[ExI] aside: xenophobia

Brian Manning Delaney listsb at infinitefaculty.org
Fri Oct 30 04:18:59 UTC 2015


El 2015-10-29 a las 02:26, Anders Sandberg escribió:

> Still, Poul Anderson showed how it might have looked if it had at least
> kept to being a Germanic language:
> https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=alt.language.artificial/ZL4e3fD7eW0/_7p8bKwLJWkJ

Very cool! But there were of course several different Germanic (broadly 
speaking: the language family) influences in English. The English have 
always been a motley crew. I assume he just switched out Latinate 
words/roots for the most common contemporary English equivalent.

On a related note: The period of merger between the Franco-Norman idiom 
spoken in England and English (not long before Shakespeare's time -- 
even up to his time in some areas) led to the cool phenomenon of "legal 
doublets". The authorities wanted to make sure the Normans and the 
Anglos both would understand, so they emphasized certain concepts by 
using two words to describe them, one Latinate, one English. A lot of 
these are still widely used today: "cease and desist", "null and void", etc.

- Brian



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