aeon.co (13/11/2015) • Why is English so weird… (d1-2)

  •  M c W h o r t e r  (2 0 1 5)  •  W h y  i s  E n g l i s h  s o  w e i r d l y  d i f f e r e n t …  •

We can display all these bizarre Norse influences in a single sentence. Say ‹That’s the man you walk in with›, and it’s odd because 1) ‹the› has no specifically masculine form to match ‹man›, 2) there’s no ending on ‹walk›, and 3) you don’t say ‘in with whom you walk’. All that strangeness is because of what Scandinavian Vikings did to good old English back in the day.

Finally, as if all this wasn’t enough, English got hit by a firehose spray of words from yet more languages. After the Norse came the French. The Normans – descended from the same Vikings, as it happens – conquered England, ruled for several centuries and, before long, English had picked up 10,000 new words. Then, starting in the 16th century, educated Anglophones developed a sense of English as a vehicle of sophisticated writing, and so it became fashionable to cherry-pick words from Latin to lend the language a more elevated tone.

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