The first French grammar book was written by an Englishman.
Roger
On Fri, Apr 4, 2008 at 10:33 PM, Mark Weiss <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > > both of which are parts/aspects of language. Just reminding that much
> > > of English . . . okay, English vocabulary etc. . . . comes from romance
> not
> > > teutonic languages.
> > >
> >
> > Um ... Depends on how much you count as "much", and how you count it, and
> which parts of the vocabulary, and a whole host of things.
> >
> > It's possible to construct a full sentence today (I can't be bothered, but
> perhaps dave will help me out) without *any Romance elements (Latin,
> post-Latin [French, Italian, etc.]), but I'd bet a damn sight more difficult
> if not impossible to do the obverse.
> >
> > Robin
> >
>
>
> To add a level of complexity, Romance vocabulary has been adopted at
> different epochs, from medieval latin to norman french to learned late
> medieval borrowings to modern. Most of the borrowings have been processed
> over time, so that tho they differ from anything protogermanic but the forms
> by which they've been transformed might be recognizable to a protogerman but
> not a protolatin--the former might not know what the root means but he would
> understand its syntactic value, the reverse for the latter. So, going over
> the prologue to the Canterbury Tales in my head, I come to the first romance
> word (ignoring the proper nouns April and March), the past participle
> "perced," pierced, French root with germanic ending, as opposed to the very
> recent borrowing "décolleté." Has the older borrowing become germanic while
> the second is available to trot out whenever the germanic "low-cut" isn't
> impressive enough.
>
> I know this is pretty elementary, Robin. All languages borrow and
> transform. As with cultures in general, the differences that resist change
> are the patterns by which information is assimilated. Those patterns
> constitute a big part of their identity.
>
> Back to Chaucer. In the first 15 lines of the preface there are 16
> naturalized French words.
>
> Mark
>
--
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