Klarinet Archive - Posting 000273.txt from 2005/09

From: "Lelia Loban" <lelialoban@-----.net>
Subj: [kl] Pinky again
Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2005 12:32:31 -0400


Catching up after a few days away for a family wedding....

Ormondtoby Montoya wrote:
> .....none of which eliminates the apparent fact that "finger" derives
> to some extent from the German "five", and "little five" therefore
> relates to "little finger", even if the are several steps between
> "five" and "pinkie".

Joseph Wakeling wrote,
>Yeah, but Dutch is basically a Germanic language.
>Or rather Dutch, German, English, Danish, Swedish,
>Norwegian and others all descend from the same origins,
>though some (particularly English) have significant
>influence from other languages.

In the case of English, it's more than an influence. According to my
college English and philology texts from the days of the dinosaurs (well,
forty years ago), about half of the core English vocabulary derives from
Old French, a Latin-descended Romance language, thanks to William the
Conqueror and his successful 11th century Norman conquest. Much of the rest
of the (earlier) English core vocabulary came from Anglo-Saxon (aka OE, AS
or Old English), which descended through the Celts from Old Norse and Old
High German (two non-Romance languages that were, as you say, related).

I suspect that the percentage of words derived from French may have gone
down, because I don't think those mid-20th century textbooks had caught up
with 20th century addition of a significant number of new words,
particularly words related to technical, scientific and industrial trades,
from the much larger resource of languages worldwide. The Oxford English
Dictionary is still catching up with those recent additions; and like any
living language, English continues to produce neologisms, first considered
regionalisms or slang, that may move into general vocabulary. For
instance, my husband, who collects dictionaries, noticed that the 1982
edition of the American Heritage Dictionary lists "snafu" as slang, while
the current edition of the same dictionary explains the acronym's origin
but no longer calls "snafu" slang.

Lelia Loban

------------------------------

Date: Mon, 26 Sep 2005 11:47:58 EDT
To: klarinet@-----.org
From: Shadow Cat <666felines-rule.org>
Subject: Re: [kl] Pinky again
Message-ID: <no-dogs-allowed@-----.org>

I'm making my stupid pet human type this. English speakers should unlearn
their stupid French and German and Anglo-Whatsit (I mean, really, who cares
where all that noise came from?) and use and understand FCS (Feline Common
Speech) instead. It's a much more cultivated language and certainly more
musical. If you ape-related primates weren't so linguistically backward
and incompetent, you'd put "screech-stick" in your monkey-speech
dictionary, too. And Lelia's not allowed to go away for the weekend. My
pet humans were both unfaithful to me.

When they dragged themselves home last night, I smelled dog all over them.
Lelia absolutely reeked of dog. She put those clothes in the dirty clothes
bag when she should have burned them. She played with the dog, petted the
dog and even walked the dog. Not just any dog, either: a nasty little rat
terrier who left coded messages all over a fire hydrant and various other
message-drops in which he proclaimed, to any dog who passed by (but also to
certain spies the dogs never see, from whom I get information dogs never
suspect), that this strange person on the end of his leash was the
dog-napper, and that he would like to bite her except his master said not
to, and she was a cat-loving varmint, and if he caught her "smelly, dirty"
cat, he would grab the cat (ME!) by the neck and shake her and break her
neck. That's what the dog said, if you can call barking and peeing a
language, with three dribbles here and five dribbles there, all over a
large neighborhood. And he said he would love to howl along with a
screech-stick, even if the dog-napper played it. Well, that just tells you
everything you need to know about a filthy rat-terrier who probably rolls
in poop and carrion every chance he gets and has fleas, worms and ticks to
go with that truly gross body odor, sssssssssso there. Ffffft!

Ssssst,
Shadow Cat

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