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1) How did English became the most popular or official language of so many countries? (particularly the US. And I'm especially wondering why was English preferred on other languages.)
2) How come so many words in modern English are derived from French (also old French) and Latin, and so few from Old and Middle English? (you can answer this separately) ...I'm asking this because it strike me as odd, that a modern form of a language would derive most of its words from other languages.
3) How and why did the Americans adopted their own accent? and how come there are so many variations of American accent?
Enlighten me oh folks of infinite linguistic wisdom!
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Ackshly, many English words derive from Old English - a lot of our very basic words do. Hand, foot, mother, father, son, daughter, wife, man, life, bone, fire, lord, lady, good, evil, sun, moon, bird....the list goes on and on.
The incursion of French happened over several centuries, which explains why we have jaunty, gentle and genteel all from the French word "gentil" re-entering the language at several different times. The latest and largest incursion happened in 1066, when William of Normandy defeated Harold Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings and began a hostile takeover of England. I direct you to a lovely little passage in "Ivanhoe", where a swineherd and a jester are discussing language - or, more properly, why a bovine is a good Saxon cow ("cu") on the hoof, but Norman beef ("boeuf") on the table. Similarly the English pig becomes French pork and the English sheep, French mutton.
Perhaps someone else has some scholarly info on accents. Canajans have 'em too.
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The pronunciation of English has changed in both Britain and North America since the first English settlers arrived there. Hence different accents. Anywhere you get a language spoken in different areas which are not in close contact you're going to get different accents. Do you have regional accents of Hebrew in Israel yet? Even if you don't, I'm sure there were different regional accents in Biblical times. This site http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/aboutenglish/proportion?view=uk puts the proportion of present-day English vocabulary which derives from Old English and other Germanic languages as 25%. But these tend to be the most common words in the language. When the Norman French invaders foisted their language on us, we developed the habit of using French/Latin derivatives for more formal/learned/official contexts.
Bingley
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Speaking of which, how did most of these words came to be derived from both languages? Was there a council for "formation of sophisticated new English words through Latin and French"? And yes, I know that "many" English words are derived from Old/Middle English (particularly the basics), just not "most" words according to my sources (which is exemplified in the link Bingley posted)  Quote:
Do you have regional accents of Hebrew in Israel yet?
We do.
Quote:
Anywhere you get a language spoken in different areas which are not in close contact you're going to get different accents
I think I understand now.
Let the record state the first question is still unanswered. 
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> first question is still unanswered
perhaps because the original *settlers came from England?
formerly known as etaoin...
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So, the US, Canada, Australia, etc, were all overwhelmed by settlers from England that it became the official language of all of these countries?
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well, the sun never sets on the British Empire, as they used to say.
formerly known as etaoin...
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Quote:
So, the US, Canada, Australia, etc, were all overwhelmed by settlers from England that it became the official language of all of these countries?
Just So. That's our story and it's sticking to us. 
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The world is slowly beginning to make more sense...
Thanks!
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By coincidence, I am reading a book by an Israeli linguist, Ghil'ad Zuckermann called Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Israeli Hebrew. He covers the various ways that Israelis have coped with a language that lacked many terms for everyday and modern objects. One process he writes about is camoulflaged borrowing, where words are dervied from German, Russian, Yiddish, and English words but by a sort of folk etymological process that tries to disguise the fact of a foreign loanword by clothing it with a Semitic root. Sometimes these sources are multiple, e.g., Israeli karpada 'toad' "from" French crapaud 'toad' and Aramaic qurpda 'an unknown kind of animal'. Sometimes the words are calques (or loan translations) like gan yeladim 'kindergarden'.
As for differing pronunciations of Hebrew, there are at least five that I am aware of: Tiberian, Sephardic, Ashkenazic, Yemenite, and Israeli. I'm sure there are more.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Quote:
Speaking of which, how did most of these words came to be derived from both languages? Was there a council for "formation of sophisticated new English words through Latin and French"?
I'm not sure whether this is what you are asking, but in any case French is a Romance language, like Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. All of these developed out of Latin, so that's the connection: Latin gave us French, which was in turn foisted on the Anglo-Saxons in Britain, from where it was taken over to the US, Canada etc...
If this was not the question, freely ignore... 
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Logwood, I haven't looked at English as a global language
in a coon's age, but it's quite possible you'll find some answers there.
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Very interesting post, zmjezhd. Here's my bit of knowledge: Tiberians are those who came from Tiberias, which is a city is Israel. Sephardic are those of Spanish or North African descent. Ashkenazim are those who came from middle or northern Europe. Yemenite... well, are those who came from Yemen. I do in fact fall in that category! and yes, there are probably more, but I'm ignorant of those. Hola Marianna! I did a little research before posting this actually, and have became aware of the Romance Languages, but I'm still perplexed about one thing: For instance, take Hebrew, and you'll find that Eliezer Ben Yehuda is considered the founder of modern Hebrew (basing most of the words on Biblical Hebrew AKA Aramaic). So, in English, were all these words that have French/Latin origin assembled by someone/s? or otherwise; how did they came to be? Edit; Jackie, I lost you at "coon's age" 
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Pooh-Bah
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My understanding is that when the takeover of 1066 happened the winners of the war moved in and brought their language with them. Since they had all the money and power they got to keep speaking their own language and the locals were the ones who had to adapt. Peasants had pigs, cows, and houses (well hovels really), and continued to use their own (?Saxon) words for these simple things. Many of these words are related to German who had been the previous invaders. Or even Danish (Viking) e.g. church from kirk. The Norman/French nobility had porc, jambon (ham) and mansions and these words eventually filtered down.
