Week 2 - Latin and it's Influences on English

 

Last week, when I started researching, I found that the old Brittonic languages didn’t really influence English in many ways. This week I looked at what I assumed would be the next historical addition to the English language. Latin. In 55 and 54 BC, Julius Caesar landed in Britain. Eventually he was pushed out and almost 100 years later, romans would once again invade. In 43 AD romans invaded again and between then and the fifth century they would come to conquer most of England, Wales, and parts of southern Scotland where the Hadrian Wall was built. More on this history can be found here. With Roman civilization came the roman language, Latin. I was always interested in roman history and I always assumed that this bringing of Latin to England was the reason why English has so many Latin-based words. I was wrong.

Original picture from here

In the early fifth century, Rome abandoned Britain. While administration was done using Latin, many of the administration was roman and so left with roman occupation. The general population at this time spoke the Britannic language and continued to speak it even throughout roman rule. Unlike other places in Europe in what is now modern-day France, Portugal, Spain, and Belgium, which were some of the earliest conquests outside of the Italian peninsula, Britain was not firmly under roman rule for long. Some words and structures were likely adopted but it wouldn’t be until later in time when Latin would merge with English.

In places like France, Portugal, Spain, and Belgium, which was under Roman rule for longer, Latin was adopted, and a form of vulgar Latin was spoken. This vulgar Latin would merge and develop with local dialects to form the romantic languages Portuguese, French and Spanish. This vulgar Latin gave them some of the key differences from English.

Where Latin had masculine, feminine and neuter forms, vulgar Latin had only the binary system of masculine and feminine. Definite articles were adopted, often by truncating Latin pronouns, these becoming articles such as French le and la, Portuguese o and a, and Spanish el and la. In vulgar Latin there was an increased need for preposition use.

“Loss of a productive noun case system meant that the syntactic purposes it formerly served now had to be performed by prepositions and other paraphrases. These particles increased in number, and many new ones were formed by compounding old ones. The descendant Romance languages are full of grammatical particles such as Spanish donde, "where", from Latin de + unde, or French dès, "since", from de + ex, while the equivalent Spanish and Portuguese desde is de + ex + de. Spanish después and Portuguese depois, "after", represent de + ex + post.”    

original text here

Ultimately, all of this is just showing that English is different from the romantic languages and does not really explain much about the inconsistencies and irregularities that are within English. What I found that was of the most use here is the idea of the copula. One of the inconsistencies (or in this case consistencies) that shows up in English is actually different form most other languages is the verb “to be.” In English we have a single verb to be. As you are all reding this in English I assume you know how and where we use the verb in all of its forms. In many other languages there are two verbs for “to be.” There is the state and the existence. Many other languages have a form of the verb for a transitionary or non-permanent state and one for the permanent state. For example, in Portuguese you can say “eu estou feliz” (I am Happy). Happy is not permanent. 10 minutes from now you can be sad. They use the verb estar for this. There is another verb for something permanent. That verb is ser. For example, you could say “eu sou um homen.” (I am a man) in English we use to be for both.    

At this time in history, Latin influences on English happened in the Germanic root on continental Europe. The Germanic tribes were often in close contact with Roman trade. Many words were adopted and used. The majority of the Latin influence came with the church. When Christianity was accepted into England the church brought with it, education in Latin. This is why you can see that many Latin words and uses are for religion or scientific topics like medicine, biology, and chemistry. You can see that depending on what topic you are discussing, more or less Latin-based words will be used. This use of two languages, one for every day use and the other for education lead to a lot of duplicate meaning words. You can find more information on this here and here.

In modern day people are generally of a higher education than back in the fifth century and you can see how the Latin educational language is incorporated into English. Watch this video here or below and you can see how you can speak English with almost no Latin-based words, but it sounds strange and foreign, maybe even a bit archaic.   

There is still some research left to do on Latin influences, but I will look into this more when I get to the conversion of England to Christianity. For now, I will continue forth next week to look at the Anglo-Saxon invasion of England and how the Germanic language influenced English and follow along the history of the English language as you can see below.    

Week 1 - Native Brittonic Language and Its Contributions

 

This week, as per my timeline, I looked at the native language of England and I realised, there is a lot of jargon that goes with linguistics. Al large portion of my time went into the not so simple process of learning some of the jargon I would need to know that goes hand in hand with learning linguistics. Words like lenition, sonority, spirantized, rhotic tap, etc.

Lenition held some of the most surprises that could be useful for understanding the English language. For example, when languages evolve, vegetation and altitude play a role in that evolution. I found this very surprising. It seems that there is a correlation between temperature and language with warmer temperatures being related to more sonorous speech. In simple terms, this is the warmer it is, the more voiced and long sounds there are. However, this relation flips when that warm climate is accompanied by dense vegetation. The theory is that in open terrain, with moisture in the air voiced and long sounds that tend to make the more lyrical languages functions well. In a cold climate, where moisture and heat are a problem, shorter time spent talking means less heat and moisture loss that would lead to the mouth feeling dry and problems like cracked lips. In dense vegetation sound is dampened and so plosives travel better. A plosive is when you block air flow while talking and let it explode out. This is done with English sounds like ‘b’, ‘t’ and ‘p’ (anything that Trudeau might label as speaking moistly). Altitude plays a similar role for similar reasons. At high altitudes where atmosphere is thinner and sound doesn’t carry as well, plosives and hard sounds travel further and better than sonorous ones. For this, many languages that evolved at high altitudes or dense vegetation tend to sound harsher and more forceful with more stops. For example, a lot of the romantic languages have a sonorous sound to them as Latin, Spanish, and French developed in a warm land that was not dense jungle at a relatively low altitude. Languages such as German, Danish, Swedish, and a lot of the east Asian languages developed at high altitudes and/or dense jungle. Some of the harsher sounding African languages were developed in mountainous or jungle regains. However, I kept my focus to European and neighbouring areas that could have influenced English, so I did not look closely at these areas. I would be curious to look at the native languages of south America as the continent is (or was) mostly jungle or mountains but that will have to wait for another time.

