How English Almost Became French #short

🇬🇧→🇫🇷? When the Normans invaded England in 1066, they brought more than just soldiers. They ALSO brought the French language. Over the next 400 years, they tried to make English, then a very Germanic language, more like French, a Romance language. But they only partially succeeded...

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[daveleesenglish]

People tend to forget that long before England “took over the world, ” it was taken over by the world – – the Romans, the Vikings, the Normans. That’s why most of the English dictionary isn’t even “English!“

When my Brazilian wife was learning this confusing language, she would often ask, “Who invented English, anyway?” Instead of going into the history, I would simply respond, “Don’t blame me; I didn’t do it!”

[surfer]

The Normans didn’t try to make Anglo-Saxon (old English) French. They spoke Norman French amongst themselves and made it the official language of the royal court and law. Latin remained the dominant language of the church and became the second official language of law. For two centuries Anglo-Saxon dropped out of literary use. When later kings fighting France saw the propaganda advantage in apparently being English in order to gain popular support, English was reinstated, but was by then very much transformed by Norman and French influence and is considered Middle English.

[hakami]

Yeah that makes sense. I've noticed a lot of sophisticated words, often synonyms of more casual words, sound familiar and that's because they have Latin origin and I speak Spanish.

[noahrice]

And it doesn’t even stop there, even though there’s a lot of fancy vocabulary. Old Norse influenced a lot of our core vocabulary, and the way that our grammar is today is mostly because of old Norse. Words like take, egg, and cake, are Norse.

[kawaiisakurapotato]

That makes alot more sense now i always wondered "why are there so many words in english that are latin based when english is a Germanic language?"

[voxtur__]

I opine that this phenomenon's effect on English makes it most singular a language.

[Adrianrams]

Ya and through out English history, with the church and french/England rivalry over the centuries, the languages changed so much. Thus the language "Briton" was created and a lot of experts debate if English is more romantic at this point because a good amount of our vocabulary is romantic influenced. It's an interesting debate!

[birkner]

This is also the reason why the names for meat and the animal are often so different. The nobles were the ones eating the most meat and the peasants were the ones to handle the animals. Other Germanic languages just call it e.g. pig meat (German: Schweinefleisch or Swedish: fläskkött) This applies to mammals only iirc.

[os]

They actually succeeded most of english writen or spoken are half french and Latin

[TheLucidDreamer]

Old trick to survive Spanish or other romance language class:
Take a word in English, say it with the fanciest synonym in the thesaurus, change a few letters and you have your intended word in Spanish, plus or minus some usage differences

[owennoad-watson]

Dude, the Normans weren't entirely French. That's why they succeeded so well- they were also part Germanic and That's what helped them mix

[berese]

The Anglo-Saxons have always managed to show great resistance to civilization

[MDobri-syce]

This song almost has a vague essence from the Fall Out 3 Wasteland Theme near the beginning at least to me.

[mxarturo]

¿ In England do You study old English or middle English?