h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Yes, fascinating. and lonely.


(that's a joke. The second part, I mean. Well, actually, there aren't a lot of people I can talk to about my area, but that's okay.)

Re the influence of Romance languages on English (whose roots lie in Germanic languages*) one of the simplest ways of illustrating it is to look at a particular meat:

Cow is the English for the animal
Beouf is the French for cow
Beef is the English for the prepared meat

The influx of languages into English is one of the reasons why it has so many synonyms (A14761) .

*so, naturally, the first second langauge we are taught in school is French, a Romance language with less grammatical similarity to English than German (a...er...Germanic langauge)

Tangentially, in looking on the Guide for something about 'beef', I found a great entry on the evolution of English swearing (A527799).

Are you a fan of Ivanhoe or did you pick that up from someone else who was a fan? It works with sheep (mutton) and goats (chevon) as well. It's a reflection of distinctions in diet according to class after the Norman Conquest: the English peasants used their word for the animal as they commonly saw it (on the hoof) and the Norman nobility used their word for the animal as they commonly saw it (on the plate).

My "first second" language was French and I never had too much trouble with it. I've since moved onto a number of other second languages, but I still can't get German. Strange. While French is, as you say, less grammatically similar to English than is German, on the vocabulary side, French is much closer to English that German. Some 80% of English words fell out of use after the Norman conquest and were replaced with French words (which explains why Old English is so hard for English speakers to get a handle on).

Blah blah

I picked that up from French classes and from being vegetarian!

Eddie Izzard's "Mongrol Nation" on Discovery had a wonderful segment where he learnt the Old English for "I would like to buy a brown cow, for milk" and then went to a rural farming community in Holland and bought a cow, using the Old English. Once you start noticing the similarities of the European languages you tend to start seeing it everywhere. It's a very entertaining mini-series on how Britain is such a mess of other cultures, if let down by very poor graphics.

Yes, it is sad how Britain has been let down by very poor graphics.

There's an old story that when the Old English and the Vikings shouted curses at each other before battle they could each use their own language and yet be understood by the other side.