This is one reason that English grammer is difficult to learn. It is a mish mash of French and German rules. pretty - prettier - prettiest vs beautiful -more beautiful - most beautiful with the fancier words usually following the French pattern.
Does this help?
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I do in fact fall in that category!
The you still make a difference between 'alef and `ayin (which many European Israelis don't, yes? Also, do you distinguish between tav and tav with dagesh?
For instance, take Hebrew, and you'll find that Eliezer Ben Yehuda is considered the founder of modern Hebrew (basing most of the words on Biblical Hebrew AKA Aramaic).
So, in English, were all these words that have French/Latin origin assembled by someone/s? or otherwise; how did they came to be?
Yes, Eliezer ben Yehuda is the father of Hebrew revival, but not all of his (or those of the Academy of the Hebrew Language) are those which Modern Israelis use in everyday conversation. (Cf. the Academy in France which tries to regulate usage in French.) I just finished a fascinating monograph of Eliezer b. Yehuda called The Revival of a Classical Language, and is with any language, the story is more complicated than simple. Ben Yehuda tried to disseminate his neologisms mainly through his newspaper, haTsevi. Whenever possible he tried to take the roots for his neologisms from Rabbinical (Talmudic) Hebrew (or Aramaic) or from spoken Arabic (rephonologized).
Some more of Zuckermann's examples of loans: pancher (pancherim) 'puncture', instead of neker. Silvim (or silbim, silibim) 'head-lights' (from sealed-beam head-lamps. Singular silv. (Here the -eam part of English beam in the loan was re-analysed as the -im Hebrew masculine plural.) I'm still reading the book. It's dense and slow-reading, but fascinating.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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I have to get that book!  Well, since Hebrew is embedded in me, differentiating between alef and ayin comes to me naturally. Tav (you mean taf?) with dagesh is only used in abbreviations as far as I know. Like for "Ma zot omeret?" ("what does it mean?"), as "Ma zt'omeret?" maybe I misunderstand you though? I ran the book through Amazon and noticed the title appears in Hebrew, while the smaller prints appear in English. I suspect the Hebraic letters are just decorative and the book itself is written in English. Unfortunately it costs 95$! (gadzooks) dense must be an understatement! Very interesting what you post nevertheless. Zed, thanks, but I'll be specific about my perplexity. I understand how did the words became commingled with English, but I'm curious about the formation of the words. Take a word like "gullet", which is from Middle English golet, from Old French goulet, from goule, throat, from Latin gula. Now, who decided that from all of these words "gullet" should be formed?
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I am far from a linguist of any kind, Logwood, but my sense is that no one "decided" the final form of any of the words. It was more an evolution of usage. No one person or several sat on high and ruled Yea or Nay.
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Yes, Logwood. It was expensive. Many academic books are. I found it online for slightly cheaper (on www.abebooks.com), around US$80, which isn't that much cheaper, but I feel it's worth it. As for taf (yes, the final letter in the Hebrew alphabet), I meant the distinction between taf at the beginning of a word, like in torah (with dagesh), and at the end of one, like in bath 'daughter' (without dagesh). In Sephardic they are both pronounced /t/, but in Ashkenazic the first one is pronounced /t/, but the second one is /s/. Now, who decided that from all of these words Nobody. Most language change is unpremeditated.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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I thought about that at length (and maybe it's my skeptic nature) but it doesn't make a lot of sense to me that most of the words of a modern language were modernized (through a number of languages) simply via evolution without anyone (singular or plural) specific to direct it. I take modern Hebrew as my fundamental reasoning, wherein most of the words formation was chairmaned. But nevertheless, if there is no other explanation I take your words for it. I was just expecting more convincing arguments. zmjezhd, I don't know the pronunciation distinction then. I'm not particularly erudite in Hebrew for a sabra (native-born Israeli). As you might tell, all my focus went towards English. PS. it sounds the book was a good deal, I'll try to look it up in a second hand store.
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I take modern Hebrew as my fundamental reasoning, wherein most of the words formation was chairmaned.
