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From: alderson@netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: English alphabet history?
In-Reply-To: japixley@netcom.com's message of Thu, 20 Oct 1994 08:23:48 GMT
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Date: Thu, 20 Oct 1994 17:31:11 GMT
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In article <japixleyCxypzo.GA7@netcom.com> japixley@netcom.com
(Jonathan Pixley) writes:

>I'm no quite sure how best to ask this question, not being a linguist, so 
>lease bear with me.

>I know that English came from Old High German and we still have words that are
>Germanic in origin (e.g. help).  After the Norman Conquest, many French words
>(Gaulic?) crept into the language (e.g. aid).  Assuming my information and
>memory are both correct, I am led to a couple of questions.  Between German
>and French influences, which is the predominant today.

First, English did not arise from Old High German.  The abbreviated Germanic
family tree (to use the standard if misleading descriptive device) is as
follows in outline form (because drawing trees is too hard in ASCII):

Proto-Germanic
    East Germanic
	Gothic (Wulfila's Gospel, 4th c. CE)
	Crimean Gothic (de Busbecq's wordlist, 16th century)
    North Germanic
	Old Norse
	    Icelandic
	    Norwegian
	    Swedish
	    Danish
    West Germanic
	High German
	    Old High German -> Middle High German -> modern German, Swiss, etc.
	    Langobardic and other extinct varieties
	Low German
	    Old Low Franconian -> Middle Dutch -> Modern Dutch & Flemish
	    Old Saxon -> modern Low German dialects
	Anglo-Frisian
	    Old Frisian -> modern Frisian dialects
	    Anglo-Saxon -> Middle English -> modern English dialects

Next, the majority of Norman French borrowings into English took place in the
14th century, 300 years after the invasion.  (BTW, "Gaulish" is the name of the
Celtic language of Gaul, which was eventually replaced by a form of Latin after
Caesar's conquests; it was dead before the Normans came to Normandy.)

New verbs are inflected with a past in <-ed>; new nouns are given a plural in
<-s>.  Participles are formed with <-ing>.  Most basic vocabulary (body parts,
family relations, counting numbers, etc.) is Germanic rather than Romance.
English is (still) a Germanic language.

>Now for my real question.  In the German alphabet, there is the umlaut.  The
>French have a cedilla, accent grave, accent aigu and the vowels with the funny
>hat that I can't remember what are called.  Just going from this I'd guess we
>got our alphabet from the Germans after they had been Romanticized and not
>from the French.  Is this the case?  Why or why not?

With the exceptions of Gothic, which was written in a derivative of the Greek
alphabet, and Crimean Gothic, which was the language of some slaves in the
Ottoman Empire and unwritten, all of these languages were written in some form
of the Latin alphabet, each with adaptations by speakers of the language in
question.  They had little influence on each other until modern times:  for
example, Anglo-Saxon spelled the umlauted form of <u> with <y>, while Modern
Standard German uses <ue> or <u">.

The English alphabet was taken directly from Latin, with some influence from
14th century Norman French (which also took it from Latin).
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
