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I see, they should learn to spell.

It has been suggested that it's we Brits who should learn to spell as the United Statsers got the whole proscriptive dictionary thing down before we did.

That said, 'cheque' is French anyway.
Tim

So next time im riding around paradise city and i see an advert for the new dildo that tickles in places dildos couldnt tickle before then its not a problem for Ea, Investors and BBFC? as long as they right a check for their couldnt give a s**t investors, this guy sounds like a dildo.

I'm sure I heard English is a derivative of French and weren't we speaking English before them?

also, what's a proscriptive dictionary?

Seriously? and you found this information credible enough to repeat?

Didn't they cover this on What the Crusty Olde English Did For Us?

I mean I've heard that homosexuality is a required course in English Public Schools, but I don't go around repeating it...

I mean if you're going to count derivatives, then yes, the precursors of the "French" spoke the precursor to "English", before the precursors of the "British". But then they started chumming around with those Latin types and abandoned the manly tongue of their fathers for something more Romantic.

No, English is NOT derived from French, 'tis Germanic. You lot just copied a lot of their Franconic vocabulary because your ruling class thought the French were hoopy froods who really knew where their towels were. Prolly a bit of cross-pollination from the Latin, from which the French actually WAS derived, kind of a Stockholm Syndrome thing going there...love those Romans...

Just guessing here, but I'd say the proscriptive dictionary refers to Webster, and the fact that by defining a word as being spelled in a certain way you are "proscribing" (forbidding) anyone from spelling it any other way. The alternative being a more inclusive model, which would include all alternate spellings. But I might be wrong.

of course that means f**k all when you have freedom of speech and a pro gun law, you can spell however you want as long as the person your pointing the gun at doesnt have a death wish..

seriously though, this english language argument has been going on forever, and it will happen again when someone asks should it be spelt Activate not Aktiv8, who make sthe decision to include a word and its spelling and what gives them the right?

Which is why the OED (Oxford English Dictionary for anybody who didn't know) is, in my opinion, so good. The people who manage the dictionary will include any word as long as it's been used in print and can have a date cited.

The OED is a descriptive dictionary in that it describes the language - "This is what people are saying these days, as well as what they said some time ago".

Websters, at least initially, was a proscriptive dictionary in that it proscribed, or defined, the language - "Your word's not down, you're not saying it!" so to speak.

Well, speaking as a historian student, yes modern english still retains about 70-75% the same and/or derived spelling from medieval french. And i'm not talking about the eleventh century dice roll party about who got to be king over england medieval french but general medieval french (11th-15th century). It is a mish-mash of latin (ofcourse lating influenced every european language because for a very long time, the clergy were the only ones who could read and write and they didn't mainly in latin), germanic and regional (especially northern) french dialects

Modern french today however is based on the southern version of medieval french when some southern line became the new kings of france which is far more based on latin and far less germanic.

Historically speaking, english spelling hasn't evolved a lot from that medieval french mish-mash.

Another example is german. Modern german is actually based on so-called high-german. Dutch is derived from the so-called low-german but there are dutch-speaking regions (like limburg) that actually have their dialect derived from high-german. Some dutch dialects when compared directly with modern german have practically no difference between in their written forms. The same counts for modern english and medieval french.

I was all interested and not biting my tongue for a lot of this - okay, I was going to yell, "Friesian not pigging Dutch!"

And then I hit this last sentence. Are you leading me to believe that if I compared a 'modern' English text to a 'Medieval' French (Northern French? Southern French?) one there would be practically no difference?

Proof please! As I am enstaggerated by such a proposition.

Cheers

Tim

I too need to see that. oh wait here it is

Modern English: The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over The Lazy Dog.
Medieval French: The Quick Brown Fox Jumped Over The Lazy Dog.

Hey it works!

..................

seriously i find this fantastically hard to believe.

Aww c'mon, you and I, and everyone else who knows anything know that ol' Optimus is confusing the influx of French vocabulary that occured during the feudal era with the actual structure and core of the (Germanic) English language.

He doesn't have proof, it isn't so.

The everyday, workingmans words that make English function are all Germanic in origin.
A, the, of, why, what, when, who, can, is, that, these, those, yes (possibly not no) you, I, mine

Might as well argue that English is derived from Spanish...burrito, taco, siesta, patio, etc...

Well, i just heard it from our professor roman-germanic languages who specializes in medieval languages who said it in class (he said around 70% off modern english official vocabularly is derived of medieval french).
Proving it will be very hard because of the how they spelled words and letters those days (well...how they wrote stuff in general really). I can show you a medieval french text and none of you will be able to distinguish an "a" in it. Even if you think you spotted a "a" it probably isn't one (here's a hint, they looked like "v"'s then). So you have to take in account also natural evolution of spelling and writing itself. Also, acces to these kind of documents can't be given to a place like this unless you are member of the universities of Ghent or Leuven. but i'll look if i stil got the notes of some examples he gave (if i bothered writing them down).

Now Roi, you argue that the grammar part of english is actually germanic and you would be right, but i could say it is also latin and i would be right because both are Euro-asian based. Example, you bring up "the" as a germanic based word, then why have the germans have as equivalent "der" "die" and "das", each one being used in a different context (gender and/or singular and/or plural use) but also french has a similiar "german" method ( "un" "une" "des"). "the" is a specific english word, not germanic in nature. same thing can be said about all those workingman's words. You english just never really bothered cleaning up your language, the french have multiple times.

