Dante's Peek

https://www.etymonline.com/columns/post/dante%27s-peek

by pcmaffey • 6 years ago

51 27 6 years ago

phaemon2• 6 years ago

Our English masks this because anciently it seems never to have had such a high-low division

What an odd assertion. There's a massive difference between "proper English" and how it's commonly spoken. Reading something like Trainspotting makes that evidently clear if you happen not to chat with ordinary people regularly.

throwaway8943454• 6 years ago

I thought this strange as well. It makes me wonder if "proper English" is much closer to our various dialects than in these other high/low language pairs.

SideburnsOfDoom4• 6 years ago

English definitely has two registers, that you might find in use in the same sentence. This becomes clear if you e.g. translate a scientific text into Dutch or German.

"Carbon" becomes "Kohlenstoff", and "metabolism" becomes "Stoffwechsel" in German.

These might be literally translated back as "Coal-stuff" and "stuff-change" but that is an unfamiliar way to say it in English because it remains in the lower register, not derived academically from old Latin and Greek.

Sniffnoy• 6 years ago

I think you've missed the word "anciently" in that sentence. He's talking about pre-modern English.

phaemon2• 6 years ago

Well, they say "Our English masks this", which suggests they're talking about contemporary English and offering the lack of past division as an explanation for a lack of current division. I don't buy it. In fact, prior to broadcasting, the differences were greater I reckon.

ivanbakel2• 6 years ago

"Proper English" i.e. Received Pronunciation is not a high dialect. It was not used in court or government before the development of modern English some 700 years ago. Before then, that role was filled by French, thanks to the Norman conquest - so the need for a high-low distinction never developed in English to its typical extent.

In general, English in England does not display the variety of dialect found in mainland Europe or elsewhere in the world. Despite a variety of accent, it is overwhelmingly homogeneous in grammar and vocabulary (outside of slang).

There is no equivalent for English to the difference between Hoch- and Plattdeutsch, or between Tuscan Italian and its other variants - in both of these cases, the overwhelming part of the population learns both their local low dialect and the high dialect as distinct "languages".

prox• 6 years ago

What is interesting though is that middle and old-english sound a lot more similar to German / Saxon.

Things like good morning is very similar in german, dutch and Scandinavian languages.

michael2l• 6 years ago

Is it just me or does the article seem to end rather abruptly as if much more was intended and perhaps accidentally left off or just published before completion?

namenotrequired• 6 years ago

I was wondering if I missed some "next page" button somewhere

dredmorbius2• 6 years ago

Aside: The Online Etymological Dictionary, to which this blog is attached, is one of the rare true gems of the Internet, and harkens back to the Early Web in both time and spirit.

It's a tool I make heavy use of --- the Mastodon toots hashtagged #OccasionalEtymology are only a very small fraction of these (https://toot.cat/@dredmorbius/tagged/occasionaletymology https://mastodon.cloud/@dredmorbius/tagged/occasionaletymolo...)

And it's mostly a labour of love by Douglas Harper. Yes, there are some ads, but the Paypal, Patreon, and Swag links do help out. And if you can contribute to something on the Internet that Does Not Completely Suck, it would be a Good Thing.

https://www.etymonline.com

pcmaffey• 6 years ago

Absolutely. It’s one of those rare sites that I still enjoy “wandering around” on. It’s an archeological park of language and tattered remnants of stories.

fenomas• 6 years ago

Agreed, I love the site greatly as well. As a data point though, the one time I found an error there I mailed the maintainer a fairly detailed writeup with sources, but I never heard back and the entry never changed.

(The error was for "anime", which etymonline has being derived from French, but which Japanese sources widely agree is just an abbreviation of "animation".)

dredmorbius2• 6 years ago

I've actually had a couple of email exchanges with Doug. Mail might have been caught in a spamfilter or just buried.

golergka• 6 years ago

he might have added Hebrew and Yiddish

Unlike all other examples, these languages are not that close; it would have been Yiddish and German, or Ladino and Italian: both Yiddish and Ladino are basically German and Italian, respectively, only written down with Hebrew characters, with some words from it.

A better example would be Modern Hebrew and Torah Hebrew.

yorwba• 6 years ago

Yiddish and Ladino are basically German and Italian, respectively, only written down with Hebrew characters, with some words from it.

Yiddish is basically German in the same way that Dutch is basically German: it's often possible to directly translate a word with some simple letter substitutions, but the choice of different letters in each language's orthography reflects an underlying difference in pronunciation.

E.g. אוי וויי is often transliterated as "oy vey" while the corresponding Standard German pronunciation would be "au weh". If you ignore the usual Hebrew letter values and pretend that it's actually an unorthodox orthography for Standard German (א glottal stop, וי au, וו w, יי eh), I've found written Yiddish quite easy to get used to as a native German speaker, but understanding it spoken aloud is much more difficult.

agustif• 6 years ago

As a native bilingual of Catalan/Spanish, who speaks some English and French, it's pretty awesome how much stuff is the same in all languages.

I love etymology and usually all the higher-language words come just from latin and are the same in all of them.

English might not sound frenchy, but it has a lot of words coming from it, (-ation, -tion, -ssion, -able, -isme, -if/-ive

YeGoblynQueenne• 6 years ago

> The fuel that took fire from the spark of insight in William Jones's astonishing paragraph had been gathered over generations, since about 1500, by scattered minds in Europe and South Asia.

"William Jones's astonishing paragraph" must be the following:

The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jones_(philologist)#Sc...

Wikipedia says its "often cited as the beginning of comparative linguistics and Indo-European studies".

Dante's Peek

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