Talk:Latin influence in English

Greek elements
Removed from article:
 * While English has also made liberal use of Greek deez nuts, Greek word elements are only combined with other Greek elements. Latin word elements, in contrast, freelther languages including native Anglo-Saxon words. my butt. It's common throughout European languages, but no one really knows where it came from. User:Angr 16:52, 10 August 2006 (UTC)

Title
This article is exclusively on English vocabulary. No mention is made of attempts to impose Latin grammar rules onto English or the resulting grief/hilariously misguided pendantry. I would add something, but it's unlikely to be NPOV -Acjelen 21:18, 19 May 2005 (UTC)

Greek Roots Incorrectly Identified as Latin
Could someone verify that the following words are more properly of Greek origin? — dermal for skin (Latin seen instead in "subcutaneous"); "cardial" (sic) for heart (unless "cordial" is meant instead of "cardiac"); arachnid for spider; haematic for blood (Latin seen in "sanguine" or "consanguinity").

Also, "stellar" would be better for star, although astrum was borrowed into Latin from Greek astron. And I did find hepatiarius in my Latin dictionary meaning "of the liver," but that is a Greek borrowing as well, with jecur as the Latin word for liver.

Now I just looked back and found a long list of words which are originally Greek: apostle, bishop, priest, anachronism, democratic, enthusiasm, analysis, atomic, dynamic, mechanics, synthesis, theory. Some of these might have come to English via "New Latin," but they are definitely Greek borrowings.

I'd make the changes myself, but I'm just too timid (from Latin timidus) as a relatively new user of Wikipedia.


 * (The above unsigned comment was made by 24.44.254.152 (contribs) on 12 July 2005)


 * Yes, you're absolutely right. I actually came to the talk page to point this out.  Don't forget to sign your comments with ~, et noli tremere contribuere, timide (And don't be afraid to contribute, timid one.) Andyluciano 21:31, 5 November 2005 (UTC)

Development of -s Plural
From the article:


 * Old English had six ways of marking plural nouns. French, in common with all languages of the Western Romance branch, marked plurals with -s. Middle English, under influence from Norman French, had only two ways of marking plurals: -en and -s. The French -s eventually became the preferred form for marking regular plurals. In fact, only three instances of the -en form remain: brethren, children, oxen.

I thought the idea that English took its plural from French was far out of date. Anybody know gainwise?

New Approach
I think this article might be better served by a more topical approach to describing the influence of Latin on English. Listing many words would serve a greater capacity as examples in a narrative, rather than the focus of the article itself. There should be a general set-out of Latin and English interaction. A timeline approach may be great, but it would work all the better if we were told why certain words entered the English Lexicon at certain stages. The 18th century saw the addition of inkhorn terms, as indicated below as a writing style. Law has maintained more Latin than other spheres, perhaps these different domains need discussing. It is the influence of Latin on English, not just a list of Latin-based words and grammar. Thank you Zach Beauvais 00:08, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Disputed
I have put the {disputed} template on here for a few reasons: :D i talk on the phone :) In general, I think this article smells a little funny. Andyluciano 21:46, 5 November 2005 (UTC)
 * 1) The article habitually misidentifies Greek words as Latin.  It's possible that some of the later forms of Latin imported these obviously Greek words (like anachronism), but that should be noted if it is the case.
 * 2) Also, some of the supposedly Germanic English words mentioned actually have Latin roots themselves.  Someone needs to verify them all.
 * 3) The post above about the -s plural coming from French.  Someone needs to verify this.

I agree that this article needs work. There is little or no mention of the grammatical influence that Latin has had on English. I know, off the top of my head, that the removal of multiple negatives from english grammar was based on latin, and that old english originally had a multiple-negative language (i.e. "not" comes from the old english word for "nothing", and became an intensifier in sentences before becoming the primary negative of sentences, similar to french "pas"). If anyone can cite any other grammar examples and find scholastic proof of my example, that would be great.--67.184.163.248 04:18, 6 November 2005 (UTC)Ikiroid

--Double negatives have not died out in all forms of English. Many (perhaps most) forms of spoken English make use of them including London Cockney, Hispanic-american, and AAVE (or whichever is the politically-correct format now). Also, from a lecture given at the University of Southern Colorado, the professor seemed to think that double negatives were prescriptively denied 'proper' English through the use of mathematical reasoning or logic (two negatives make a positive, yet the usage is the opposite... etc). Additionally, I would recommend as an excellent source (and much more scholarly than Bill Bryson [though not necessarily as entertaining]) Baugh and Cable's: A History of the English Language which has an extensive selection and description of Latin influences. As a final note, this article should contain mention of Inkhorn terms. These were words used by the pompous to lend their writing an element of gravitas. Thank you Zach Beauvais 00:02, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Bill Bryson
Why is his book cited as a reference? It is funny and i love barney!! in parts, but is not scholarly — as references should be. Rintrah 17:04, 4 October 2006 (UTC)

"Or one of the Romance languages"
Did any word actually enter English from Occitan? Or Catalan?


