Arden Chatfield
Posts: 6657
Joined: Jan. 2006
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Also, as was mentioned earlier, Despite the Norman invasion, English maintained it's basic syntax and borrowed essentially just vocabulary from the french invaders. However, the French words we got are a little closer to latin than modern french maybe. |
Right, by far most of the big French influence on English was lexical, and most of it took place 600-800 years ago. Some of the French words English borrowed look more like Old French rather than modern French. A good example is that when most of these French words entered English, French still kept old Latin 'st'. So English has French loanwords like 'beast' and 'feast', with 'st', while French subsequently deleted 's' before 't', which is why modern French now has 'bete' and 'fete' (sorry, I don't know how to make the accents work).
English is also very grammatically simplified compared to most of Germanic, but the current consensus is that the grammatical simplification English underwent was not due to the Norman invasions, but was in fact the result of the NORSE invasions a couple centuries before that, when large numbers of Norse speakers invaded eastern England. That invasion also left a large layer of (Norse) loanwords, including some very basic words like 'they' and 'egg'.
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"Rich is just mad because he thought all titties had fur on them until last week when a shorn transvestite ruined his childhood dreams by jumping out of a spider man cake and man boobing him in the face lips." - Erasmus
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