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from the and-the-colts-and-the-jets... dept.
This research indicates that the Vikings were not the worst invaders to land on English shores at that time. That title goes to the Anglo-Saxons, 400 years earlier.
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One support for this contention is the impact, or rather the lack of impact, that the Viking Old Norse had on contemporary Old English language of the Anglo Saxons in the ninth and 10th centuries. This should be compared to the absence of Celtic language in England in the fifth and sixth centuries after the Anglo-Saxons had arrived.In the fifth and sixth centuries, Old English wiped out the earlier Celtic language in a similar way that modern English eradicated the language of the Native Americans in U.S. in the 19th and 20th centuries. This is clear in the almost non-existent impact that Native American words have on the English spoken today in the U.S. Modern American English has retained around 40 Native American words. Similarly, only a dozen Celtic words made it into the Old English of the Anglo Saxons.
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If the Anglo-Saxons eradicated the Celtic language, the Viking's impact was significantly less. Linguists do see some influence from the Old Norse of the Vikings in the Old English language. But it doesn't come close to the eradication of Celtic by the Anglo-Saxons.
Hmm, perhaps, but the Vikings did introduce 900 glorious ways to say, "I smite thee!"
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Arik on Wednesday December 19 2018, @08:46AM (21 children)
This is false. Languages sometimes change rapidly for reasons completely unrelated to violence. Most often commercial advantage.
This is an example of a very common fallacy - equating language and ancestry. They're quite often unrelated. You might have many descendants in 100 years but your language may have gone extinct nonetheless. This has happened over and over again throughout history. Livonian either recently went extinct or very soon will, for example, but Livonians did not. They just speak Estonian now, because that gives them better opportunities, economic or otherwise. The earliest written language known to us, Sumerian, went extinct thousands of years ago. Linguistically, it's long dead, but genetically, their descendents still live and work the same lands, for the most part. They have changed languages several times over the millenia, today they speak Arabic.
Or the reverse - the Magyars are virtually extinct, genetically, for some centuries, yet a sizeable nation still speaks their language and answers to their name.
So, sure, it's striking that so little remains of British in English. This is hardly the first time that's been noticed. But the conclusions reached seem sensationalist and beyond the evidence.
Counter hypothesis - Ænglisc replaced British because the Ænglisc were traders and speaking that language was a commercial advantage. Danish did not have much influence because the Danish were raiders, they wouldn't stop to talk. And when Danes did settle down to trade they learned the trade language - Ænglisc - just like everyone else.
I'm not saying that's true, at the very least it's a bit too simple to be true, but it's probably at least as true as the other one.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Wednesday December 19 2018, @09:18AM (2 children)
Exactly how to classify English is a subject of much heated debate e.g. here: Wordreference.com: Is English a creole? [wordreference.com], and the reasons for people to cease speaking a language are not always because they have been massacred. Languages can wither and die because is it significantly economically advantageous to speak the language of richer people you trade with.
(Score: 1) by nitehawk214 on Wednesday December 19 2018, @03:47PM (1 child)
Hard to take that discussion of language seriously when he says "21th century".
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday December 19 2018, @03:51PM
I've seen that, and similar, enough to suspect it's a Euro thing. They don't have first and third, or 1st and 3rd it seems. It's all variable-th.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday December 19 2018, @10:11AM (9 children)
Ummm... this may mean that, in 100 years, the American language will get extinct, replaced by Mandarin?
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @11:12AM (2 children)
Um, no. We Americans are too lazy and self-obsessed to learn foreign languages.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @12:24PM (1 child)
This is why the first to learn it and economically flourish will be the immigrants, especially the Mexicans. The first generation of Americans will go the way of Eth (i.e. deep down) and maybe their kids will adapt.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @04:45PM
The "refugees" won't need to learn English, the government will just make facilities available in Spanish.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday December 19 2018, @02:02PM (3 children)
Speaking Mandarin will never give anyone better opportunities. First, it's not spoken by any other nation. Second, going to China and speaking Mandarin won't help, either, because they will always see you as a laowai (foreigner) anyway, and do everything they can to rip you off. Third, its writing system and tonal structure are non-trivial to learn and is only slightly related to other languages in its region; that is, even Japanese and Koreans find it hard to learn, so who are going to be those who invest the large amount of time and effort to learn Mandarin when everyone already speaks English?
Languages that become established as the lingua franca of trade and learning and diplomacy often persist long after the societies that produced them have vanished. Akkadian persisted for a couple thousand years after Akkad was no more.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @04:47PM
Taiwan and Singapore have Mandarin as one of their official languages.