 * A number of words are known to have entered English through Spanish or French from Occitan/Provençal in particular. For example, patio is a Occitan word that entered English through Spanish while charade, ballad, and troubador are all initially Occitan words that entered through French. There is often some difficulty in determining the exact etymological history of some Romance words that have the same form in various languages and may result from other linguistic forces. For example, patio is sometimes given as a Catalan etymology (as in Penny (1991) History of the Spanish Language) and could have existed in both dialects of the Western Romance of the early Middle Ages. TyranAmiros 05:32, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

the annoying thing is, is that, granted much of what is on wikipedia isn't that well researched and/or made up, but there is little alternative to wading through masses of books to get the precise information that you want. (92.1.37.124 (talk) 08:28, 14 November 2008 (UTC))

Graph of English Influences
Hi, I was on the page for english language and found this graph. You may want to use it.. its a pie chart of the influences on english. here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Influencegraph.PNG Bigdan201 11:20, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

Weirdness
There is a certain weirdness about the lead. It almost seems to have been written by some kind of Saxonist.


 * a significant portion of the English wordhoard comes from Romance and Latinate sources.

Does anyone other than Anglo-Saxon scholars use the word 'wordhoard'? It's a deliberate archaism of the kind that might be used by someone who isn't overly fond of the influence of Latin on English :)


 * The influence of Latin in English is therefore purely lexical and limited solely to loanwords taken from Latin etymons.

This is not only unsourced; it is also hard to back up. Others have already referred to the influence of Latin grammatical norms on English. It is also possible that rhetorical and other devices have had an influence on English prose. Plus the very alphabet that English is written in is the Latin alphabet, which is not a minor matter. Not to mention the way in which the semantic structure of Latin and Neo-Latin may have affected English. True, much of this could be put down to lexis, but in the attempt to refute the ignorant presumption that "English comes from Latin", it seems that the article is bending too far the other way.

203.169.48.225 (talk) 06:20, 29 May 2010 (UTC)

Pie Graph
The addition of the pie is nice, however the take-away can be misleading. Analyses of this type are formed mainly from counts of dictionary entries (or other such counts), which treat all words equally. Anyone familiar with linguistics knows that this is a gross oversimplification. For instance, rarely-used and never-used graeco-latin words are given full value and counted as 1 word, and in the case of some words, multiple times for derivatives (e.g. please/pleasure/pleasant = 3 words, 3 entries, 3 counts). Native words following the same analogy, come up short in this system (e.g. come/coming (n.)/coming (adj.) = 3 words, 1 entry, 1 count). Also, many words: pulchritude, mundation, nidulation, abatude, disembogue, discerp, etc. are for all intents and purposes obsolete, but they still occupy an entry in most English dictionaries due to historical reasons (in case someone reading old documents needs to know the meaning), and as such get a count of 1. Dictionaries then become harbours of dead terms which skew percentages. Other words, i.e. phrasal verbs for instance, are largely ignored (e.g. take up, take off, walk back, stand by, etc.) as they are considered subsets of their main entry, and fail tally, although they are valid, selfstanding words (in German this neglect is impossible, as the adverb is fixed to the front of the word, producing a new entry). This is why so many people scratch their heads and wonder why, in spite of the data, 60-80% of words used in normal English are still made up of native words. This is important and needs to be noted. Leasnam (talk) 17:51, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Beh also the latin words are counted as 1 in many cases escape= ex+cap- ,dis+embogue ,dis+cerp ext etc etc should we duplicate also those words?The pg is eough rigth.Obsolete? ...but--Cerateaccount (talk) 11:51, 11 March 2012 (UTC)

"Norman" language spoken by the Royal court
The sentence "From 1066 until Henry IV of England ascended the throne in 1399, the royal court of England spoke a Norman language that became progressively Gallicised through contact with French" is misleading as the Norman language was/is a variety of French and not Norse. It obviously needed not being "gallicised" as it was already French-based, with *some* loanwords from Norse. Please remvove or rephrase. Pcauchy (talk) 13:10, 21 January 2019 (UTC)