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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 2039305" data-attributes="member: 2205">Somebody else forget to read the word "practically" in my sentence "[English] has practically no structural or grammatical borrowings from French."  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Anyway, if you don't agree with me, take it up with the linguistics professors I've had (and read the books of) over the years.  There is an "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothesis" target="_blank">English as a Glorified Creole</a>" theory out there, but it's got some serious problems to the point that it will probably never be taken seriously by linguistic scholars.  (To quote the linked article, "Most linguists hold that most changes that happened to English would have happened anyway, even without Norman influence. The Scandinavian languages have undergone very similar changes without being conquered by the French.")  Here's another <a href="http://www.linguistlist.org/~ask-ling/archive-most-recent/msg01953.html" target="_blank">quick note</a> on the subject.  Here's some quotes from there:  "No, I doubt very much you will find a reputable linguist  ... who believes this.  The proposition ... shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of comparative-historical linguistics and what it means to be in a language family. We do not decide this by "majority of vocabulary".  Moreover, in this particular case, the proposition you seek a reputable proponent of reflects a glaring ignorance of the particular facts about English sound ~ meaning correspondences and about English and comparative Germanic v  comparative Romance grammar.  ...  I doubt you will find anybody who knows much about the subject who will regard it as anything other than goofey. [sic]""The only reputable linguist I have ever heard of who doubts the Germanic status of English is Charles-James N. Bailey.  Bailey has suggested that English should now be considered a Romance language.  I know of no other linguist who considers this suggestion to be anything but absurd."All from professional linguists with academic posts.And anyway, I'm not trying to deny that there was a deep influence of Norman French on modern English, merely that to state that English is midway towards being an Italic language is false, and that claim can really only be made if you're looking only at the vocabulary.  Even then, it'd be a hard sell.</blockquote>

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