Influences on lenition may be important later but I won’t know until I do more research. For now, I stuck to the native languages to Britain, England, and the area, as this is the birthplace of English. Three languages broke off from the parent native language and dominated the area that would become England. These became Brittonic which covered the majority of England, Welsh which was spoken in what is now wales, and Cornish which was spoken in the southern most part of England, what is now Cornwall and Devonshire. Welsh is the only surviving language spoken today and probably gives the greatest clues as to how old Brittonic sounded and was structured. It was similar to the old Irish and Goidelic dialects and featured periphrastic forms, inflected prepositions, VSO typology, and dependent and independent verb forms. Some of these forms are reflected in English and some are not.

Periphrastic forms seem to be adopted into English but not regularly. This is one of the features of the language that makes English hard for English language learners. The simplified explanation of what periphrastic form is would be the use of multiple words to make one meaning. I say this was not regularly incorporated into English as you can see both being used. For example, I can use the inflected form lovelier, or I can use the periphrastic form more lovely. It can also be seen with verbs such as converse. You can use the full verb, to converse, or you can use the periphrastic light verb alternative to have a conversation. This is inconsistent through the language and can be done using verbs like give, take, and have.

Inflected prepositions are contractions of prepositions and personal pronouns. It would be the equivalent of saying ‘toyou’ as one word (probably changed to sound better together and make it more distinctive) instead of ‘to you’. Another real example of this could be the Portuguese form comigo which springs from the contraction of Latin ‘cum’ (with), and ‘me’ (me). In Latin this would be mecum, but the principle applies.  This does not seem to be incorporated into English as you can see, we do not combine our pronouns with prepositions. I’m not sure yet where this comes from.

VSO typology was also a part of the language that was not carried forward. This is verb-subject-object order. Speaking like this is understandable in English and is, in technicality, grammatically correct… but it makes you sound like Yoda. This is the sentence structure that looks like "eats john, the food”. It is awkward and is almost never used in common English.

Tag questions are one of the few contributions from old Britannic than I remember students having issues with when I was a teaching English in brazil. A tag question is the shortened question form the takes the form, aren't I?, isn't he?, won’t we?, haven’t they, would you?. This is in contrast to German (nicht wahr?), French (n'est-ce pas?), and Portuguese (Nao e?), all of which are constant and can be used with almost any preceding statement. This varying form used in English is almost identical to welsh, the nearest surviving relative language to old Brittonic.  

There are many structures and forms that I could talk about here and many more that I don’t know or understand enough about to explain them. after much research into the Brittonic language, I found that many scholars agree that Brittonic did not contribute much to modern English as it is today. Contribution largely seems limited to toponyms such a geographical words and a few lexical constructs. The silent b at the end of words such as bomb and comb seem to have its roots in old Brittonic. Periphrastic forms and question tags seem the most likely contribution from Brittonic that could cause English learners’ difficulties.

In conclusion, after much research into the native languages of England, I am forced to conclude that the Brittonic languages of the native played very small role in the development of the English language. From here, and for next week, I would like to look into the invasion of Latin into Brittonic territory and the effects of Latin on the language, which I am thinking will be vast. Hope to see you next week!  

Looking at this tree we are currently on the trunk of the tree where the Celtic languages split from the trunk. 

Welcome

Welcome all to my Genius Hour Blog.

I have never done one of these before so I invite you to join me on this adventure! Back in 2014 I met a wonderful Brazilian girl. It was the typical story. Boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, boy follows girl back to her country... boy needs money to live.

My dream had always been to teach and I had been planning to head out of country to teach English. Having a fiancé from another country was convenient for my plans. I set about securing a job in Brazil teaching English and learned Portuguese at the same time. It was during this time that I really became interested in languages. As a Canadian from Ontario I was required to study French from kindergarten to grade 9 but at those ages I wasn’t really interested. I wish I had been. Teaching English and learning a second language, I really started to notice that were things I could do with Portuguese that I couldn’t do with English and vice versa.

I learned so much and thought so much about English in my three years of teaching it. You don’t often think about you first language, you typically just use it. It was a challenge when a student would ask me about irregularities in English. Like “why is the plural of plant, plants but the plural of fungus is fungi?” or “Why are there one dog, two dogs, but one moose, two moose?” English is so full of irregularities and inconsistencies that make it incredibly difficult to learn. Portuguese may have a lot to remember to use it but at least it is all structured. English by contrast seems to be like a house built by a half dozen different engineers and contractors that could agree on anything and just did their own thing. Its haphazard and seems to be rather unwieldly from a learners standpoint.

For many years have have wondered, “why is English so full of the irregularities and inconsistencies that make it so hard to learn?” and “would knowing about these help teachers teach and learners learn?” these are questions that I would like to answer. I will start with the first one for now:

Why is English so full of the irregularities and inconsistencies that make it so hard to teach and learn?

I will start by breaking the problem down into smaller questions. Where did modern English come from? What influenced it? What forced the changes? How is English different from other languages? What can you do with it? What can’t you do with it?

At the end of all of this I would like to identify what it is about English that makes it so hard to learn and maybe help ESL teachers around the world to better understand what it is they are teaching. Perhaps if students understand the development of the language, it can help them to understand how to use it more efficiently and fluently.