The reason it seems funny to see the word "stuff" in a scientific essay is that it's very much not a French-derived word. French-speaking people ruled England for a while starting in the year 1066, and quite quickly in that region the use of French-derived English words became seen as a sign of high class. That sort of thing, once strongly established, becomes self-perpetuating.
That's why, even today, a police officer might say in court, "I observed the individual in the vicinity of the canine" whereas among family the officer might be much more likely to say, "I saw the man near the dog."
The first sentence is full of French. The second, Anglo-Saxon.
It's the same reason we eat beef and pork, but raise cows and pigs. The people eating the meat were upper class and thus used the French-derived words; the people taking care of the animals used Anglo-Saxon.
The difference with formal language is not just due to Norman rulers: across the whole of Europe for almost 2000 years, the language of Law was Latin and lawyers were educated by (mostly Catholic) Latin-speaking clerics.
You can observe the same difference between "vulgar" and "formal" modes in French, Italian, Spanish and probably most other continental languages as well. 'Vulgar' would evolve quickly and absorb influences from all over (invading armies, temporary rulers, fads etc), but formal language would stick to Latin words or their closest local equivalent. This was absolutely necessary at a time when national identities and linguistic cores had not been firmly established and two neighbouring towns might be talking completely different languages for various reasons (even just out of spite for each other).
Do you know about Law French? Have you ever seen the Selden Society reports? Before 1600, the law was primarily written in Law French in the UK, a language somewhere between English and French but definitely not Latin.
> French-speaking people ruled England for a while starting in the year 1066
Norman French speaking people. Normandy had been heavily colonised by the Norse, just as Anglo-Saxon England had, and left it quite different to French. Harold had as many connections to Scandanavian royalty as William.
Attempts to Latinise Englist are still going strong; any time you hear some folk grammaticist inveigh against split infinitives as "bad English", you're hearing someone who is continuing the 19th Century efforts to Latinise the languae.
The Google etymology thing (I didn't even know it existed - just search for "stuff etymology" and you get a nice little graph) tells me that the word "stuff" came to English from Greek (stuphein) via Old French (estoffe). So maybe it is not correct to say it's not a French-derived word?
But it's also present in German- stoff means something like "material". Amusingly, there's a wikipedia article titled "List of stoffs". The elements have names like Wasserstoff = water stuff = hydrogen. In the attached essay (which claims to be written without German derivatives), it seems strange to prefer "waterstuff" to the very Greek "hydrogen"... ?
For some reason this discussion sent me off to try and find the origin of "loons" and "quines" - the terms for "boys" and "girls" in the dialect of Scots English I am familiar with.
"Quine" seems to be based on "quean" but "loon" seems a mystery!
NB Referring to someone as a "loonie" is not derogatory - but just means they are a young boy :-)
"Loon" and "Quine" aren't even Scots English, I suspect you'd get funny looks if you used either in Edinburgh or Glasgow. Each are very much "Doric" (the dialect of Aberdeen\shire) words.
edit: I recognise your name from another post and remember that you're from Scotland so you probaby know this already :)
I find the suggestion surprising myself, given how Germanic the German term sounds to me, but I decided to check in Kluge's Etymologisches Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache for the etymology of German "Stoff".
Kluge says that it came from Middle Dutch "stoffe", which got it from Old French "estoffe", which had a sense of 'cloth, mesh, fabric (especially of silk)'. He says the word's "economic background" is the importation of silkworms and silk weaving from Byzantium ("where Justinian had brought them in 552 from the Orient") via Sicily and North Italy to France and Flanders, and that the "assumed" etymology of the word in Greek στυφειν can thus be "supported on grounds of cultural history".
As a german I can say that "Stoff" has different meanings. It can be used like cloth, but in other contexts it is used like material. For example there is "Stoffkunde" which it the study (Kunde) of materials (Stoffe). "Lesestoff" is reading (lesen) material.
English words derived from French are usually longer then similar words derived from Anglo-Saxon. Bad or insecure writers and speakers, especially when they are members of the middle class, will often assume that using words with many syllables will make them sound smarter and more eloquent.
The police officer would prefer the first sentence because it has more syllables, not because it has many words derived from French. He would likely say that he "utilized" his training, instead of "used", even though "use" and "utilize" both derive from French.
For talking to (or teaching) non-native English speakers in English, using the Norman-derived verbs can often be useful for avoiding 2-word phrasal verbs (and 3-word prepositional verbs). Many learners of English understand "put" but don't understand "put off", "put up", and "put up with", so saying "postpone", "accommodate", and "tolerate" can help with communication where the objective of the conversation (or lesson) is something else.
While English is a Germanic language, 41% of English words (ranked by frequency) come from French, making French the largest source of words in English, not German (which comes in at about 35%).
Of course, removing all non-French words would be worse since English pronouns, prepositions and conjunctions are mostly German derived. According to Wikipedia, 97% of the top 100 words in English are German derived. The loss of German would leave little to "glue" a sentence together.
Last September I spent a little time going through Beowulf and pulling out words we no longer use but are still active in modern Swedish. I got to 100 very quickly. I can't speak so much for German, having only a basic grasp, but to me it looks like Scandinavian languages are closer to Old English now than Modern German. That might give a picture of how English would otherwise look without a Norman conquest (or if the Normans had retained their Norse language).[0]
For info, if you hadn't heard yet, Tolkien's Beowulf translation is due out on the 22nd of May. Scholars say it is likely to just be his working translation and teaching notes, unlikely to rival Heaney's efforts. I think everyone interested will want to see it though. Myself included. [1]
Sure, but perhaps the development of the Scandinavian languages would be closer to the most likely outcome (speculation), with their general European influences, rather than the wider, and better preserved Nordic variants.
There's a brief comparison of Old Norse and Old English in the blog post mentioned, if interested. They were very similar, almost mutually intelligible, and so only major outside influences would have caused their divergence (as has happened). Without those influences, though, who knows, maybe Icelanders and the Germanic-British could still converse in their own tongues.
It's pretty amazing how either conquests or preferences of the aristocracy shaped languages. Being a fluent Russian speaker, I had a chance to interact with a person from Serbia without a translator, who did not speak Russian.
The experience was eye opening in how languages evolved. Though the two started from a common ancestor language, Russian had become extremely "polluted" (using the term loosely) with foreign words for the most basic things. For example the word for Army is now derived from Army, whereas Serbian is using the word "wojsko" (not sure of actual spelling, transliterating), which is very close to what I would consider old Russian or proto-Slavic.
On how words are voiced in modern English, and the contrast with just a few centuries ago, I like this short clip (around 10 minutes) on Shakespeare in 'Original Pronunciation' (and how many of his puns are missed today): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s
Interesting example. In Bulgarian, both войска̀ and а̀рмия * mean the exact same thing and you can use whichever you like. I guess it would sound weird if you were to speak about войнѝци in an а̀рмия or армѐйци in a войска̀.
Computer jargon is always interesting to observe, too. "Computer" is simply transliterated "компютър" - because изчислителна машина (calculating machine) is just so unwieldy, while keyboard and mouse are translated to клавиатура and мишка. E-mail seems to have lost its e- prefix and these days is either "мейл" (transliterated) or "поща" (translated) and I don't notice a specific trend one way or the other. Upload and download tend to be translated - качвам (put up, make higher) and свалям (put down, make lower), rather than transliterated - ъплоуд and даунлоуд. I think part of the reason is that words starting with ъ tend to sound ugly, plus the оу combination isn't something usual. Internet is just интернет or less usually мрежата (the net).
* graves added to show pronunciation, we don't write where the stress falls in a word
My family jokingly uses дупло to refer to email; it's a joke about leaving a letter in a hollow tree for another person to come and look for. I wonder how many other people use what's basically a private dialect to refer to new technology and borrow-words.
I can't help but be reminded of how in "War and Peace", almost all aristocratic characters (which is nearly everyone in the book) speaks French most of the time.
That, and invasions. Quite substantial parts of Europe have spent hundreds of years under rulers from a country with a different language, who'd often mean aristocrats and bureaucrats and military with a different language.
English is the prime example of the effects of this, with it's French/Germanic split (French from the Norman aristocracy).
The French may have originally started to trickle in to English from Norman French, but Norman French and Central French differ greatly and most of the Central French in English actually came much later due to French being a prestige language with-in Europe. The Latin and Greek also came through a similar mechanism, though more because they were scholarly. The idea that Norman French is the source of all English French loans is pretty easy to prove with comparison - Warranty vs Guarantee, liquor vs liqueur, hostel vs hotel, castle vs chateau, catch vs chase, warden vs guardian. Some could equally have come from earlier borrowings (e.g. hostel vs hotel), but the same happens when you compare any two dialects of the same root language (i.e. Norse and Old-English dialects), so nothing is 100%.
You're of course right - I'd entirely forgotten about the later wave of French influence.
Of course that also to a large extent spread via the upper classes first and foremost..
There's a saying I first heard about Danish - a bastardisation of a quote often misattributed to Charles V - about how aristocrats would read Latin in books or use it at court, speak French to the ladies, German to his dog, and would only speak Danish to servants.
The exact set of languages (and animals...) differ in different versions of the saying, but generally it puts Spanish, Italian or Latin at the "top", then French, German and sometimes finally a local language.
In french there is a common pattern where words lost an "s" while a vowel gained a circumflex. i.e. hospital -> hôpital, forest -> forêt, etc. I'm guessing hostel -> hôtel is another example of that pattern.
I wonder why 5th century invaders (Anglo-Saxons) are considered native while 11th century invaders (Normans) are not.
Nor for that mater are 1st century invaders (Romans)
Indeed, if Normans are considered an intrusion into a formerly pure Britain, one would think that the Doomsday book would be the considered the beginning of illegitimacy rather than the other way around.
Depends on who you ask. I doubt that the Scots or the Welsh or even the Cornish would consider the Anglo-Saxons to be the 'natives'. Fortunately hardly anyone in Britain actually thinks in terms of racial or ethnic purity.
There definitely is a sense in which French and Latinate words are considered more upper-class, clever, fancy or polite - my favourite example is how referring to someone as 'fat' is considered rude whereas 'obese' is not, with the only difference being that one word is Germanic and the other Latinate.
Spot on. Only the BNP and UKIP are fascinated by ethnic purity and luckily they have a limited number of uneducated bigoted followers.
There was an interesting DNA study that I read on the BBC website some time ago about the Welsh (Celts of Breten) being 'true Britons' [1]
The Celts of Breten are the usually named as the true 'indigenous' Britons [2], but you wouldn't be able to find a 'pure' one if you tried. But the origins of the Celts are also suspected to be of mainland European descent as well. [3][4][5]
The real true Britons, who more than likely crossed the land bridge during the last ice age left no trace of themselves [6].
After the Celts the Saxons, Jutes, Angles, Danes, Romans and Normans were all additions to the melting pot. More recently, immigration after the WWII of workers from ex-Empire countries (now nearly all Commonwealth) have added to that vibrant mix.
1000 years later and our DNA is a good healthy mix. I think that was nature's design in the first place right?
One of our neighbours supports the BNP. Given that both my ex and I are immigrants, and she is black, this has given rise to some amusing conversations now and again.
When the subject of repatriation came up (for people not familiar with British politics, the BNP wants to repatriate anyone that's not of white-British descent), my ex immediately asked "so you will go back to Germany and give England back to the Welsh?" (aiming to make a point rather than accuracy)
But somehow, of course, they wanted to draw the timeline on how long your family needed to have been in Britain just far enough back to ensure there'd be no brown-skinned people.
(My impression is that they're not really all that racist when actually pressed for details; they've just been talked into believing in some mysterious group of "others" that steal their jobs and take their women, but somehow whoever they get to know cease to be part of this "others", regardless of race - they actually have quite a few friends that are both immigrants and black, asian etc.)
> somehow whoever they get to know cease to be part of this "others", regardless of race
I think you are spot on here. There is this notion that "other" people are causing Britain's problems (this applies in any other country). It gives them someone to blame.
In fact politicians are happy to seed these kinds of blame shifting, because more than often the country is screwed because of their policies. Furthermore, the country is screwed because as a collective, we've let our country and the system fester and rot.
Hence, we blame others rather than looking inwardly. On a more micro level we can see this kind of blame culture in our development teams, or even with ourselves when we suffer poor health.
We need to care for our system together. One of the reasons I dislike politics is that it is divisive and blame focused.
I grew up in London and I'm of very mixed descent (mother- English, Irish and Scottish, father- African-American and Cherokee Indian). One of my best friends was from Scotland and due to his parents was extremely racist, but half of his friends were black.
The best sentences he ever came out with when we were discussing his racism were these two gems: he hated darkies because they took all the jobs, and he hated darkies because they didn't work and claimed the dole (welfare). When we pointed out this paradox he was at a loss for words.
There is no real logic behind racism, just a need for blame outside of yourself.
There was a rather splendid Time Team special a while back where they mentioned that the British Isles had seen something like seven completely separate waves of human colonization - i.e. multiple times people have come here, eventually to be wiped out or leave only for people to try again and again.
Same happens in italian where English words are used to sound fancy and hide behind technicisms. Sometimes it gets funny because you end up with words like "devoluzione" coming from english "devolution" (which in turn comes from latin) replacing the italian "decentramento".
"obese" doesn't sound less rude per-se because it's latinate, but because, being latinate, it became a technical term and thus can be used to describe something with more distance, and apparent objectivity.
> Fortunately hardly anyone in Britain actually thinks in terms of racial or ethnic purity.
That's why Robin Hood, with its tales of darstardly French and stalwart Anglo-Saxon Englishmen has survived hundreds of years. Because no-one in England thinks about racial or ethnic purity.
Amusingly, for King Arthur the "stalwart Anglo-Saxon(s)" were the invading enemies - and yes he probably is mostly fictional but things like the Y Gododdin do refer to battles by the natives against the Angles.
[I love mentioning the Y Gododdin as I can see Edinburgh Castle out the window as I write this].
Indeed. I very much enjoy Bernard Cornwell's take on the Arthurian mythos, where he tries to strip out a lot of the later additions to the myth and tell the stories as the struggle of the post-Roman Britons to retain their kingdoms in the face of the Germanic invasions.
Neither the Romans nor the Normans overrun/outnumbered the population. That is the main reason. The Angles, Saxons, Jutes and so on, plus the Vikings in the North East, did. England was fairly unified by the time the Normans invaded - and had a well established culture.
The Normans didn't really bring anything that improved the way England was being managed. In many ways, they pushed the country back by removing the native administration and pushing a different model.
The Romans got up and left the Britons to it after Rome started to fail. Neither really did more than influence the direction of the country.
The Germanic people overtook and obliterated the native culture in an almost genocidal way. They did re-base everything.
There's pretty good evidence that there were subtantial Saxon and Frisian settlements in Britain before the Hengist & Horsa incident. The old idea that the Saxon shore was actually an "anti-Saxon shore" still has some adherents, but to say that it is being reconsidered is something of an understatement. And Bede's account (and similar stories of the era) fail to explain why Old English had a much closer resemblance to Old Frisian than it did to Old Saxon, or why Celtic monuments disappeared from the southeast of England long before the invasion was supposed to have occurred. Yes, the Germanic peoples pretty much displaced the Celtic outside of Wales, Cornwall and the north of Scotland, but the story as most of us learned it seems to be horribly oversimplified and "heroed up" (with the Frisians largely edited out by Saxon-descended writers).
I've been so happy to submit this! I read all the comments and learned a lot of stuff. Thanks to all commentators thus.
A very similar situation can be observed in Turkish: Turks went to Europe and Middle East in 4th century, the ones that went to Europe eventually died, and the ones that went to Middle East and formed empires, including the rather long lived and glorious Ottoman Empire. While they were busy becoming more Muslim and more Arabic, learning fancy Arabic and Persian words, borrowing their alphabet and elevating this new Ottoman language to be the language of the palace, and the language of art, whereas the public spoke their own languages (lots of ethnicities were within the umbrella of Ottomans); Renaissance and The French Revolution happened, which eventually got Ottomans to love and behold Europe, mainly France, and borrow their words and lifestyle. In 19th century, Ottoman language was such a travesty, the first lessons of an under-graduate History course in Turkey now teaches the language, albeit Turkey directly descended from Ottomans not even a century ago. Together with the Kemalist revolution did start a movement of linguistic purism, along which the Turkish language was greatly stripped from what made it Ottoman, and the result was an easy-to-learn, simple and consistent language.
Still, though, it'd bear the same effect with “Uncleftish Beholding” to the average Turkishman, a text where only Turkic-rooted words were used, as still there are lots of words in the language that come from Arabic, French, English and Latin. Also, it'd be a bother for the average Turkishman to communicate with a Middle-Asian Turk of modern times, language of whom is closer to pre-Islam Turkic languages.
It is fun to play games with language, watch it grow and find out about how it came to be the language it is today.
"Rest" is used to mean "remainder" is German as well. It was quite a surprise in class to read the line "Wo ist der Rest?" ... and find out it was legit German.
Latin was used in England prior to the arrival of the Normans; the Roman invasion, pre-German Celtic Christianity, and then the reconversion to Catholicism.
This was thoroughly entertaining, recognizing each word's meaning is like solving a small puzzle. Like recognizing English words written in katakana. Some words were taken directly from German, like waterstuff (== Wasserstoff), sourstuff (== Sauerstoff). Bernstone for amber/ēlektron is my favorite.
I'm reminded of the first time I read novels like A Clockwork Orange, or Greg Bear's Queen of Angels, where the fictional world's slang is used, but not explained.
The youth slang in Clockwork Orange is derived from Russian. I always assumed that, the book having been written during the Cold War, this was the obvious 'alternative vision' to our own world were American cultural influence predominates amongst the young.
As a Greek, I always admired Zolota's speeches, which are the exercise in reverse.
Speeches
Two of his speeches in English are considered to be historic and notable because they contained mainly terms of Greek origin. Here are the texts:
1957
I always wished to address this Assembly in Greek, but realized that it would have been indeed "Greek" to all present in this room. I found out, however, that I could make my address in Greek which would still be English to everybody. With your permission, Mr. Chairman, l shall do it now, using with the exception of articles and prepositions, only Greek words.
Kyrie, I eulogize the archons of the Panethnic Numismatic Thesaurus and the Ecumenical Trapeza for the orthodoxy of their axioms, methods and policies, although there is an episode of cacophony of the Trapeza with Hellas. With enthusiasm we dialogue and synagonize at the synods of our didymous organizations in which polymorphous economic ideas and dogmas are analyzed and synthesized. Our critical problems such as the numismatic plethora generate some agony and melancholy. This phenomenon is characteristic of our epoch. But, to my thesis, we have the dynamism to program therapeutic practices as a prophylaxis from chaos and catastrophe. In parallel, a Panethnic unhypocritical economic synergy and harmonization in a democratic climate is basic. I apologize for my eccentric monologue. I emphasize my euharistia to you, Kyrie to the eugenic and generous American Ethnos and to the organizers and protagonists of his Amphictyony and the gastronomic symposia.
1959[edit]
Kyrie, it is Zeus' anathema on our epoch for the dynamism of our economies and the heresy of our economic methods and policies that we should agonize the Scylla of numismatic plethora and the Charybdis of economic anaemia. It is not my idiosyncrasy to be ironic or sarcastic, but my diagnosis would be that politicians are rather cryptoplethorists. Although they emphatically stigmatize numismatic plethora, they energize it through their tactics and practices. Our policies have to be based more on economic and less on political criteria. Our gnomon has to be a metron between political, strategic and philanthropic scopes. Political magic has always been anti-economic. In an epoch characterized by monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, monopolistic antagonism and polymorphous inelasticities, our policies have to be more orthological. But this should not be metamorphosed into plethorophobia, which is endemic among academic economists. Numismatic symmetry should not hyper-antagonize economic acme. A greater harmonization between the practices of the economic and numismatic archons is basic. Parallel to this, we have to synchronize and harmonize more and more our economic and numismatic policies panethnically. These scopes are more practicable now, when the prognostics of the political and economic barometer are halcyonic. The history of our didymus organizations in this sphere has been didactic and their gnostic practices will always be a tonic to the polyonymous and idiomorphous ethnical economies. The genesis of the programmed organization will dynamize these policies. Therefore, I sympathize, although not without criticism on one or two themes, with the apostles and the hierarchy of our organs in their zeal to program orthodox economic and numismatic policies, although I have some logomachy with them. I apologize for having tyrannized you with my Hellenic phraseology. In my epilogue, I emphasize my eulogy to the philoxenous autochthons of this cosmopolitan metropolis and my encomium to you, Kyrie, and the stenographers.
The Avalon movie theater in NW Washington, DC, has a "Panorama of Greek Cinema", which has always amused me because the only capitalized word that does not derive from Greek is "Greek".
I'd love to have a way to do this automatically with my text .. anyone know of a good way to do this, maybe there are some already-established dictionaries which remove the non-Germanic words out there, somehow?
This is interesting, I wrote a few samples describing my life and things I own and it suggested no words. Then I pretended that I was starting a school writing, and it found many.
That's why, even today, a police officer might say in court, "I observed the individual in the vicinity of the canine" whereas among family the officer might be much more likely to say, "I saw the man near the dog."
The first sentence is full of French. The second, Anglo-Saxon.
It's the same reason we eat beef and pork, but raise cows and pigs. The people eating the meat were upper class and thus used the French-derived words; the people taking care of the animals used Anglo-Saxon.