Also...the Fries and their language are not a dutch dialect, it's a Kelt/Gaul one. Thanks to their marshy surroundings, the fries managed to stave off the romans and any kind of heavy germanic rule and so keeping much of their language intact.

edit: oh yes, do mind, when talking about differences and similarities between languages, do not think ever a modern text can look at all like a medieval text. This is all speaking in phonetic writing (medieval folks wrote very phonetically). Yes english spelling looks for 70% like medieval french writing...phonetically (and the words also having the same meaning largely, the same with the limburg dutch dialect compared to high-german). You people take this stuff sometimes far too literal.

Umm, no.

Yes, French vocabulary entered the English language. Yes, the English language derives from and gets its grammar and core from Germanic roots. No, it does not have a similar relationship with Latin as it does with German. No, the fact that French and German both have gender-specific articles and English does not proves nor implys nothing special relating to the English word "the". Yes, "the" is indeed Germanic in origin, being derived directly from the Germanic equivalent of the Modern German female article "die". The English just dropped the others, sometime after they quite being Ye Olde Englifh (which was pronounced "the", as "Y" was actually representing the dipthong "th"). The French articles are derived from the Latin for "one", while in the Germanic, the article which evolved from the word "one" corresponds to the English article "a", which is distinct from "the".

Think of English as Angelina Jolie, and French vocabulary as an asian baby. Germanic is still her daddy, French vocabulary is but one of her adopted asian babies, no matter how fat he is.

Drop all the names you want, assure me that if only I was a member of the Order of the Phoenix I'd be allowed to read Nicholas Flamel's secret writings from the Restricted Section in the Library at Hogwart's that prove you're correct if you will, you're incorrect in the basis of your argument, and no amount of smokescreen is gonna fool the more savvy SPOnGers, who likely already know more about what you're on about than you will.

p.s. I'm sure that when you said Euro-asian, you actually meant Indo-European...

OK, I coun't find track 19 1/2 or whatever, so I settled for WikiPedia...weak I know...but this is what it shows as the two languages in question's family trees...

Indo-European>Germanic>West Germanic>Anglo–Frisian>Anglic>English

Indo-European>Italic>Romance>Italo-Western>Western>Gallo-Iberian>Gallo-Romance>Gallo-Rhaetian>Oïl>French

Meanwhile:

Indo-European>Germanic>West Germanic>High German>German

Looks like French isn't nearly as closely related to English as German is to me...while English and German could only get legally married in Alabama or Arkansas.

After searching, i remembered i trew out all the notes and copies of the old texts out the moment i pass for the course.

You're taking it a bit too serious i think. I don't think a specialized professor is just going to say that 70% of english vocabulary can be traced back to french medieval vocabulary. I believe him yes, but the real details is something he probably knows, you should ask him then (if i can only remember his bloody name). The reason behind this seems reasonable also, norman knights take over english crown and so frenchinising (don't know what the english tanslation of "verfransing" is) the elite togheter with allready latin writing and reading clergy and mingle with the local languages. So the base grammar is this keltic/germanic thing but much of the words are derived from medieval french. that's really not so unbelievable as it would seem.

About the documents...i just said that because of possible copyright and end user problems these kind of thing can bring. We students are giving copies of the original for study reasons only, not to prounce around on the internet with them.

Well, I'm not a specialized professor, though I do ride a Specialized...but that 70% figure is grossly inflated, according to all the information I've been able to glean from the Infobahn.

from memory, the actual percentage is closer to 28%, with an additonal 25% coming directly from the Latin, 25% from Germanic, 7% Greek, and the rest either from other languages, are based on proper names, or have unknown etymology. In addition, included among the 25% of Germanic origin are ALL 100 of the most commonly used words in English, of the 1,000 most commonly used words, 83% are of Germanic origin.

[redacted by author]

@haritori None of the words you used are of French origin (except MAYBE "jump"). If you're going to make a joke, at least make it a little bit distant from the childishly absurd. In Frisian, our sister language, it would read. "De kwik brun foks hat liepen oer de loai dogge" (literally in English "The quick brown fox hath leapen over the lazy dog").

@haritori None of the words you used are of French origin (except MAYBE "jump"). If you're going to make a joke, at least make it a little bit distant from the childishly absurd. In Frisian, our sister language, it would read. "De kwik brun foks hat liepen oer de loai dogge" (literally in English "The quick brown fox hath leapen over the lazy dog").

@OptimusP Your mistake is assuming that Germanic means German, German is not the most pure or true Germanic language. In Frisian, "de" and sometimes "it" mean "the". In Dutch, "de" and "het" can mean "the". English at one time had "it" also meaning "the". Frisian is actually not a Kelt/Gaul language but especially not a Dutch dialect. It's pretty much an ENGLISH dialect. Here's a Frisian sample sentence "De dogge drank de wetter fan de stream under de brege", and he's another one "Yn de winter, de kald is wat meast is fielen by folk". Looks STRIKINGLY like English, doesn't it. Here's one more "De man is net myn fader, hy is myn broer". Oh, here's one more for the road "De grun yn de moarn wiet en floeden was fan alle de rein dat hat fallen oer de nacht". It looks a lot like Chaucer's English IMO.