The Many Origins of the English Language
August 8, 2015 3:46 AM   Subscribe

 
Side note: Jeremy Piven made fun of the kid majoring in Sanskrit in PCU that lost his Thesis, but since 1950+, that has been the origin of a pretty good chunk of new words!
posted by Nanukthedog at 8:03 AM on August 8, 2015


Philip Durkin (the author of the linked piece, and please credit the author, folks!) is deputy chief editor of the OED and knows his stuff. I wrote about his work here, and there's some interesting stuff in the comments. Thanks for the post!
posted by languagehat at 9:02 AM on August 8, 2015


knows his stuff

If you say so.

Is he from New Zealand? It seems odd that Māori shows up so prominently (kiwi, moa, haka, and... ???), but Algonquian's nowhere to be found.
posted by Sys Rq at 9:14 AM on August 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


Sys Rq: "Māori shows up so prominently (kiwi, moa, haka, and... ???)"

Mana! (Like in video games!)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 11:26 AM on August 8, 2015


It seems odd that Māori shows up so prominently (kiwi, moa, haka, and... ???), but Algonquian's nowhere to be found.

Not really? Māori is a language, Algonquian is a group of languages. So those "Algonquian" words are Arapaho or Powhatan or Naragansett, etc. (And there probably weren't/aren't enough from any one particular language to account for more than a very small percentage of the total loanwords in English in the relevant period...probably 1650-1850).
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 11:51 AM on August 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


What is "early Scandinavian," then? It's not a language. Not even an official group of languages, truth be told. I guess he just meant Old Norse, but who the hell knows.

And, like, the absence of Old English (or Anglo-Saxon or whatever term you prefer), but the inclusion of Latin, kind of handwaves the fact that people were speaking the latter in Britain for 500 years before they were speaking the former. Anglo-Saxon did not "borrow" from Latin so much as failed to overwrite it totally.
posted by Sys Rq at 1:02 PM on August 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


And, like, the absence of Old English (or Anglo-Saxon or whatever term you prefer), but the inclusion of Latin, kind of handwaves the fact that people were speaking the latter in Britain for 500 years before they were speaking the former.

Not really; people spoke Celtic languages (Latin was the language of government and Church, but not the language of the people).
posted by Pseudonymous Cognomen at 2:40 PM on August 8, 2015 [1 favorite]


…would be better illustrated using a "graph".
posted by esprit de l'escalier at 4:25 PM on August 8, 2015 [2 favorites]


(Latin was the language of government and Church, but not the language of the people)

Romans are people too. Maybe not the people, but then I never said that, did I?
posted by Sys Rq at 4:46 PM on August 8, 2015


Does the study weight for frequency of use?
The short article touches on this at the end, but it's not clear.
If it did, I'm sure German and Scandinavian would have higher proportions, with all the everyday words from them - house, cook, weather, school, and so forth.
posted by Steakfrites at 8:52 PM on August 8, 2015


Going far back, what exactly is a loan-word? Everything except Anglo-Saxon? Are there essentially English words? Does the final cumulative chart not count what he considers non-loan-words?
posted by Steakfrites at 9:12 PM on August 8, 2015


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