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English is not both a Romance and Germanic language.  It is a Germanic language, specifically a West Germanic language.  However, English can correctly be called the "least Germanic" of Germanic languages, due to its heavy borrowing from French after the Norman Conquest of 1066.

English is not both a Romance and Germanic language.  It is a Germanic language, specifically a West Germanic language.  However, English can correctly be called the "least Germanic" of Germanic languages, due to its heavy borrowing from French after the Norman Conquest of 1066.

Don't want to niggle about this -- since I'm a linguist by training, I know what you are saying, but I want to put this in plain language that non-linguists can understand.  Yes, English in orgin is a  West Germanic language, but some of its parts are grafts, as it were-- our pronoun system comes from Danish, and many of our syntactical habits (use of auxilliary verbs, for instance) come from French.  In terms of the lexicon, Saxon-era words are a small minority (though predominant in the 1st decile of most commonly-used words), French the big contributor, followed by Latin, Greek, and other modern languages.  So I want to give a sense that English is really a language with a mixed heritage, getting more mixed all the time, which is its strength!  But I don't want to write something that sounds too technical.

::Don't want to niggle about this -- since I'm a linguist by training, I know what you are saying, but I want to put this in plain language that non-linguists can understand.  Yes, English in orgin is a  West Germanic language, but some of its parts are grafts, as it were-- our pronoun system comes from Danish, and many of our syntactical habits (use of auxilliary verbs, for instance) come from French.  In terms of the lexicon, Saxon-era words are a small minority (though predominant in the 1st decile of most commonly-used words), French the big contributor, followed by Latin, Greek, and other modern languages.  So I want to give a sense that English is really a language with a mixed heritage, getting more mixed all the time, which is its strength!  But I don't want to write something that sounds too technical.

[[User:Boethius|Boethius]] 18:07, 14 March 2007 (EDT)

::[[User:Boethius|Boethius]] 18:07, 14 March 2007 (EDT)