There's a few surviving Old English en plurals like oxen (not oxes) and children. Some hung around until the sixteenth century: shoen, hosen, eyen. Thankfully we got rid of crazy inflection, genders (so knife, fork and spoon were neuter, feminine and masculine) and umpteen verb endings. Unlike the French :-)
I’m always tickled by irrationally gendered words, eg “girl” being masculine in Irish (cailín) and neuter in German (mädchen). “Brethren” is my favourite -en plural survivor.
I was riveted by this video when I first saw it and thought I might share it with anyone interested in the evolution of spoken English over the last half milennium.
The young man has studied written and spoken English in the South East in the years between 1340 and 2006 and invented a conceit whereby the same text is 'repeated by the grandson' of each sucessive generation, at distances of 60 years.
It's not a co-incidence that English began its emergence from the peasant language to the national language not long after the Black Death, given the social levelling effects of plagues:
Apparently even the Church brought in large numbers of barely literate laymen who only spoke English as much of the Latinate clerge caught the plague or ran away.
"Perhaps, with the Conquest, English might have gone extinct altogether, just like several previous native languages of Britain, such as Cumbric, which lived on only in sheep-counting."
I imagine that if the Angevins never lost Normandy, there would be even more French words and even grammar in modern English. However, I don't think it would go extinct as the fates of languages that have been under French domain like Breton and Occitan illustrate.
I think the English were too many for the language to go extinct, and more importantly they all spoke the same language. One plausible explanation for Old English winning originally is that the natives were divided between Latin and Brittonic.
Still, I think Breton and Occitan are pretty much on the ropes.
Most regional dialects are on the ropes. This is largely the consequence of a process that began with the increased mobility of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th Century and later the rise of the mass media in the 20th . If one looks at the Irish language, in the year 1800, almost the whole island spoke Irish. Now, it exists mainly in the Western fringes as a vernacular.
The Famine was lethal to Gaelic. City dwellers, whose language was English survived mostly unscathed. The Gaelic speaking peasantry died or emigrated. Ireland is unique in still having a lower population today than in 1840.
I was in a pub in Ireland last week eavesdropping on an old boy complaining about the “synthetic rubbish” passed off on kids in schools as Irish, replacing the dialect that used to be spoken in each distinct region.
Another reason why the Anglo-Saxons largely triumphed over the Britons is that the later who divide of land equally among sons as opposed to a single heir. Subsequently, the Britthonic domains would fragment in the face of Anglo-Saxon solidarity. The Plague of Justinian also didn't help.
Occitan is being absorbed into standard French as a mere set of dialects. The same is happening with Sardinian and Italian, and with Plattdeutch and German. Belarussian also being sucked back into Russian. Catalan appears to be escaping that fate vis-s-vis Spanish. Scots English? That's not clear yet.
I was reading about that the other day, coincidentally. From what I understand, it was the victim of a deliberate program of cultural genocide following the Revolution as part of a campaign of national standardization.
Anyone reading Chaucer in the original, rather than modernised, English, has a hard time of it and needs a glossary to hand. Orally, it sounds rather like a German language.
But Shakespeare's English is pretty readily comprehensible.
So the 15th and 16th centuries saw another huge change in English, from medieval to modern.
And the growth of a standard English (based on the East Midlands dialect) which even dialect-speakers could understand and speak.
"Likewise, titles are mostly Latinate, including sovereign, prince, duke and baron – although not king or lord, from the Anglo-Saxon ‘loaf-giver’".
That the English word "lord" is derived from Anglo-Saxon "loaf-giver (or Middle English "hlafward") is a piece of evidence I use in support of my (perhaps preposterous?) claim that the Adam and Eve myth may have originally been about the invention of agriculture which brought slavery into the world.
The basic idea is that once primitive peoples became dependent on grain as their main source of nourishment, they were liable to conquest. Why? Because they could no longer run away and live off the land as in hunting and gathering days.. Henceforth both they and their annual grain stores could be captured by superior military force, reducing them and their descendants to a perpetual state of servitude.
