanic languages, such as Old Norse and Dutch, upon English separately from that of non-Germanic languages..."

The problem here is that any foreign words borrowed by a language become thoroughly nativized or assimilated in that language over time. The process may often take as long as 1500 years but it still eventually happens. For example, early loans from Vulgar Latin and Church Latin into English like camp, mile, street, cook (Latin coquere cf. Spanish cocinar), offer (<Latin obferta), pit, (< Latin puteus cf. Romanian puts "pit" ; Spanish pozo 'well') bishop (<Latin episcopus) and candle (<Latin candela also found in Irish coinneal /kwinyel/ "candel") would be considered "native English words" today by most school children and high school students if you were to ask them about it. It is only those of us who have linguistic hindsight who know differently.

English is not the only language where this has happened. Some words of Visigothic origin in Spanish like alamo, bigote, ganar, listo, rico and estaca have been in the language for so long that they are virtually indistinguishable from native words of Latin origin.

However, from an academic standpoint I admit that your position would still be considered a respectable one in that you are arguing (I think) that "Germanic" is kind of one superlanguage with English, Frisian, Dutch, German, Yiddish and the Scandinavian tongues all being essentially just dialects of this superlanguage; French, however, is outside the pale.


Kirk,

One author on the Japanese language that I read, Roy Andrew Miller - "Japanese And The Other Altaic Languages", puts Korean in the Ural-Altaic superfamily of languages. He divides this group into a western branch which includes all of the Turco-Tartar languages (and possibly Hungarian and Finnish) and an eastern branch which includes Mongolian, Manchurian, Korean and Japanese. There are a few modern linguists who prefer to put Korean and Japanese into classes by themselves but with some indirect links to Ural-Altaic, Tungus and Eskimo.

Personally, I think Korean sounds a lot like Finnish and Estonian whenever I've listened to South Korean students speaking it amongst themselves. This makes sense if their original homeland was indeed near the Ural Mountains between Russia and Siberia along with the Finns and Hungarians (Magyars).

Korean and Japanese ,of course, have numerous Chinese (and American English) loanwords but still seem to maintain their esssential native identity which, as you said, is not Sino-Tibetan.