Re: Roots of English (Was: Intro and other)
| From: | Thomas R. Wier <trwier@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, January 1, 2002, 8:43 |
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Quoting Michael Poxon <m.poxon@...>:
> Frisian didn't come to England. Far as I know, it's still in Fris. :-) -
> but both Frisian and Anglo-Saxon (the ancestor of English) come from the
> same Germanic subgroup, so that's where the closeness derives from.
It's true that Frisian didn't come to England along with Hengist
and Horsa, but that's because Frisian per se didn't exist then
as a distinct language. For the purposes of communication, the
people who came to England were speakers of Frisian, and the people
in Frisia were English speakers. Neither was a language at that
time.
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Thomas Wier <trwier@...> <http://home.uchicago.edu/~trwier>
"...koruphàs hetéras hetére:isi prosápto:n /
Dept. of Linguistics mú:tho:n mè: teléein atrapòn mían..."
University of Chicago "To join together diverse peaks of thought /
1010 E. 59th Street and not complete one road that has no turn"
Chicago, IL 60637 Empedocles, _On Nature_, on speculative thinkers