Thus the first as well as all succeeding "nobility" throughout history were quite literally "those who controlled the grain." See here for an elaboration of this no doubt hard-to-believe thesis regarding the origins of the Adam and Eve myth, in which I argue that military conquest was the "original sin" that corrupted the world, an unspeakable truth before modern times: https://shorturl.at/BUjBa
In "A Short History of England" James Hawes points out there are still
two English languages - the Germanic one of short, practical words and the Franco-Latin one, full of long, abstract words.
The former is spoken by the plebeians, the latter by the posh / educated.
He points out that the former is native, the latter colonial. Unfortunately, as the government and its vast (late-Roman) bureaucracy insist on blathering away in Latinised French, England is in some ways still as much the victim of colonial rule as in 1100.
I really don’t agree that Old English somehow died out. When you hear it without knowing what the speaker is on about - and it sounds softer to me than a Scandinavian accent, more Highland Scot - it seems incomprehensible, but many words are basically the same as we have now (as Ed admits). When you read it and you know the context, it is surprising how much you understand. Trees, agriculture, weapons, the weather, sailing, the days of the week. Easter. Any festival ending in -mas. A town ending in -ham or -hurst or -ly. Wonderful nautical words, like “abaft”. Moot. The idea that it has died out is just WEIRD - see what I did there?
Then you have kenning, which was an AS poetic device, which I think survives in terms such as weed-wacker, skid-lid, blues and twos. And nicknames: Ethelred the Unready - well-read the unread, implying maybe the book-smart (another one) bloke who lacked cunning or nous - always makes me chuckle.
The etymology of "OK/okay" is itself pretty interesting. Most supported theory is that it's an abbreviation of "oll korrect", meaning "all correct," from a 19th century American fad for comical intentional misspellings. Wikipedia's coverage of it is good:
If you have never tried it, read Paul Kingsnorth’s superb The Wake, an eerie novel of doomed resistance to the Conquest, though our hero feels the country started going to the dogs when people gave up the old gods in favour of fancy foreign rubbish. Kingsnorth tries to write it without using any Frenchified imported words, meaning you spend the first few pages going back and forth to the glossary, but you very quickly absorb it all. It’s great, dig it out.
How many feminine endings can you think of in English. I can think of blond/blonde, fiancé/fiancée, savant/savante, né/née (I do know one bloke who changed his name to his wife’s as her surname was interesting and his was Jones), gamin/gamine (admittedly with slightly different meanings), but feel there may be a couple more.
PS: All this doesn't involve feminine versions like, recently reading Waugh, 'editress' etc. I suppose Countess remains, though not actress, which is all a bit bonkers.
Noble titles will likely endure. We don;t use them that much and they steeped in tradition. Odd fact about English: the female of "King" is a separate word entirely, one which originally meant "woman" as the cognates still do in some other languages. It's not the word for king with a feminine ending tacked on.
It is intriguing to think that French and Latin may have had major influxes of vocabulary into all surrounding languages anyway . I read in Robert Bartlett's book that in 1300, 90% of all realms in Latin Christendom were descended from Franks. Scandinavia and Poland were the exceptions.
Wonderful, thank you. The Normans did a lot of conquering... I wondered if anyone has tried to compare the linguistic impact of the various Norman conquests of various territories?
England is obviously a special case in so many ways, but I wonder about the linguistic legacy of the rest of the "Norman empire."
There's a few surviving Old English en plurals like oxen (not oxes) and children. Some hung around until the sixteenth century: shoen, hosen, eyen. Thankfully we got rid of crazy inflection, genders (so knife, fork and spoon were neuter, feminine and masculine) and umpteen verb endings. Unlike the French :-)
I’m always tickled by irrationally gendered words, eg “girl” being masculine in Irish (cailín) and neuter in German (mädchen). “Brethren” is my favourite -en plural survivor.
I was riveted by this video when I first saw it and thought I might share it with anyone interested in the evolution of spoken English over the last half milennium.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lXv3Tt4x20
The young man has studied written and spoken English in the South East in the years between 1340 and 2006 and invented a conceit whereby the same text is 'repeated by the grandson' of each sucessive generation, at distances of 60 years.
It's quite mesmerising.
All credit to the chap who made it.
Excellent. Thanks for sharing.
