The Development of Latin English

There must have been a common ancestor of the modern Germanic languages, although we have little trace of it, which stood in much the same relationship to them as Latin did to the present Romance languages. These two ancestors were themselves cousins of some degree and had a far-off common ancestor in what is now known as Indo-European. We can therefore expect to find a certain number of words which are common to both these groups, even though their form may have greatly changed.

Our word “cost” illustrates this point well. It is “côte” in French, “costa” in Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, “Kuste’ in German, “kust” in Dutch and Swedish, and “kyst” in Danish.

In the same way because there is an intimate relationship between “p” and “f” “piscis” and “fish” are really the same word and so are “pes” and “foot” (“fuss” in German) and we can truthfully say that there were Latin words in English before English was a language in its own right.

Curious as it may appear at first sight very few Latin words entered the English language directly as a result of the Roman occupation. The struggle for supremacy between the various dialects of what is now English, had hardly begun, and the literary – West Saxon, into which they mostly entered, went to pieces later.

But the flow had started and Christianity continued where the Romans had left off. Words like Bishop, Cowl, Noon, Verse came in as ecclesiastical terms.

Latin from this time onwards was the language of scholars and the learned professions, though the Anglo-Saxon of the East Midlands and Norman French both had their place and all three tongues existed side by side.

Thus fresh Latin words continued to enter the country and gradually some of them became popular and replaced native words. In this way cleave was ousted by divide although the word truthful retained its place alongside veracious. Sometimes the Latin word came in twice or three times and remained as a learned word in one form and as a popular word in another as, surely and security or status and estate. Sometimes the two words became popular but with different meanings, as – feat and fact, dainty and dignity, satiate and satisfy.

The Book of Common Prayer has many examples, too, as the services had to be intelligible to the masses:

so we are prayed and beseeched when we aemble and meet together not to dissemble nor cloke our sins and wickedness into which we have erred and atrayed.

Another wave of Latin words came in at the Renaissance and the influx never ceased and continues today – Latin words still compete with Greek to provide names for new inventions and technicalities.

Not all Latin words entered directly. After the Norman conquest the majority came through French and it is now almost impossible to distinguish whether they entered directly or indirectly since they generally took the French form in either case. The word texture, for instance, would have taken that form even if it had come from the Latin textura. Flexure, on the other hand, is known to have come direct from flexura because no such word as “lexure” exists in French. While the Romance languages were developing each along its own path and were choosing the Latin word that suited them best for a particular purpose English was making an indiscriminate collection of them without any real need.

No fewer than 8 alternatives are found in the English dictionary for the word foresee, all of them of Latin origin: anticipate, expect, preconceive, predict, prognosticate, prophesy, visualise, envisage. Now we are unlikely to find all these in all the Romance languages, but we are sure to find at least one to suit each and can recognize them.

Дата добавления: 2014-01-11