At 13:19 1/30/00 , H@nz wrote:
>The funny thing is that the Americans, without realizing it,
re-established the
>way the word, which originates from Latin, was written. I think the way the
>English write it reflects the way the French pronounce it.
>
>Latin: color
>French: couleur
>English: colour
>American: color
>Dutch: kleur (this is pronounced exactly as in French, but skips the first
>vowel)
>German: Farbe :-0
Been watching this thread for a while.
English is one of the most difficult languages to learn because it has both
a Germanic and Latin base. The Germanic roots are from the Angles and
Saxons and a few other folks that lived on the British Isles for a very,
very long time. The Latin roots are from the Normans.
There was this momentous event near Hastings in 1066 when a guy named
William soundly thrashed and trounced a guy named Harold. To do this,
William and his henchmen paddled their boats across the English Channel
from the area now known as Normandy. But that's not where they originally
came from, having migrated there much earlier.
The Normans are not really French. Norman was originally "Norseman"
referring to their origin from what is now know as Norway. My guess is
they found the coast of France much more inhabitable and performed a
permanent migration similar to what we see here every Winter with the mass
exodus of retirees from the "rust belt" in the northern tier to Florida,
Texas and Arizona. They pushed the real French inland from the Normandy
region, but over the years picked up and incorporated Old French into their
language.
William became the first Norman king of England after his success at
Hastings won him the "title belt" but it was not the end of his troubles or
that of his successors. The Saxon Lords did not like having big portions
of their lands ripped out from under them and handed over to William's
Norman cronies. So, William and his successors had to set up housekeeping
on the British Isles to maintain a grip on things there. For a very long
time (counted in centuries) the English Norman king had land holdings on
the Normandy coast of France.
Now the French had never liked being pushed out of their seacoast resorts
much and the French kings kept an eye out for opportunity to regain the
coastal area. They had the patience of Job. With the move of the Norman
king from the continent to the British Isles attention was continuously
diverted to subduing the Saxons, Welsh, Scottish and other assorted folks
there. Numerous opportunities arose for the French to gnaw away at the
Norman holdings on the continent. Things really went downhill for the
Normans around the time of the Crusades when a Norman king decided to take
a number of very extended holidays into the Middle East. Eventually the
French managed to boot the Normans off of the continent entirely.
In the process of all this, the English Language became a hodgepodge of the
Norman, Saxon and a few other assorted odds and ends floating around the
region. It should be noted that at one time the official language of the
English Court (royal court) was French. The language of "The Church" and
scholarly texts was Latin as was much legal stuff.
What has never helped is nobody is in charge of proper English. The French
and Spanish have preserved, or at least slowed, changes in their languages
by having a special, select scholarly committee decide what is proper and
what is not. There is a committee of sorts that determines proper English,
but in true democratic spirit, *everyone* who speaks it is an equal member.
That is, proper English is determined by consensus of usage by the masses.
Thus, English as written and spoken in widely flung regions such as
Canada, U.S., Australia, New Zealand, and Great Britain (to name a few, but
not all) has evolved differently and much more rapidly than other
languages. After all, until the 19th Century, it could take months to
travel to all these places, so consensus was regional. Not only that, only
a few people were truly literate so they spelled things as best they could.
Anyone who has done deep genealogical research into census, birth, death
and marriage records can attest to that.
So now you have the Compleate Storie. And if the "English as a second
language" members of the list have wondered why the only rule in English is
there are no rules, and why it is so difficult, well now you know.
Oh yes, the *real* reason the Colonial upstarts here dropped the "u" from
many words (and shortened various others) was it made their postal letters
shorter, thus they weighed less, and therefore they would pay less for some
of King George's blasted stamps. At least that's my wacko, fringe theory.
There may be a few minor errors here and there in this, but it is the gist
of what happened. I typed it at ultra high speed, at an ungodly hour of
the morning, on a caffeine high, and teetering on the brink of mental adhesion.
-- John
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