Week 3 - Germanic Base

 

    This week I looked at the most obvious and one of the most influential languages on English. That is, the Anglo-Saxon language. English is technically classified as a Germanic language. This is because our grammar structure, pronunciation, and lenition are most heavily influenced by the Germanic Anglo-Saxon language from which it officially sprung. In my pervious research into Latin influences I learned that, although Latin was brought to the British Isles by the Romans, after roman occupation ceased, Latin mostly died out and a native Brittonic based creole with Latin loan words. 

Original picture and article can be found here

    With the withdrawal of roman protection, Brittonic England was at constant threat from the scots and Picts from the north. Rumor has it that in the late 5^th century, a Celtic warlord Vortigern invited men from the north Germanic tribes of continental Europe to settle in the east of England. The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes brought with them the Germanic language with them to the islands, the language that would become English (check out this site for more information). Even the word English has its roots in the word Anglo. Germanic is a synthetic language which is slightly inflected. Inflection is the process of combining prefixes and suffixes with a base word to match or communicate tense, number, gender, and other linguistic items of a similar nature. Sentence structure was loosely defined, and word order was very free. This is something that was carried over into English that makes it difficult to learn. English has borrowed word order from many other languages and incorporated them into a structure that was already loosely defined. This is why rephrasing something in English can be done using almost the same words as an original sentence just changing the word order and some inflection. It is difficult to say how the Germanic language influenced English because it is the base upon which the other was built. Check out this site where Dr. Vishwanath Bite analyses a segment of Saxon or old English text. It is readily apparent just how similar the two are. This is the reason why German and English are so similar. They even sound similar in some cases using words like ‘und’ and ‘and’. Sentence structure is similar and even, if you listen to the sounds of the exaggerated accent from Saxony, Germany, you can hear how the rounded vowels and dropped consonant sounds makes one sound more like the other. Check out this video here (or see below)where DontTrustTheRabbit tries to explain the accent.     

Also, check out my new video here for my genius hour project