Arden Chatfield
Posts: 6657
Joined: Jan. 2006
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| Quote (ericmurphy @ May 21 2006,00:04) | | Quote (BWE @ May 20 2006,23:55) | Ericmurphy,
Um, I could make as good of an argument that English is a mix of germanic and french as I can that Portuguese is not what Davey-dumbo says it is. Typically, the history of a language is classified by the surviving writing. |
You might be able to, but I don't think any linguist would agree with you that English is a romance language, like French, Spanish, Italian, and yes, Portuguese. English is definitely a Germanic tongue. |
English is a Germanic language. Period. Its grammar and core lexicon are Germanic. Granted, after the Norman invasions it acquired a huge amount of French vocabulary, but that does not make it a Romance language. It makes it a Germanic language with a big French influence. Not the same thing.
(And Portuguese doesn't even have that.)
To say that English is Romance, one would have to say that Japanese is both Chinese and English, since Japanese has a huge number of loans from both those languages. No one would want to make either statement.
The question of whether English is a 'mix' of Germanic and French is somewhat more interesting. I don't think most linguists would go so far as to say that English is a mixed language, since fundamentally, the grammar of English owes very little to French. And, as I said, most of the core everyday vocab of English is still Germanic.
The influence of French on English is much bigger than that of French on Portuguese, and yet phonetically French and English are very different. This shows that impressionistic phonetic 'similarities' really count for very little.
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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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