Posted on 04/02/2024 10:05:48 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
Interesting! I did not know that!
I love the German language. Both high German and low German.
French is badly pronounced Latin.
It’s Pig Latin.
“Cochon latin”?
exactly
All French is badly pronounced Latin.
“ All French is badly pronounced Latin.”
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All Latin is badly pronounced Proto-Indo-European.
Wee-wee, mon sewer.
It’s all Greek to me!
Is French just badly pronounced Latin?
English continued to exist in England after the Battle of Hastings, it just went underground. French became the language of court and the gentrified folk, but the peasants still only spoke the language left in Briton by the Saxons.
This is still reflected in the modern English language and its words for food and the sources of those foods. Cows make beef because "kū"* was the Saxon word the commoners used for the bovine animal. What the lords an ladies ate was "bœuf."
* And "kū" became "cow" after The Great Vowel Shift
Same with cealf (calf)/veal, sceap (sheep)/mutton, and right on down the line with all the other farm animals. The commoners named the animal but the gentlefolk named the product of the animal that came to the dinner table.
I can read Chaucer (with difficulty) in the original Middle English. What I can't read, not even a single complete sentence, is his French contemporaries such as de Machaut or Porete. I find it absurd to suggest there is a connection.
Then came the Black Death. People died so fast that the survivors piled up the dead bodies on random street corners and set them alight. The cities stank, both from rotting flesh and roasting flesh, so the nobles abandoned the cities and fled to their country estates.
The nobles probably never realized but leaving the crowded and rat-infested cities saved their lives because the bubonic flea infestation was much lower in the countryside. But the servants they left behind to maintain their estates didn't fare so well. They died almost to a man. When the plague burned out, the gentlemen came back to the cities but found skilled domestic servants in extremely short supply. So the upper classes sent for their servants from the country.
The problem with that plan was most of the servants on their country estates were farmers and milkmaids, not domestics, and they'd never had need to learn to speak French. So when the Middle English-speaking servants outnumber the French-speaking gentry by 20-to-1, what do you do? In the end it was just easier for the gentry to learn Middle English than to try to teach French to people who'd never been exposed to any formal teaching before. The result was Early Modern English, which still was recognizable as Middle English but with a lot more French "loan words."
There had been tension between the Norman Kings of England and the King of France ever since 1066 because William, King of England, also was Duke of Normandy, the largest of all the French provinces. The King of France wanted the Duke of Normandy to pay tribute (tax) to his king but William, King of England wouldn't even consider it. Tension finally permanently pulled the two apart and in 1205, King John severed all ties with France and ordered all his subjects with allegiances to the French king to leave his country. This was when English began its return to dominance.
In 1362, Edward III opened Parliament in English, and Parliament passed the "Statute of Reading," making English the official language.
Is it French spoken poorly? You'd only think that if you flunked HOTEL.
If you need to say something bad about something or someone say it in French it sounds nicer.
I also speak German and this Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung is the longest German word, see for example here https://www.buzer.de/gesetz/5188/index.htm
Do you agree that this превысокомногорассмотрительствующий is the longest Russian word?
English is a mutt language. It is derived from Latin, French and German.
It is easier to understand the Lord's Prayer in Old English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Faederureaudio2.ogg
Probably the words were not pronounced in these ways and the language melody was probably different.
No. The linguistic structure of the two languages are markedly different. The opiner is an idiot.
No sweat, mutts tends to be healthier than purebreds. And mutts built this country.
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