Quote:
Originally Posted by Tye
Like Deepwaters said, the langauge of the English royals was French during parts of the Middle ages. French was used by the royals, and an unrefined version of English was used by the poor people. The reason why some people didn't want the Bible translated into English in the Middle Ages was because the church thought the English language was not worthy enough to have the Bible translated into it. Shakespeare wrote his plays in English so that it would be accesible to common people. Shakespeare gave the language credibility in the literary filed.
I wonder what the English language and culture would be like if the Normans had failed to conquer England?
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Yeah, OK, I should have been more explicit about the role of the Norman conquest and the rise of French as the court language during that time.
Actually I'm not really all that familiar with quite how long the domination lasted, though it's clear that it had a huge impact on the vocabulary of English as we speak it now. (And I suppose there's a reason why the Anglo-Saxon words in English for certain things, e.g. bodily functions, are considered ruder than the French counterparts in English
. It also explains why we have all these funny dualities for certain things, e.g. "cow" for the animal but "beef" for the meat. So perhaps your point is well made regarding English, with the additional comment that the language itself hybridized a lot more than, say, Russian did when the court language was French there. The only thing I wondered about was that I didn't know what it meant to say that English was
never a "high" language.
Regarding the Bible, I think Luther's translation of the Bible into German was met with similar consternation at the time for similar reasons.
And if the Norman conquest hadn't happened, we'd probably be speaking something a little more like Frisian
(that's assuming everything else happened and former English colonies dominated North America and etc. etc. etc.
)