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.
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 5th 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
No comments:
Post a Comment