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Archiver > GEN-MEDIEVAL > 1999-05 > 0928127428


From: "Stewart Baldwin" <>
Subject: Re: Inbreeding
Date: Mon, 31 May 1999 00:10:28 -0500


John Steele Gordon wrote in message
<>...

[snip]

>...English, which has the oldest written literature of any
>post-classical European language, simply vanished as a written
language
>after the Norman Conquest in 1066.

Are you forgetting the Irish? (Many do.)

And what about the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, some versions of which were
being updated on a fairly continuous basis until the middle of the
twelfth century?

>Gone were such grammatical baggage as gender, agreement between nouns
>and adjectives, multiple declensions of nouns and conjugations of
verbs,
>strict word order, and almost all those inflections which are the
bane
>of English-speaking school children trying to learn Germanic and
Romance
>languages. English, heaven knows, has its difficulties for foreigners
>trying to learn it, but grammar isn't one of them. (The biggest
problem
>for foreigners is probably the huge everyday vocabulary of English.)

What about the often illogical spelling vs. pronunciation that Englash
has? I imagine that people who are trying to learn English are not
very fond of that particular feature.

Stewart Baldwin

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