arnie muses elsewhere about how, after the Norman conquest of 1066, the language would have been changed by the need for communication between the french-speaking ruling classes and the english-speaking natives.

It occurs to me that the same need would have arisen hundreds of times in history, as one people conquered another. If the victors choose to settle as rulers among the vanquished as rulers (rather than drive the defeated side out of the land, as for example the Angles, Saxons etc. drove out the Celts), then the two peoples would have to work out a way to communicate in ordinary day-to-day affairs.

This has surely happened hundreds of times in history. The general pattern, at least from the few instances that I can discuss meaningfully, is that one language or the other prevailed. For example, when Rome conquered lands in continental Europe, Latin prevailed, and we have little trace of whatever languages had been spoken by the tribes that Rome conquered. Conversely, when Rome conquered Celtic Britain, Latin did not become the language of Britain; it vanished when Rome withdrew as its empire collapsed, and almost nothing of the roman terms survived in the language of the isles. (It came in only later, through the Normans in 1066.)

But following the Norman Conquest, neither language prevailed. Instead, copious new terms entered the language but many of the old ones survived, making english a "blend" or "combination" language very different from other Germanic languages. And beyond vocabulary, I suspect that there was a similar mixing of other aspects in which the two languages differened.

I'm nowhere near as informed on this as I'd like, but it seems to me that it is very unusual for a conquest to lead to this sort of "combination" language, rather than to a language that largely tracks either the tongue of the victor or the tongue of the vanquished.

Is it indeed unusual? If so, what factors about the Norman Conquest were unusual and led to this unusual result.

English isn't really a blend. It's a Germanic language the same as any other, Middle English being a direct continuation of Old English, but with a huge influx of French vocabulary. Languages in contact often borrow massively -- Turkish from Arabic, Persian from Arabic, Japanese from Chinese --, yet this doesn't make them blends. The grammar is unaffected, the phonetics may be largely unaffected.

French made minor differences to English phonetics, introducing [v] as a separate sound rather then just a positional version of [f], and bringing in a lot more examples of [dZ] as in courage where Old English had it in edge, bridge.

I don't think French had any grammatical influence on English. If the loss of inflexion was caused by language contact (highly dubious, in my opinion), it was with Old Norse. The loss happened first in the Danelaw, and in the north generally, before 1066.

English still had Germanic grammar into the Early Modern period (early 1600s): it shared with German/Dutch features such as the word order of questions and negatives, and inversion after an initial element that wasn't the subject: "I went" - "went you?" - "I went not" - "then went I".

For example, when Rome conquered lands in continental Europe, Latin prevailed, and we have little trace of whatever languages had been spoken by the tribes that Rome conquered. Conversely, when Rome conquered Celtic Britain, Latin did not become the language of Britain; it vanished when Rome withdrew as its empire collapsed, and almost nothing of the roman terms survived in the language of the isles.

Latin had an impact on Brythonic Celtic (Welsh, Breton, and Cornish) and Gaelic, and even Old English. One institution in Britain continued to use Latin for a long time to come: the Church.

We also have a pretty good idea of what Gaulish was like, there being a pretty good corpus of texts, some of which have been discovered in France in the past 100 years or so.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: jheem,