"Franglo-Saxon"

Here's one for the purists!

What must I admit, being both Anglophone and Francophone, when I am confronted by those who desperately search to purify the 'English' language by ignoring the four basic building blocks of Sheakespeare's tongue? (Greek - technical terminology, Latin - artistic, legal and lithurgical, Lower or Bass-Saxon(Germano-Dutch) - popular discourse, jargon, invective, agricultural terminology, Middle French (Langue d'Or) - upper-class discourse, political, diplomatic.) This list is not exhaustive but gives a general idea of the complexity and the origins of a language that is anything but pure.

Usage is another matter, with hundreds of dialects and a variety of vocabularies one can but be astonished that the English language has not disintegrated, given the 'cultural invasion' that it has experienced within the past 100 years with the American cinema and all that this great institution has offered to the free world. 

Where is the English language today, and what is it? 

I repeat what I said elswhere:

The notion that there is something such as the purity of a language (English or any other) that can be preserved is entirely misconceived.

Let's go back roughly 1500 years to when Germanic tribes started to settle in Britain. They are believed to have come from different parts of what is now Denmark, Germany and Holland. It seems highly likely that the different groups spoke different varieties or dialects of the same language. This appears to be confirmed by the different dialects of Old English that can be seen from the texts that began to appear a few centuries later.

The next stage was the invasion of the Vikings. By the time they came the varieties of language that the invaders spoke had become differentiated from the varieties of language spoken by the Angles, Saxons, Frisians and Jutes who had settled a few centuries earlier. We can probably talk about the invaders and the "English" speaking different languages, but with a high degree of mutual intelligibilty. Many Scandinavian words entered the English language, most notably they, them and their and are.

The Norman Conquest did of course lead eventually to huge changes in English vocabulary. After that borrowings form Latin and Greek continued to enrich the language and we must not forget the influx of words from all over the world more or less starting with European colonialisation.

The position is now such that no one, however clever they are, can understand Old English without learning it as if it were a foreign language.

So, if you want to restore the "purity" of the English language how far back do you want to go? Even if you go as far back as the time when it could be said that "English" was a separate language from what was spoken on the continent, you still have the problem of which variety to choose.

And I add:

The "cultural invasion" to which you refer is after all by a variety of English. To the extent that there is Standard American and Standard British English the differences between them are very small. The new vocabulary of popular culture is for the most part ephemeral.

All languages are to a greater or less degree fragmented into dialects, but this does not threaten the dialect accepted as the standard form of the language.

It is not true to say that the Romans left an enormous cultural heritage on the early English since there were no English around for them to influence. The English in England were never subject to Roman rule. The Romans were in Britain for approximately 400 years from 43 AD. The peoples they conquered were Celtic. After the Romans declined to defend Britain the invasions by Germanic tribes began. Essentially the Celts were driven further and further to the West to what is now Wales and Cornwall. Some emigrated from Cornwall to what is now Brittany. The Germanic invaders, who had never been conquered (at least decisively) by the Romans, brought their own language and culture with them. No one knows how many Celts stayed in the areas taken over by the Anglo-Saxons, but if any did, it appears that they quickly adopted the tongue of the invaders. The Celtic influence on English is almost negligible and for the most part survives in place names. When the Anglo-Saxons adopted Christianity (this was the second time England was converted) the first Latin words came into English, but the influence was minimal.

I have never heard a theory that any Germanic (Teutonic) language was spoken in the Indus basin. Certainly the Indo-Iranian languages are part of the Indo-European family and therefore related to the Germanic languages.

I do not think it is true that the vast majority of English speakers hide from the truth concerning their linguistic origins, simply because the vast majority of English speakers think very little, if at all, about their linguistic origins. If the English do think of themselves as a culture apart from the rest of Europe it is for non-linguistic reasons and mainly because of the sea separating England from the rest of Europe. Whilst the English, quite unreasonably, think the rest of the world should speak English, they have no strong feeling that English is intrinsically superior to any other language; English is not even the official language of England, although curiously it is one of the official languages of Wales. There is no Academy to protect the English language. There is no significant movement in Egland to keep the language "pure", although people may complain about Americanisms. The situation is strikingly different in France where measures have been taken by government to try and stop foreign influences on the French language. The French are brought up to believe that "Ce qui n'est pas clair n'est pas français" with its implied corollary "Ce qui n'et pas français n'est pas clair" which has led to the ridiculous notion that French is the "language of diplomacy", when all languages are equally diplomatic.

My2sense wrote:

It's not that French is more diplomatic than other languages but that French was used a the language of diplomacy i.e. government, treaties, royal courts, etc.

Indeed, after the Norman invasion, French was the language of the royal court for about 300 years.  But given the great cultural chasm between the royals and the commoners, there was no real mixing of the languages inside the British Isles during that time. 

I believe that the French influence on the English language came later on through the education of the 'middle' classes and with the advent of the Renaissance.

What is interesting is that as I thumb through Beowulf, the Hymns of Caedmon, and other poems and stories from about 1100 - 1300 AD, I don't see a lot of French influence.

Does anyone out there know (through documentation) when French began to influence the 'common' English usage and vocabulary?  I think it may be difficult to find these sorts of documents because the language of the scholars and clergy was still solidly Latin around that time.

C