(Score: 2) by Arik on Wednesday December 19 2018, @11:47PM (1 child)
Assuming you don't look chinese, that's true, but that particular prejudice can work to your example. If you can understand what they're saying, and they can't grasp that fact, it makes it really easy to avoid being ripped off.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday December 20 2018, @03:37PM
It doesn't. They don't generally laugh and tell everyone around how they're ripping the foreigner off, so understanding Mandarin doesn't help you there. Even if you do catch them red-handed doing something like that, they're still going to charge you the two-tier price anyway as a matter of Han pride.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Mykl on Thursday December 20 2018, @01:35AM (1 child)
C'mon. You haven't even been able to switch from Fahrenheit to Celcius yet - and you expect us to believe you could change languages?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Thursday December 20 2018, @12:05PM
FYI: I"m native Celsius and metric. Which, hopefully, places me in the potential winning category (for a change).
(grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @11:08AM (2 children)
That should be infer and its. Dude, less font and more grammar.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @03:49PM (1 child)
Grammar is highly over rated, dude.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday December 19 2018, @08:09PM
Hey, leave my Grammer out of it, OK?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2018, @12:10PM (1 child)
So as a counterargument to "Anglo-Saxons were worse", you're suggesting the Anglo-Saxons were actually capitalist pigs destroying local culture in the name of profit?
(Score: 3, Touché) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday December 19 2018, @06:37PM
I guess we need to define "worse."
Murdering everybody and then fucking off back to base-camp probably doesn't help you language spread but it would be a stretch to call that "better."
(Score: 5, Informative) by rleigh on Wednesday December 19 2018, @12:32PM (1 child)
Agreed, the implication is quite false. Not that there wasn't lots of fighting and warfare over the years, there was, but outright genocide isn't the explanation for the language changes over time except perhaps for local and extreme events. We can also see this in recent history. If we look at the decline in the use of Welsh and Gaelic, and also smaller languages like Cornish and Doric. This is because English has become increasingly pervasive over time. You can't be part of society and not read, write or speak English. Whether it's work documentation, product labels, forms, entertainment or interpersonal communication, they are all overwhelmingly in English. Welsh and Gaelic have been reduced to spoken use between locals. Though with a lot of effort, Welsh has seen a resurgence in use by requiring it to be taught and making it a legal requirement to provide Welsh text for official uses. But even then, it's still basically a second-class citizen to English; that's just the practical reality. Doric is discouraged and seen as being the language of the uneducated.
I live in a village outside Dundee in Scotland. The railway stations here and in Fife have Gaelic translations. But Gaelic hasn't been used here in living memory, or even several generations back. What was spoken was Scots, which has gradually become more aligned with English over time. That shift is essentially down to education and the media, which have promoted "standard" English across the country, and this has led to the decline of the extremes of regional dialects in all of the UK, turning them into English with some slang, rather than being almost separate sister-languages. Whether it's true or not, regional dialects have a perception as being used by uneducated or stupid people; being "well spoken" means to speak in the manner of the SE of England. This is the power of cultural expectations; even if you disagree with them, they are general expectations embedded within all of society. While modern technology from printed text to the spoken word has enabled much of that, I don't see why the same factors would not have been at play in the distant past. Economic and cultural influences are incredibly strong forces.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Nuke on Wednesday December 19 2018, @08:21PM
Agreed with most of what you said except for that bit. It is a fallacy to think that "well spoken" or "BBC English" or "Received pronounciation" or whatever you like to call it is the native manner of SE England. That is cockney, which is not just a London thing but can be heard throughout the home counties, particularly in Essex and Kent, among blue collar workers. The family I came from spoke cockney, and BBC English was to us just as different from our own as it might be to a Liverpudlian, and was very often the subject of ridicule.
Today I live far from the SE, in an area with a different regional accent, and when I go back to the SE I am immediately struck by its accent which now sounds somewhat foreign and unusual to me, and nothing like BBC which of course can be heard anywhere and every day on the media and among the "professional" classes.
Which is my point - BBC pronounciation exists as a kind of layer thoughout Britain. Far from London, my doctor speaks it, so does my solicitor, estate agent, supermarket manager (and half his staff), dentist, the bank staff, most shopkeepers and so on. If you are looking for the spiritual capital of the English language, it is Oxford, not even in the South East, the home of the dictionary and the alma mater of David Dimbleby, the textbook example of a BBC presenter.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday December 19 2018, @03:47PM
Oh, please, shush. We WANT the world to fear us English speaking people.