yick wrote: ↑October 12th, 2021, 8:57 pm
MrMan wrote: ↑October 12th, 2021, 6:41 pm
Yick,
I have studied Linguistics, too, and one of my degrees is in it, but I took other classes and not History of the English Language.
One of your degrees is linguistics but cannot differentiate a loan word from a derivative word? OK then
That sounds more like lexicography, which overlaps somewhat with linguistics but wasn't my area of study. It is possible your courses focused on this.
I don't remember the topic being discussed. It might have been in the intro class. I took a number of classes under a Proto-IndoEuropean expert who would derive words during lectures from dead languages and the reconstructed PIE protolanguage. The issue we were discussing was whether a large number of words came in through Latin rather than French. I pointed to a couple of sources that claimed this was the case. I don't care to put in the effort to verify these sources. You have made the claim that few words came in through Latin, and you haven't really shown any evidence for it.
I haven't sat down and studied all the etymologies into English from Latin, and whether they came into English from French. I usually look up a quick reference if I am interested. The one I looked up for 'intelligent' said it came from Latin and did not show it coming in from French. If you can show it came in through French and care to do so, knock yourself out.[/quote]
You're the one who was arguing the point that 'many' English words came directly from Latin - they didn't and you're wrong and now we all know you never studied the history of the English language you have learned something new.[/quote]I said I did not take the class on the topic. I did not say I knew nothing about the topic at all. I offered two sources that disagreed with you, btw. What have you posted?
The word 'intelligent' has it's roots in Latin but the word in English came via French (which came from the Latin word 'intellegens') - it didn't directly come from Latin - there is no way it could have came directly from Latin into English because when Latin speaking cultures (The Romans) ruled the British Isles the English language didn't exist! The French ruled England for 500 years and legal and the language of aristocracy was in French (or Anglo-Norman which was a dialect of French). The Magna Carta was in French.
Wikipedia says this under its entry for 'intelligence'.
The word intelligence derives from the Latin nouns intelligentia or intellēctus, which in turn stem from the verb intelligere, to comprehend or perceive. In the Middle Ages, the word intellectus became the scholarly technical term for understanding, and a translation for the Greek philosophical term nous. This term, however, was strongly linked to the metaphysical and cosmological theories of teleological scholasticism, including theories of the immortality of the soul, and the concept of the active intellect (also known as the active intelligence). This approach to the study of nature was strongly rejected by the early modern philosophers such as Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and David Hume, all of whom preferred "understanding" (in place of "intellectus" or "intelligence") in their English philosophical works.[3][4] Hobbes for example, in his Latin De Corpore, used "intellectus intelligit", translated in the English version as "the understanding understandeth", as a typical example of a logical absurdity.[5] "Intelligence" has therefore become less common in English language philosophy, but it has later been taken up (with the scholastic theories which it now implies) in more contemporary psychology.[6]
Of course, the word goes back to the 1400's, thought, so it could have come in through French, or it could have come in through the Latin academic use of the term described above.
You're the one who was arguing the point that 'many' English words came directly from Latin - they didn't and you're wrong and now we all know you never studied the history of the English language you have learned something new.
I did not take a course on the topic. I offered a source (a YouTube video, maybe not very 'academic') that claimed that a large percentage came in through Latin without going through French and a page that showed a number of rather important words for English claimed to have come in through French.
The word 'intelligent' has it's roots in Latin but the word in English came via French (which came from the Latin word 'intellegens') - it didn't directly come from Latin -
Maybe it did. If it is important to you, you could look up an etymology that shows that, maybe study Old or Middle French or whatever stage French was in when the loan word came into English. I'd imagine someone has done the research on this and might have written an academic paper on it. It could be impossible to know whether it came from French or Latin. The first use may have been around 1400, much later than the Norman conquest.
there is no way it could have came directly from Latin into English because when Latin speaking cultures (The Romans) ruled the British Isles the English language didn't exist!
How is that relevant? Old English existed when Bede wrote that 'book Latin' was one of the languages spoken in England. There were monks and priests that read and/or spoke Latin and later scholars in various disciplines used it.
The French ruled England for 500 years and legal and the language of aristocracy was in French (or Anglo-Norman which was a dialect of French). The Magna Carta was in French.
[/youtube]
How 'French' were the Normans? The use of French as the language of court doesn't prove there were no derivations directly from Latin.
100 words isn't 'significant' at all when an educated persons vocabulary is between 17-20000 words.
There is some basic vocabulary that are used quite frequently.
The earliest forms of the English language didn't precede French by all that much within the British Isles - probably 500 years, the earliest forms of English was as alien to the British Isles as French and Latin is. The native tongues of Britain are the Brythonic language group which exists today as Welsh (with Cornish and Manx making a revival, Cumbric is all but a dead language).
The Anglo-Saxons had not conquered before that point. Their language existed on the mainland before they conquered England, too. But this doesn't have much to do with how Latin words got into the English language.