Re: OT: NB as Xy

[Frank Brownlow fbrownlo@xxxxxxxx]

Well, modern English is a descendant of Old Western Germanic. So's
Frisian. Day to day our spoken English speech is something like 80%
Germanic. What we're now learning, though, is that what moved westward
into Britain in the 5th century were the war-bands, and the numbers were
fairly small. Hence the people who were pushed westwards were the
displaced warrior aristocracies. The hewers and tillers, descendants of
the folks who made Avebury and Stonehenge &c., stayed right where they
were, and acquired new bosses. The genetic makeup of the British isles
is amazingly homogenous, and most of it predates the Celts, let alone
the Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, and Normans.

This was strikingly illustrated a few years ago when Cheddar Man's 9,000
year-old DNA turned up in a guy teaching history--of all subjects--a few
miles down the road from the place where Cheddar Man's bones were found.


Frank Brownlow


Robert Holmgren wrote:
** Reply to message from "Patricia M. Godfrey"
 on Fri, 14 Sep 2007 14:49:10 -0400

Well, A parent, surely?
 

The parent.

Because though the _structure_ (idiom,
syntax, what grammar is left) of English is Germanic, a huge
percentage (85? 80? surely more than 75?) of the vocabulary is of
Latin origin
 
90% is the usual number. But vocab does not a language make.
90% of Indonesian vocab is Sanskritic (Indo-European), but
Indonesian (=Malay) is still an Austronesian language. English
is a Germanic language. Come on -- you know that. Nobody looks
at borrowings -- you look at the core words. What we now call
Frisian (or some proto thereof) is the parent. The bloody
Angles came from northwestern Germany, after colonizing
Friesland. If you step back and look at the really big picture,
they were just one tribe in wave after wave after wave of
central Asian peoples, both Teutons and Turks (and later
Mongols), who swept out of the east toward Europe, in massive
migrations. The arrival of one group usually pushed preceding
groups further west. Except for the Vandals, who swept across
Europe and Spain and _past_ everybody else, ending up in Morocco
and Algeria (Berbers). The Romans thought these tribes made
hunky-dory slaves -- indeed, they still make good slaves (check
out most any corporate cubicle). It may be no accident that the
Turkic Huns arrived in northern Europe in the early 5th century,
pushing Germanic tribes across the Rhine and generally toward
the sea (cf. the Germanic Franks taking over France, where they
planted some interesting notions of freedom, albeit only for
Franks, that still resonate in France -- this explains why
American Congressmen have franking rights, but only for them).
The Anglii invaded England in the 5th century, and it seems that
*all* the Angles just picked up and emigrated to Britain -- auf
wiedersehen, hello Northumbria.

Yes, I'm simplifying. I thought briefly of encoding it in XPL
-- but, it's clearer this way.

-----------------------------
Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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