It's not a co-incidence that English began its emergence from the peasant language to the national language not long after the Black Death, given the social levelling effects of plagues:
https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691183251/the-great-leveler?srsltid=AfmBOoqm5apjYQ0l-oNTUQ9F45ZUJbDrXCITbYLJwcs6sW8bVwSk9NeD
Apparently even the Church brought in large numbers of barely literate laymen who only spoke English as much of the Latinate clerge caught the plague or ran away.
And francophone officers needing to speak to their English sergeants in their native tongue on the battlefield.
"Perhaps, with the Conquest, English might have gone extinct altogether, just like several previous native languages of Britain, such as Cumbric, which lived on only in sheep-counting."
I imagine that if the Angevins never lost Normandy, there would be even more French words and even grammar in modern English. However, I don't think it would go extinct as the fates of languages that have been under French domain like Breton and Occitan illustrate.
I think the English were too many for the language to go extinct, and more importantly they all spoke the same language. One plausible explanation for Old English winning originally is that the natives were divided between Latin and Brittonic.
Still, I think Breton and Occitan are pretty much on the ropes.
Most regional dialects are on the ropes. This is largely the consequence of a process that began with the increased mobility of the Industrial Revolution in the 19th Century and later the rise of the mass media in the 20th . If one looks at the Irish language, in the year 1800, almost the whole island spoke Irish. Now, it exists mainly in the Western fringes as a vernacular.
The Famine was lethal to Gaelic. City dwellers, whose language was English survived mostly unscathed. The Gaelic speaking peasantry died or emigrated. Ireland is unique in still having a lower population today than in 1840.
I was in a pub in Ireland last week eavesdropping on an old boy complaining about the “synthetic rubbish” passed off on kids in schools as Irish, replacing the dialect that used to be spoken in each distinct region.
Another reason why the Anglo-Saxons largely triumphed over the Britons is that the later who divide of land equally among sons as opposed to a single heir. Subsequently, the Britthonic domains would fragment in the face of Anglo-Saxon solidarity. The Plague of Justinian also didn't help.
https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/2007/04/10/the-plague-that-made-england/#:~:text=John%20Morris's%20magisterial%20history%2C%20The,middle%20of%20the%20sixth%20century.
I believe Breton enjoys the usual enthusiastic Celtic revivalist and preservationist efforts, while Occitan really is indeed pretty much doomed.
Occitan was apparently the main language of the Medieval Troubadours .
Occitan is being absorbed into standard French as a mere set of dialects. The same is happening with Sardinian and Italian, and with Plattdeutch and German. Belarussian also being sucked back into Russian. Catalan appears to be escaping that fate vis-s-vis Spanish. Scots English? That's not clear yet.
I was reading about that the other day, coincidentally. From what I understand, it was the victim of a deliberate program of cultural genocide following the Revolution as part of a campaign of national standardization.
I suppose like a lot of languages it’s a range of dialects rather than a single system, but how far is it from Catalan?
They are spoken in geographically-adjacent areas and are closely related, yes.
Anyone reading Chaucer in the original, rather than modernised, English, has a hard time of it and needs a glossary to hand. Orally, it sounds rather like a German language.
But Shakespeare's English is pretty readily comprehensible.
So the 15th and 16th centuries saw another huge change in English, from medieval to modern.
And the growth of a standard English (based on the East Midlands dialect) which even dialect-speakers could understand and speak.
"Likewise, titles are mostly Latinate, including sovereign, prince, duke and baron – although not king or lord, from the Anglo-Saxon ‘loaf-giver’".
That the English word "lord" is derived from Anglo-Saxon "loaf-giver (or Middle English "hlafward") is a piece of evidence I use in support of my (perhaps preposterous?) claim that the Adam and Eve myth may have originally been about the invention of agriculture which brought slavery into the world.
The basic idea is that once primitive peoples became dependent on grain as their main source of nourishment, they were liable to conquest. Why? Because they could no longer run away and live off the land as in hunting and gathering days.. Henceforth both they and their annual grain stores could be captured by superior military force, reducing them and their descendants to a perpetual state of servitude.
Thus the first as well as all succeeding "nobility" throughout history were quite literally "those who controlled the grain." See here for an elaboration of this no doubt hard-to-believe thesis regarding the origins of the Adam and Eve myth, in which I argue that military conquest was the "original sin" that corrupted the world, an unspeakable truth before modern times: https://shorturl.at/BUjBa
James de Peckham's kids dropped the de
while Daniel Foe added it
Del and Rodney de Peckham has a ring...
In "A Short History of England" James Hawes points out there are still
two English languages - the Germanic one of short, practical words and the Franco-Latin one, full of long, abstract words.
The former is spoken by the plebeians, the latter by the posh / educated.
He points out that the former is native, the latter colonial. Unfortunately, as the government and its vast (late-Roman) bureaucracy insist on blathering away in Latinised French, England is in some ways still as much the victim of colonial rule as in 1100.
I really don’t agree that Old English somehow died out. When you hear it without knowing what the speaker is on about - and it sounds softer to me than a Scandinavian accent, more Highland Scot - it seems incomprehensible, but many words are basically the same as we have now (as Ed admits). When you read it and you know the context, it is surprising how much you understand. Trees, agriculture, weapons, the weather, sailing, the days of the week. Easter. Any festival ending in -mas. A town ending in -ham or -hurst or -ly. Wonderful nautical words, like “abaft”. Moot. The idea that it has died out is just WEIRD - see what I did there?
Then you have kenning, which was an AS poetic device, which I think survives in terms such as weed-wacker, skid-lid, blues and twos. And nicknames: Ethelred the Unready - well-read the unread, implying maybe the book-smart (another one) bloke who lacked cunning or nous - always makes me chuckle.
"the neologism ‘okay’"
The etymology of "OK/okay" is itself pretty interesting. Most supported theory is that it's an abbreviation of "oll korrect", meaning "all correct," from a 19th century American fad for comical intentional misspellings. Wikipedia's coverage of it is good:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OK#Etymologies
Oh come on! It’s Och Aye! Almost identical.
isnt this the most debated etymology in English?
If you have never tried it, read Paul Kingsnorth’s superb The Wake, an eerie novel of doomed resistance to the Conquest, though our hero feels the country started going to the dogs when people gave up the old gods in favour of fancy foreign rubbish. Kingsnorth tries to write it without using any Frenchified imported words, meaning you spend the first few pages going back and forth to the glossary, but you very quickly absorb it all. It’s great, dig it out.
Yes I have! I mention it tomorrow. The first few pages are hard but you get into it.
How many feminine endings can you think of in English. I can think of blond/blonde, fiancé/fiancée, savant/savante, né/née (I do know one bloke who changed his name to his wife’s as her surname was interesting and his was Jones), gamin/gamine (admittedly with slightly different meanings), but feel there may be a couple more.
Fellator/fellatrix? Host/hostess admittedly more common.
and confidant/confidante
PS: All this doesn't involve feminine versions like, recently reading Waugh, 'editress' etc. I suppose Countess remains, though not actress, which is all a bit bonkers.
Noble titles will likely endure. We don;t use them that much and they steeped in tradition. Odd fact about English: the female of "King" is a separate word entirely, one which originally meant "woman" as the cognates still do in some other languages. It's not the word for king with a feminine ending tacked on.
I wonder what might have happened to the English language had the North Sea Empire been stronger and more permanent:
https://sco.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_Empire
Then again Norse power overall declared afterwards.
https://x.com/Varangian_Tagma/status/1834293372565225596
Linking to Scots Wikipedia on the discussion of a piece on lost language is awesome, particularly in view of the site history!
It has a better map in addition to a Norse feel.
Nice illustration of the Lallans apostrophe in the caption of the map too.
It is intriguing to think that French and Latin may have had major influxes of vocabulary into all surrounding languages anyway . I read in Robert Bartlett's book that in 1300, 90% of all realms in Latin Christendom were descended from Franks. Scandinavia and Poland were the exceptions.
Wonderful, thank you. The Normans did a lot of conquering... I wondered if anyone has tried to compare the linguistic impact of the various Norman conquests of various territories?
England is obviously a special case in so many ways, but I wonder about the linguistic legacy of the rest of the "Norman empire."