Shu and I were having a great discussion recently about how our language has developed, though a question arose. Why is it that some cultures (the Germanic, for example) had such a big influence on English, when others, such as the Romans, didn't? Why do some cultures make such an influence on languages, while others don't? Perhaps there are a lot of reasons that vary depending on the situation?

Thoughts?

Well, the Romans conquered the Britons, who were Celtic speaking, and the English (the Angles, Saxons, and the Jutes) came in afterwards. Those tribes were Germanic, and their culture came to have impact on ours (in the States). The English didn't pick up much in the way of loanwords from the Celtic-speaking Britons, and so, I'd imagine they wouldn't pick up much culture-wise either. Just my tuppence.

But there are very many words of Roman origin in common use in English. Just off the top of my head:

picture; mural; bellicose; pugnacious; gregarious; corpulent; egotistical; via.

There are many words of Latin origin in English, but my point was that the English, arriving as they did after the Romans left, did not get them directly from the Romans but from priests and scholars who were using Latin (and were not Roman in the cultural sense).

True. But my point was that, regardless of how it arrived, there are many Roman influences, both on our language and in other areas. Kalleh seemed to suggest that she felt that there was little such influence.

Of course, what have the Romans ever done for anyone? http://www.mwscomp.com/movies/brian/brian-09.htm

The English established few of their cities at the sites of older Romano-British ones. They tended to stay away from those scary, old, abandoned cities with buildings like bleached bones (marble facings).

I may have misunderstood Kalleh and Shu's assertion. English is a Germanic language in core vocabulary and grammar. It has lots of loanwords from French, Latin, and Greek. If there were no contacts between Romans (and their culture) and the English, how could there be an influence of the former on the latter? I suppose, the influence could've been one of secondary transmission, e.g., books.

I'm not quite sure what this means: "Why do some cultures make such an influence on languages, while others don't?" Cultures and languages are apples and crates. A language is a medium or a tool of culture transfer.

Is borrowing a word, say corpulent, rather than using a native (inherited) one, say fat, an example of a culture influencing a language? How about architecture? The British got the neo-classical style via the French from the Italians, who had rediscovered (or reinvented it) from the Romans.

I will be honest. Shu carried most of this conversation, which was intriguing and interesting to me...but he was far more knowledgable than I. I asked him to raise the question here, and he hasn't. So I did. I will jiggle his elbow because I'd like his contribution.

Richard, yes we have words from Latin in English. However, we got them indirectly, as z says, through other languages. Why is it that Rome itself didn't influence the English language more? And why, I wonder, didn't the English pick up much from the Celtic-speaking Britons? They surely picked up a lot of language from Germanic tribes.

Forget my "cultures" word. I wasn't sure what to call the people who come in and capture countries, so I referred to them as "cultures." That wasn't very clear.

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Is borrowing a word, say corpulent, rather than using a native (inherited) one, say fat, an example of a culture influencing a language?

In my opinion, no. To me, the influence would have to be directly from the Romans, and not from Old French, which got it from Latin. I supposed there is varied thinking on that, too, and Richard probably disagrees with me.

[The English] surely picked up a lot of language from Germanic tribes.

That's because the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes were Germanic tribes. They didn't get influenced by Germanic languages, they spoke a Germanic language: what today is called Old English and was before called Anglo-Saxon. Another factor is the Germanic tribes conquered what was left over of the Roman province of Britannia. They came looking for farmland and other more movable spoils, not to be influenced by Romanized Celtic-speaking tribes who just happened to be occupying the countryside. The English weren't directly influenced by the Romans because they weren't any Romans left in Britannia when they got here. The folks who came into daily contact with the Romans (i.e., had been subjugated) tended to borrow a lot more culturally and linguistically from them.

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Why is it that Rome itself didn't influence the English language more? ...the influence would have to be directly from the Romans, and not from Old French, which got it from Latin

Here's a blurb from Wikipedia that speaks to early Roman influence on the development of English:

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The Germanic tribes who gave rise to the English language (the Angles, Saxons, Frisians, Jutes and perhaps even the Franks), traded with and fought with the Latin-speaking Roman Empire in the process of the Germanic invasion of Europe from the East. Many Latin words for common objects therefore entered the vocabulary of these Germanic people even before any of these tribes reached Britain; examples include camp, cheese, cook, fork, inch, kettle, kitchen, linen, mile, mill, mint (coin), noon, pillow, pin, pound, punt (boat), street, and wall. The Romans also gave English words which they had themselves borrowed from other languages: anchor, butter, chest, devil, dish, sack and wine.

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They surely picked up a lot of language from Germanic tribes.

