🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <C0Hr0w.159@NeoSoft.com> claird@NeoSoft.com (Cameron Laird) writes:

>. . . That is, I'm saying
>that, *un*like say, French, which picked up bits
>of Arabic, German, Italian, and so on, English
>differs fundamentally from its Germanic ancestors
>in the regular and predictable ways of a creole.
>[Cameron Laird]

Yeah.  When the Normans clobbered the Anglo-Saxons at Hastings,
they and their descendants introduced *zillions* of Old French
(and later French) Romance-type words into the language.  Also,
all manner of declensional inflections that weren't necessary
in French turned out not to be necessary in English, either,
so they went out the window with the Mail Pouch, cut-plug
chawin' by the stove.

English wound up with an easy-to-speak, easy-to-understand 
isolated SVO structure.  That's one of its special virtues.
And thanks to all those French- and Latin-type Romance words,
an Englishman often has two or three ways to say something that
a German, Dutchman, or Afrikaner on the one hand or a Mexican,
Brazilian or Frenchman on the other hand may have only one way
to say.  We've got more words than any other Germanic language.  
We've got more words than any other Indo-European language.  
In fact, we've got more words than any other language, period.
That's another of the special virtues that English has.  

All those words from both the Germanic "ice people" and the Romance 
"sun people" demonstrate that Britain was multi-cultural (in the 
best, hierarchical sense of multi-culturalism, as in the British
India of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen) long before the term "multi-
culturalism" was coined.  That's yet another special virtue of English.

With all its special virtues, it's no wonder that foreigners all
over the globe are learning English to a far greater extent than
French, Arabic, German, Italian or Japanese.

>There are some hazards in this position:
. . . 
>2.  someone will think that, because I'm con-
>    trasting English with most of the other
>    modern tongues of Western Europe (or Use-
>    net, say), I'm claiming special virtue
>    for English.  I am not;  [Cameron Laird]

He doesn't have to; not while there are English chauvinists like me 
on Usenet.

					-- Matt Rosenblatt
					(matt@amsaa-cleo.brl.mil)

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"quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus."