John, (01)
We seem to be off into another rat-hole. (02)
What you think is significant about English right now was true of French 300
years ago and may be true of Chinese in 2050. It is all about language
evolution, which is the central theme. (03)
One point that I strongly disagree with: (04)
> But the impact of French caused English to lose the ability to form new words
> from native roots. Just look at the number of distinct morphemes in that
> German example:
>
> Leben-s-ver-sicher-ung-s-ge-sell-shaft-s-an-ge-stell-t-er
>
> In German and Anglo-Saxon, those little pieces can be combined to form
> new words. Russian and many other languages can also do that.
>
> English lost that ability. (05)
Yes, the French approach is the tour de la phrase -- you use adjectives/adverbs
and connect nouns with prepositions -- instead of concatenating nouns.
But, with respect to morphological additions/modifications to words that modify
their sense slightly, French, German, Russian and, yes, modern English all
still have it. (06)
Let us take your example:
Leben-s-ver-sicher-ung-s-ge-sell-shaft-s-an-ge-stell-t-er
is:
Life insurance company employee (07)
The noun phrase idea is the same in both languages; but German (and Russian)
omit the spaces, giving rise to "Marathonwords".
Now, let us look at the markers. (08)
The -s after Leben is the English 's -- the genitive form. In German it is
life's insurance, i.e., the insurance OF life (which would be the French form).
That we don't happen to use the 's in the noun phrase does not mean English
does not have and use the genitive marker. (09)
Ver-sicher-ung is in-sur(e)-ance, which is a morphological modification to
insure, which is itself a modification of 'sure'. In exactly the same way
'versichern' is to 'insure', and the 'ver', like 'in', is a prefix attached to
the adjective 'sicher' = 'sure'. In both languages the function of the prefix
is 'verbing' (per Calvin and Hobbes). In this case, we used a French prefix
(for the French 'sure'), but we still have words like 'be-friend', which uses a
Germanic prefix (for a Germanic noun), and the ability to construct others in
that way. Similarly, in this case, the -ance is the French 'nominalization'
("nouning") suffix, instead of the Germanic -ung, which we have in English as
-ing. I can tell you from recent experience that a good many active
participles in English have become -ing nouns with plurals, and there are more
in every edition of the OED/NODE. (This phenomenon makes part-of-speech
recognition harder: is 'parting' a verb form, an adjectival form, or a noun
form.) (010)
Ge-sell-schaft is part-n-er-ship in English -- an institution of persons who
'part-en' (take part, even though we haven't used that verb since Chaucer).
And we create words like intern-ship, which is a Latin noun with a Germanic
suffix. Selle is an obsolete word in German as well, but Gesellen, another
prefixing modification, are 'colleagues', i.e. con-league-s, another sequence
of French morphemes taken from the Latin and adopted into English. But it is
far from a dead practice in English to add con- (Latin 'with') to verbs and
nouns to connote groupings. (I'm not sure about 'com-pan-y'. I suspect its
origin may be 'with-bread-ie': people who share bread together, but the
original interpretation of 'companion' was a military unit drawn from a single
region/estate. In any case, they were joint-something-ies. Similar idea,
different base constructs.) (011)
An-ge-stell-t-er is literally 'in-stall-d-er' -- a person who is 'put in a
place' in an organization. The French origin of em-ploy-ee could be translated
in-use-d, or in-place-d, a participial adjective taken as a noun. ('ployer' is
about putting something into use, from which English has 'ploy' and 'ply' (as
in plying a trade).) The actual morphemes are different, but the parallel
structures are obvious. And we have coined similar terms, like 'installer' and
'mortgagee'. (012)
As we can see, rather than losing this technique for vocabulary extension to
the French influence, English simply gained the mechanisms of the second
language as well. So, we call it Parliament instead of Talkingness. So what?
We don't lack the means of coining 'cable man' or 'Internet' or 'markup' or
'cloud computing' or 'artificial intelligence', just because Billy the Bastard
smashed Harold the Oathbreaker at Hastings in 1066. (013)
Indo-European languages have evolved these more-or-less common techniques for
vocabulary extension that facilitate language evolution, and we all STILL use
them to do just that. (014)
-Ed (015)
But as Calvin said to Hobbes, "Verbing weirds
> language": http://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1993/01/25
> There are no ifs, ands, or buts about that point.
>
> > The evolution of all languages is very much tied up with the history
> > of the speakers and their institutions. We can argue about the
> > special cases, but the important thing is that we agree that the
> > history of the speakers does not stop, so the evolution does not stop,
> > and for that reason, no dictionary will be entirely stable for any length
>of
> time.
>
> I agree. But I still maintain that the French attempt to "control"
> their language was a mistake. It enables modern French speakers to read
> their classical literature more easily than modern English speakers read
> Shakespeare. But it restricted the flexibility of the French language to
>adapt
> to the future.
>
> John
>
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