User blog comment:Akvii/Natlang vs. Conlang Discussion/@comment-1355223-20100511092009

@Koppadsao, I dont mean to be arrogant but your dead wrong in what you said about englisc and english. Maybe not dead wrong, but pretty wrong.

English came from the Anglo-saxons who setteld in britain. According to the english historian Bede tells of how, in AD 449, Hengist and Horsa were invited by the Celtic king Vortigern to help him against his enemies, and how they proceeded to establish a base for themselves in Kent. Bede also says that these first settlers came from three Germanic tribes, the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes.

The language these settlers spoke was called Englisc and was a language from the germanic tribes of Germany and scandinavia (so what you said about englisc stealing words from norse languages, well they are in the same family so your better of saying dutch stole words from german)

Below I give some examples of cognate forms from English, Dutch and German, and alongside them I give the corresponding French words: English      Dutch            German             French father         vader             Vater                 père foot            voet               Fuss                 pied tooth          tand               Zahn                dent ten             tien               zehn                  dix It will be clear that English and Dutch share much in common, and that German is not hugely different (although the initial consonant t has changed to z). Of course the reason for this is that all three are Germanic languages. French, on the other hand, is a Romance language, which blatantly disproves what you said about english being closer to french and not a germanic language.

the Anglo-Saxons, or more properly, the English, came from the area of north-west Germany and Denmark, and perhaps also the north-east of the Netherlands, the area known today as Friesland. Indeed Frisian, still spoken by about 300,000 people in this part of the Netherlands, is the language to which English is most closely related historically. Which again blatantly disproives what you said about english ebing related to icelandic the most.

by the seventh century the English (as they called themselves = Old English angelcynn) had settled in almost all of England and southern Scotland, the main exceptions being Cornwall and parts of north-west England.

and for those wondering how englisc became and transformed into PDE, or present day english, here are some points and questions i came up with

How has the noun inflection system developed from Old English to Modern English? 1 Loss of most categories — loss of gender distinction, loss of case distinctions 2 Levelling of irregularities by analogy

What factors could possibly have influenced the noun inflection system? 1 Much ambiguity in OE (old english or anglo-saxon, or englisc) system, e.g. no distinction between nominative and accusative in plural; many nouns have same nominative and accusative in singular; analogical change (language-internal, morphological factor) 2 Sound changes from Old English to Modern English; in particular, word endings were unstressed, and unstressed vowels mostly became [ə] (like the a in about), then lost (language-internal, phonetic factor) 3 Vikings settled in Britain, switched from Old Norse to Old English; French-speaking Normans settled in Britain, switched from French to English; potentially problems with suffixes (language-external factor) 4 While French spoken in Britain it was the prestige language, and did not have case-marking, though it did have gender; maybe transfer? (language-external factor)

What you said about the vikings wiping out englisc isnt true, they changed to the language and abandoned their old one, but of course when this happened they did not master the language and changes resulted, this can be explained in Zelos' blog about language change, or the documents i psted up in mine. And when the normans came in and swapped from french to english, which was a completely different structure and they failed to master englisc, which when studying second language acquisition is very common even in theses days as it is almost impossible to master a second language as good as a native of that language, and as a result chnages occured in english, and when the vikings were defeated and norman "pidgin" of anglo-saxon, or englisc became the norm and those porblems and errors were passed on to the next generation, thus changing the language over time. and now read LctrGzmn under mine for a further talk about english grammar.

the normans and vikings did not "force" anything on the englisc speakers rather changed the language when they adopted it through their own stupidity and inability to learn it properly. Though we have many french words in english, it is a huge exaggeration to say 40% are french, that is ridiculous, and besides look at how many words french has from latin.

the english words you mention come from their old english (englisc, anglo-saxon, whatev er you want to call it) original counterparts, not norse or french. example OE                 Modern High German example of similarity scip/cyning              schiff/könig

these mean ship and king repsectively and i provided this example to show that english clearly was and still is a germanic language, not some deformed transplant of latin and french like you suggested.

cheers, :D