The lost letters of the English alphabet

Re:The lost letters of the English alphabet by Svip on Monday January 16, 2017 @05:22AM (#13409197)

The Anglo-Saxons lived in England before the Vikings arrived. So no, they are two distinct languages. The Angles and the Saxons came from Northern Germany, long before the Vikings decided to invade. The Viking invasion was significant, heavily influencing English society and language. Many old towns in England still have the old Norse town ending -by.

Effectively, there are three main sources for English:

* The Anglo-Saxons, arriving around the time where the Romans left.

* The Vikings, arriving around 800-1000.

* The Normans, arriving around 1066.

Not that English haven't changed significantly since then, but these three periods represent the largest number of words increases. The other changes have primarily been spelling.

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Re:The lost letters of the English alphabet by jacobush on Monday January 16, 2017 @05:25AM (#13409214)

Also remember the Normands spoke not only French but some kind of Norse. Still in Normandy there are Norse/Scandinavian names for places. Besides, Saxon and Norse languages must've been pretty mutually intelligible, even today German and Swedish is pretty similar even with a millennium or two apart.

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Re:The lost letters of the English alphabet by stan_rogers on Monday January 16, 2017 @05:34AM (#13409253)

There were a lot of cognate words and similar grammar, but genders and inflectional endings didn't match well at all. That drove the dramatic simplification of English grammar, for the most part. As for the Norman influence, it was mostly vocabulary... but changing the languages of documentation to Latin (mostly) and French (in law, for the most part) left English a lot of room to progress away from the Old English that was, by that time, already playing the same sort of role that Latin did in the Early Romance period - it no longer reflected the language that people lived in.

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Re:The lost letters of the English alphabet by theandrewbailey on Monday January 16, 2017 @10:19AM (#13410412)

> There were a lot of cognate words and similar grammar, but genders and inflectional endings didn't match well at all. That drove the dramatic simplification of English grammar, for the most part.

It's why English nouns lost their masculine and feminine grammatical gender. The people who used both languages had more important things to worry about.

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Re:The lost letters of the English alphabet by jacobush on Monday January 16, 2017 @06:30AM (#13409418)

Haha, so Saxon and Norse cancelled each others' grammar out? :)

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Re:The lost letters of the English alphabet by Shorel on Monday January 16, 2017 @10:30AM (#13410465)

Creole languages have a very simplified grammar compared to their parent languages.

It all points to the case that English is actually a creole language.

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Re:The lost letters of the English alphabet by amyjess on Monday January 16, 2017 @02:11PM (#13412133)

English doesn't quite meet the criteria of being a creole, though.

Superstratum/substratum theory applies here. English has an Ingvaeonic superstratum and multiple substrata, from Old Norse and Norman French at least, if not more.

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Re:The lost letters of the English alphabet by jacobush on Monday January 16, 2017 @12:38PM (#13411473)

But from pretty closely related languages.

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Re:The lost letters of the English alphabet by pbhjpbhj on Monday January 16, 2017 @07:07AM (#13409526)

I didn't think French arrived as a language name until well after the Norman conquest?

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Re:The lost letters of the English alphabet by jacobush on Monday January 16, 2017 @12:39PM (#13411481)

Something romance then. Whatever derivative of Latin they used.

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Re:The lost letters of the English alphabet by pluma on Tuesday January 17, 2017 @06:56AM (#13416739)

I actually learned something today.

I had always chalked up the Viking invasions to "more of the same" after the Anglo-Saxons had settled, but you're of course right that the two (well, three, I guess) groups came from different geographical areas and the Vikings would of course have spoken a distinctly different language.

I guess I conflated the common view that English is originally a Germanic language with French influences with "English is Anglo-Saxon plus French over time".

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Re:The lost letters of the English alphabet by jmenn on Monday January 16, 2017 @11:20AM (#13410822)

I vaguely recall hearing something about Aelfric's "neorxnawang" (Paradise) being a derivation from Old Norse "norn," though IIRC Grimm said this wasn't possible.

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