Thread: A Lexicon of English Words From (mostly) Hindi

Originally Posted by coqauvin

Syme it is very apparent that you know more about this than I do.

Ok, I am going to go out on a limb and say that the general changes then come about much later

I had assumed that there was a root linking those languages together, but this is apparently quite wrong

also, by 'the language' I meant whatever the name is of the tongue(s) that the locals on the british isles spoke that was influenced by the germanic invaders, which is, I presume, the forefather of what eventually turned into "English"

Well, you're not wrong about the common root; there is definitely a root linking Hindi and the Germanic languages (English included), since they're all Indo-European languages, but you have to go back much farther than the Anglo-Saxon invasions of Britain to find that root. It would be found somewhere around six thousand years ago when the original Indo-Europeans started spreading out from somewhere in western Asia (Anatolia, or maybe the Caspian steppes; there are conflicting theories) and expanding west into Europe as well as further east into Asia. The ones who went east into Asia would eventually give rise to the Indo-Iranian branch, of which Hindi is a member, while the ones who headed west into Europe would eventually give rise to the Germanic branch (which English belongs to) and several other branches.

As for the pre-Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of the British Isles, they were Celts, so their native languages (the Brythonic languages) belonged to the Celtic group, which is another branch of the Indo-European family. But these Celtic languages are not the forefather of what eventually became English; English actually developed from the Germanic languages that the Anglo-Saxons brought with when they invaded, rather than from the Celtic languages that were spoken in the British Isles before they arrived. The words "England" and "English" derive from the name of the Angles, who were of course part of the Anglo-Saxon invasion. So the English language is an invention of Germanic invaders, not the "native"* peoples who lived there before; the pre-Anglo-Saxon languages of the British Isles have nothing to do with English.

*I say "native" because the British Celts themselves were not truly native to the British Isles either, but had come over from the continent much earlier, invading/breeding with the pre-Celtic peoples living there. Even those pre-Celtic peoples had migrated across at some point in the past... You see how it goes on.

Originally Posted by Think

Hello Exodite Prime!

Howdy-do.

Originally Posted by coqauvin

I didn't know the Celts~ were invaders either, I had assumed they were the descendants of the first people to immigrate to the island before it was populated, but then I can't say I've ever truly studied the situation in depth.

It's an interesting area. There isn't really an established name for the peoples who lived in the British Isles before the Celts came over, since we don't have any histories or records that discuss them, and they definitely didn't keep histories of their own. The first recorded information about the people living in the British Isles is from after the Celts had already settled there. So everything we know about the pre-Celtic Britons is based on archaeological evidence. These people migrated via the land bridge that connected the British Isles to mainland Europe during the glacial periods of the current Ice Age (as recently as about 8000 years ago), when sea levels were much lower. In fact there is evidence that for as long as this land bridge existed, people migrated in and out of the British Isles multiple times, depending on what the climate was like (i.e., when it got too cold, the people living there would cross back into mainland Europe and head south, then when it got warmer, the limits of human habitability would move north, and people would come back into the British Isles). These people were neolithic hunter-gatherers, obviously, with a pre-metallic level of technology. Anyhow, when the most recent glacial period ended and the sea levels rose, separating the British Isles from the rest of Europe, the people living there were stuck there, and lived there until ~500 BC or so until the Celts finally came over from Europe. Then came the Romans, then the Angles and Saxons and other Germanic peoples, including Scandinavians (who are Germanic), then the Normans.

If you really wanted to pick a period of "radical change" in the English language, it would probably be the several hundred years following the Norman conquest. During that period, English was transformed from essentially an all-Germanic language into the predecessor to the language we know today, which has a huge amount of French-derived (and therefore Latin-derived) vocab grafted onto it. It was the Norman conquest that caused English to diverge sharply from the other Germanic languages.

You can see the results in the way we talk today. French was originally the language of the aristocracy in post-Norman-conquest England, whereas English (meaning Old English, before it picked up all those French influences) was the language of the recently-conquered peasantry, who were naturally viewed in a distasteful light by their new French-speaking overlords. So certain French-derived words for certain things are considered acceptable--like "excrement". That's a word that the nobility might have used. But the English word for the same thing, "shit", is considered vulgar and profane, because it comes from an Anglo-Saxon root and therefore was what the dirty, low-born English-speaking peasants would say. The same is true of "fuck", which also comes from Anglo-Saxon roots, whereas "copulate", for instance, comes from French roots (because it was originally Latin) and therefore is considered less offensive even today. "Cunt" is also from Germanic and therefore Anglo-Saxon roots, while Latin-derived words for the same piece of anatomy are seen as much less offensive.

/language ramble