[Glossolalia] No More Norman Conquest
In 1066, the Normans crossed the English Channel and invaded Hastings on the Southern English coast. The Norman king, William I, won the battle, killing the English king, Harold II, in the process. Despite winning the battle, the Normans were sick, tired and ready to be done. William I waited in Hastings for the English to submit and when that didn’t happen he took his men riding toward London and destroying much of everything in his path. His attack was halted when he was recognized as king and finally crowned on Christmas Day, 1066 at Westminster Abbey.
The Norman Conquest completely changed the way we talk today. Since the English basically became servants to the Normans, the English language adopted tons of French words like poultry, beef and pork. This isn’t to say that English never had any Latin words, since the British Isles were a favorite trading ground for the Romans. But unlike most languages, we now have around one-third of our words from French, another one-third from Latin, one-quarter from Germanic origin and the remainder from other languages. Without the Norman conquest, we may never have had the Great Vowel Shift or been able to borrow from so many languages around the world effortlessly [my own unsubstantiated speculation]. The BBC cares about teaching you about the (more factual) history of the English language:
So what would English be like without the Conquest? It would definitely be much closer to Old English. We’d actually be able to read Beowulf and understand it, although Shakespeare would probably sound weird. The closest to Old English that we have today is Frisian, spoken in the Northern Netherlands, a close genetic relative represented below:
Paul Jennings in 1966 (the 900th anniversary of the Norman Conquest) wrote a series of articles describing what English would have turned into with the French influence (a language he calls Anglish). The following recounts in Battle of Hastings (which he can’t call a “battle” because that’s a French word), in Anglish:
In a foregoing piece (a week ago in this same mirthboke) I wrote anent the ninehundredth yearday of the Clash of Hastings; of how in that mightytussle, which othered our lore for coming hundredyears, indeed for all the following aftertide till Doomsday, the would-be imaginers from France were smitten hip and thigh; and of how not least our tongue remained selfthrough and strong, unbecluttered and unbedizened with outlandish Latin-born words of French offshoot. Our Anglish tongue, grown from many birth-ages of yeomen, working in field or threshing-floor, ringing-loft or shearing house, mead and thicket and ditch, under the thousand hues and scudding clouds of our ever-othering weather, has been emulched over the hundredyears with many sayings born from everyday life. It has an unbettered muchness of samenoiselike and again-clanger wordgroups, such as wind and water, horse and hound, block and tackle, sweet seventeen. The craft and insight of our Anglish tongue for the more cunning switchmeangroups, for unthingsome and overthingsome withtakings, gives a matchless tool to bards, deepthinkers and trypiecemen. If Angland had gone the way of the Betweensea Eyots there is every likelihood that our lot would have fallen forever in the Middlesea ringpath.
None of the words above have non-Germanic derivation. Cool. Orwell was actually a big proponent for what is called “Anglo-Saxon Linguistic Purism.” I think in practice the whole thing is totally absurd since we would basically just be robbing our language of about 1,000 years of history and gutting it of so many nuanced words, but it’s an interesting scholastic exercise.
You can actually see Latinate words next to their Germanic counterparts on a Wikipedia list. Also cool.
Filed under: Glossolalia | 1 Comment
Tags: 1066, anglish, anglo-saxon lingusitic purism, battle of hastings, great vowel shift, history of english language, linguistics, norman conquest, old english
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