by axel@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sep 30, 2005 at 10:10 AM
In soc.culture.scottish hawker@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
<flink@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> I hope you do not mind if I top post.
It's annoying... why do it?
> Wright, the eminent Victorian
> philologist, noted the total lack of German grammar in so called Middle
> English, as well as massive word borrowings from Scandinavian and Celtic
> languages, and even on a smaller scale French. Grammatically English
bears
> to relation to either archaic or modern German, so how can English be
> derived from Anglo-Saxon? No, English is a pidgin language derived from
> several other languages. This accounts for the mixed English vocabulary
and
> the general lack of grammar.
There is no 'general lack of grammar' in English. This is immediately
obvious when you hear someone who does not know English well making
grammatical mistakes.
Nor is English a pidgin language - Modern English is derived via
Middle English from Old English (Anglo-Saxon). It has been influenced
by Old Norse - hardly surprising considering the political sway
held by Scandinavians in Britain at one time and the more or less
mutual intelligibility of the Old Norse and Old English languages.
English vocabulary does borrow heavily from other languages but
that is not unusual. Most of the basic ordinary words that are used
in English can in fact be traced back to Anglo-Saxon.
Axel
