Putting English back in the box
“One of the best things that ever happened to the English-speaking peoples was when a rapacious army of Scandinavian-derived Frenchmen conquered the right little tight little island about a thousand years ago, shot the king of England in the eye, and more or less banned the native tongue for a hundred years or so. Spoken English was limited to common people, written English ceased to exist for a while, and when the language came back into official usage it was a French/English hybrid that was a vastly richer, more powerful, and easier to use language (among other things, it no longer had three genders and declined nouns) that has resisted all attempts by grammarians to put it back in a box.” ~ Tim Cavanaugh
English really is a fascinating language and not purely because of the influence of French, but also the influence of various Scandinavian and Germanic languages which infiltrated its linguistic make-up over the years. Ironically, there is very little of the Celtic languages left in the English language. I think around a dozen Welsh words actually made it into the lexicon.
All this co-opting of other tongues is what makes English such an interesting language, and the inability of grammarians to put it back in the box – we have no official language regulators such as the French have – is one reason so many creoles and pidgins have sprouted across the globe. This was helped along greatly by the British Empire, and later by the technological revolution in America. It’s also why the language continues to evolve and adapt rather quickly. It is a laissez-faire language, unlike that of the people who came up with the term laissez-faire….
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[...] Putting English back in the box – E.D. Kain – American Times … [...]