The Pig-Pork Transformation: Class Divisions in Medieval and Modern English
In which I attempt to explain this twice, once with only Germanic words, and once with only Latinate words.
Sometimes it helps to remember that English was essentially created to facilitate the pickup of Saxon barmaids by Norman soldiers. It still works pretty well for that application; we only encounter problems when we try to extend its use beyond the original design.
-bit.listserv.techwr via pburton on reddit.com
English is Easy, English is Hard
English is a wonderful language. It is easy to learn but hard to master, capable of both terse, rapid communication and florid, expressive prose. I am a native speaker, and am heavily biased towards liking my own language, yet I truly believe English to be an excellent tongue on its own merits.
Basic, so-called “global,” English is relatively easy to learn. It has no case, no gender, no adjective agreement, no explicit formality registers, and a (relatively) simple grammatical structure. Its writing system is alphabetic, and can be learned quickly compared to a logographic system like Chinese. To read a Chinese newspaper, you must know 2,000-3,000 unique symbols, to read an English newspaper, you need 26. Though spoken languages tend to gravitate towards a constant information rate, English has an overall high information density.
English is also incredibly difficult to master. Its spelling and conjugation system is a mess, resulting from smashing at least four distinct orthographies together:
The massive vocabulary of Modern English is derived from the same multi-lingual origin as its complex spelling. Old English comes from the Germanic branch of Indo-European languages. However, in 1066, when Britain was conquered by William the Conqueror, English essentially borrowed an entire language’s worth of alternate vocabulary from Norman French.
When Latin, Greek, and other loan-words are included, well, you get spelling bees. English orthography is so nonsensical that we have spelling contests. Very few other languages have spelling contests — A Spanish or Russian spelling bee would be boring (as their languages have sensible phonetic spelling systems), and a Chinese spelling bee doesn’t even make sense as a concept (they have “dictionary contests” instead).
But there are further, hidden nuances that make English difficult to master, and which are rooted in the class divisions between the Norman French conquerors and the Anglo-Saxon peasantry of Early Medieval Britain.
Medieval Class Divisions in Britain, Twice Told
In the following paragraphs, I will describe the class divisions between Germanic/Old English vocabulary and Latinate/French vocabulary in two ways:
First, using only Germanic root words
Second, using only Latin root words
Caveat: I couldn’t find any non-Latin synonyms for “cook,” so I just left it in as-is.
1. Germanic English
English is, first, a Germanic tongue. Words which come from Latin were brought to English by the Normans, a mingled body of Franks and Vikings, who overthrew the Anglo-Saxon kings of Britain in 1066. The Normans spoke Norman French, a Roman-made tongue with beginnings in Vulgar Latin. After the Normans won Britain, the Norman highborn lived as a thin upper rind atop an Anglo-Saxon groundwork. Their two tongues blended over time, but since the Norman French speakers and Anglo-Saxon speakers came from unalike standings, the hidden meanings of words with unalike beginnings lasted -- words with Latin beginning (mainly long words) are even today seen as more worldly and becoming for writing, where smaller words from Germanic tongues form the groundwork of everyday speech. To see this, look at the words for living things before and after cooking them. The Anglo-Saxon peasants kept cows, and the Normans who ate them called their meat boeuf, or beef. The same is true of pigs and pork, sheep and mutton, and so on. The cooking words are worldly and begin in Latin tongues -- the everyday names for living things are workaday and Anglo-Saxon.
2. Latinate English
English originated as a primarily Germanic language. The Norman French conquerors, a mixed Franco-Viking ethnic group, introduced Latinate vocabulary to English when they conquered the Anglo-Saxon rulers of the British Isles in 1066. The Normans communicated in Norman French, a Romance language originating in Vulgar Latin. Post conquest, the Norman nobility formed a thin elite stratum superior to the Anglo-Saxon substrate. The dual languages eventually merged, but because of the class divide between the Norman and Anglo-Saxon populations, the socioeconomic connotations of synonyms with differing origins persisted. Terms of Latinate origin (usually multisyllabic) are viewed as sophisticated and proper for formal composition. By contrast, Germanic terms form the basis of common, informal conversation. Exempli gratia, consider the terms for animals pre- and post- cooking. The Anglo-Saxons cultivated cows, and the Normans who consumed them termed them boeuf, or beef. Similarly, pigs transformed into pork, sheep into mutton, et cetera. The sophisticated culinary terms originate in Latin — the common terms for animals are Anglo-Saxon in origin.
Persistence
Though I tried my best to use exact synonyms wherever I could, and the same information content exists in both, the Germanic and Latinate paragraphs came out sounding very different.
The Germanic paragraph is perfectly plain and comprehensible, though some uncommon words like “unalike” creep in. When Germanicized English is taken to its extreme, something like Uncleftish Beholding, Atomic Theory in Germanic English, is produced (wiki link).
The Latinate paragraph sounds like a high schooler who found a thesaurus, or someone trying too hard to sound fancy. Simply read any scientific journal paper for a modern example of Latin-heavy English.
The language prejudice of the Norman elite has endured far beyond the relevance of
”Normans” as an ethnic group. The class division of the Norman conquerors and the Anglo-Saxon peasants in 1066 evolved into writing conventions where upper classes favored more French/Latinate styles of expression, which were seen by society as more sophisticated and desirable. These conventions and tastes in formal writing persist in the modern education system, and are indeed explicitly taught to new English learners.
For example: from clickonenglish.blogspot.com:
Here is the original paragraph I wrote, in Standard American English:
English is a primarily Germanic language. Latinate words were introduced to English via the Normans, a mixed ethnic group of Franks and Vikings who conquered the British Isles in 1066. The Normans spoke Norman French, a Romance language with its origins in Vulgar Latin. After the conquest, the Norman ruling caste formed a thin elite stratum atop an Anglo-Saxon substrate. The two languages merged over time, but due to the class divide between Norman French speakers and Anglo-Saxon speakers, the socioeconomic connotations of words with different origins persisted -- words of Latinate origin (which tend to be longer) are still seen as more sophisticated and proper for formal writing, whereas smaller Germanic-derived words form the basis of everyday, informal conversation. One of the best examples of the historical socioeconomic divide in language is the different words for animals before and after they are cooked. The Anglo-Saxons who tended the cows called them cows. The Normans who ate the cows called the meat boeuf, or beef. The same is true of pigs and pork, sheep and mutton, etc. The culinary terms are sophisticated and Latinate, and the everyday names of the animals are common and Anglo-Saxon.