Actually, the English were Germanic tribes. English is known technically as "Insular Anglo-Frisian (West Germanic)". There is a great map in Wiki that shows these teeny pink bumps where Frisian originated, and there just to the west is huge (by contrast) England which adopted a variation of that language. Did you ever see Robin McNeil's series "The Story of English"? One scene took place in a rural pub somewhere in the eastern Netherlands; the dialect being spoken was so close to English that you could just about understand what was being said.

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And why, I wonder, didn't the English pick up much from the Celtic-speaking Britons?

It would be great to hear from some who have indepth knowledge of this period, i.e., the 5th, 6th, etc centuries where English was developing from the Western German dialects of the invaders. I know the Celtic and Gaelic speakers were pushed off to the north and west and eventually formed their own countries, but didn't they trade, mingle, and exchange/ borrow words?

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In my opinion, no. To me, the influence would have to be directly from the Romans, and not from Old French, which got it from Latin. I supposed there is varied thinking on that, too, and Richard probably disagrees with me.

Not really. I simply said that we use many words of Latin origin. I did not comment on how they got here.

But I would guess that our Roman town and city names (anything ending in "caster" or "chester") remained unchanged from Roman times - even if the city centres moved.

I didn't mean to suggest that English (or Germanic languages in general) were not affected at all by Latin or contact with Latin-speaking Romans, but, to my mind the effect was something less than, for example, what happened to the Gaulish speakers in Gallia who were so affected that they simply adopted Latin, which later became French (with some addition of Frankish loanwords). (Also, those contacts with Romans happened while the Germanic tribes who later immigrated and became the English were still on the continent. After they got to England, most contact with Romans would have been extremely scarce, as the Roman Empire in the West was slowly disintegrating.

It is controversial how much Latin was spoken by the Britons before Rome abandoned Britannia by pulling out its legions to defend the core of its western Empire. Was it everybody? Or was it the collaborating aristocracy and the upper-, city-dwelling classes. It is also controversial whether the Celtic speakers moved to today's Celtic fringes (Wales, Cornwall, Scotland, or whether the Celtic speakers in what is today England simply starting speaking Old English and abandoned their Brythonic languages (whether as slaves or neighbors). The same goes for the Celtic, Iberian, and Celtiberian speakers of Hispania, and the Etruscan, Ligurian, Oscan, Umbrian, Venetic, and Greek speakers in Italia, etc. We see other examples of small groups of people, speaking language A who invade an area where the inhabitants are speaking language B, and the A speakers end up as B speakers after a while: I'm thinking of the Norse in Ireland (they founded Dublin after all), Normandy (Norman comes from Old Norse for North-man), Rus (i.e., Russia and Ukraine), the Franks in Gallia, the Langobards (or Lombards, literally Long-beards) in Lombardy, Italy, etc.

There are Greek and Latin loanwords in Old English: e.g., Gk angel and devil, besides L castrum '(military) camp' OE cæster 'city'. labellum > læfel 'bowl', tabula > tæfl 'gaming-board', salto, saltare, > sealtian 'to dance', lactuca > leahtric 'lettuce' (all examples from A Campbell (1959) Old English Grammar, OUP, ch X, 'Loan-words in Old English'. These words look very much different from the usually Graeco-Latinate vocabulary, which English engorged itself with during the Renaissance and Neo-Classical period.

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I simply said that we use many words of Latin origin.

Yes, of course, Richard. I had only meant that we don't have many words from the original Romans who came through England. Most of our words with Latin roots developed from other languages, such as French. You are correct about the Roman town and city names, though. Shu had pointed that out to me in our conversation.

Most of our words with Latin roots developed from other languages, such as French.

We also have a huge vocabulary from Latin directly, the ISV, but those words weren't borrowed from Romans either but got out of a dictionary.

Your entry above is fascinating & thought-provoking, zmj, i.e. the mystery of the mechanics of how the invader's language is given up, or supersedes that of the invader, though I suspect that in any of these cases there must be traces of the "lost" language. One of the factors involved is probably geographical. We have seen in the US how areas isolated by geography retain much of the language of its earliest settlers (17thc. Scots-English features of Appalachian dialect; 18thc. West AFrican Creole on Gullah island for examples).

Thank you, beethree5; it's one of the reasons I chose to study linguistics at university. There is a classic book on the subject by Uriel Weinreich, Languages in Contact (1953). It's out of print and expensive, but a good library should have a copy or be able to get one for you on loan.

[Addendum: I found this book (Donald Winford Introduction to Contact Linguistics) searching on Google Books to see if they had digitzed Weinreich. I haven't read it, but the TOC looks intriguing.]

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