But, Logwood, Israeli Hebrew is a special case amongst languages. It stopped being spoken by native speakers (i.e., people who learn their first language from their mothers) more than two thousand years ago. For about two thousand years it was used as a learned and liturgical language, somewhat like Latin. When, towards the end of the 19th century, it started to be revived as a national language for Jews in diaspora coming to live in what is today Israel, it was discovered by people such as Eliezer ben Yehuda and Mendele Mokher Sfarim and others that it lacked an adequate vocabulary to discuss everyday, mundane, and modern things. As a result, Ben Yehuda and others started to coin words and popularize them in newspapers and books (novels and dictionaries). Almost all the other languages of Europe have a history of being used continuously over an historical period stretching from at least the Middle Ages until today. These languages changed, e.g., Latin and Italian are quite different but obviously related. Same with Spanish, French, and Romanian. They are related to one another through their one ancestor Latin. If you look at the vocabularies of the Romance languages, you will see many loanwords. The word for white in Latin is either albus or candidus (depending on whether it is shiny or matte). Hardly any of the daughter languages use either of those words for the common adjective 'white': e.g., Spanish blanco, Italian bianco, and French blanc all come from a Germanic loanword blank 'white'. When two languages come into contact with one another, borrowing tends to occur. Uriel Weinreich wrote a marvelous little book on this called Languages in Contact. (You can probably find it used online.)
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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Pooh-Bah
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One's own experience always feels like the "normal" one. To me a chairman or committee deciding on which word to use seems odd and artificial. Although when you look at English the idea of having one person to blame for the muddle (though, cough, through anyone) is attractive.
There are a series of videos, possibly from the BBC, called "The story of English" which are very good. They show the origins of the language as well as regional differences in word use and accent. They even subtitle the accents.
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(I meant "were" chairmaned, my initial wordings were different; so, sorry for the egregious mistake!)
Yes, a little thinking done; and I think I finally understand that too. It's sometimes hard to break off one's shell, base reasoning and skeptic nature. But taking my time to work through the logic and see things differently, it does make sense to me now.
PS. Thanks for the books and videos suggestions.
Last edited by Logwood; 11/14/05 11:46 PM.
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Quote:
I take modern Hebrew as my fundamental reasoning, wherein most of the words formation was chairmaned.
There was a period in English when scholars made up a bunch of words based on, typically, Latin examples. Some of them took and some didn't, so even with the committee input it was still subject to popular approval. Google inkhorn-words and browse.
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Aha, I know "inkhorn terms", just used it in my previous post in fact.
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French was the official diplomatic language of the Western world for quite a while (the "lingua franca", a phrase that now means "official language" or "common language"). That was due to the success of Charlemagne, French catholicism, and William the Conqueror. British English supplanted French over a period of time that began with the defeat of the Spanish Armada during the 1500's. The defeat of Napolean and the British colonization of India (plus their domination of the Chinese opium market and much of the Southeast Asian spice market) in the period from 1700-1850 continued the linguistic takeover. Add to that the previously mentionned spread of English colonists to the New World, Australia, New Zealand, then their colonization of North Africa and parts of the Middle East... That quote about the sun never setting on the British Empire has meaning. Britain had colonies or economic control of many regions of the world, and its language went with it. With the rise of the US as a world power from 1918 onward, the dominance of English as a diplomatic language was assured. It is interesting to note, however, that more people speak Chinese as their native language, and I think that's still true of Spanish, due to the Latin American population.
Regarding the odds spellings: English did not have fixed spellings until the 1800's, when standardized dictionaries began to appear. The people who created the dictionaries cribbed from each other but did not form committees. It simply happened that the most popular dictionaries won! The French L'Academie Franciase attempts to keep modern French pure, though the general populace happily ignores the official attempts to purge such words as le pique-nique, le week-end, and l'hambergeur. North Korean, I have read, is a manufacturered language, at least as far as the spelling goes. Apparently the previous Kim created a completely new set of characters and, as supreme dictator, forced it on the nation. All words were respelled phonetically using the new characters. This makes it the easiest language to learn to write (if you start as a child, at least).
By the way, when Norman French took over from Anglo-Saxon, it turned many everyday Saxon terms into vulgar (that is, dirty) words. Sh*t, for example, was merely the Saxon word for feces, no stronger in meaning that the French merde is today. The same applies to many other four-letter words of Saxon descent.
As a final irony, the Normans were originally cousins to the Anglo-Saxons. They were raiders from the North (Jutland, Saxony, etc.) who colonized the northern coast of what we now call France at about the same time that the first Jutes and Saxons were invading England. But the very name, France, is also a conqueror's term. The Franks, a Germanic tribe, moved south overland and took over the geographic region of France from the Gauls in early AD (hastening the fall of Rome), long before their distant cousins the Normans descended on them in turn. With each invasion and assimilation, the languages changed. That's one of the things that makes them so fascinating, eh?
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old hand
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With regard to language committees:
This way of establishing language conventions makes for interesting possibilities. I read in the paper recently that a stone tablet was found a little outside Jerusalem with the oldest known Hebrew writing etched into it (cannot find a link!). Maybe such discoveries might allow (or force?) linguitic commissions in Israel to reevaluate features of grammar or certain usages. Maybe not too - but it's extraordinary to think that a stone buried for thousands of years can have any bearing any of today's written or spoken languages.
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I seriously doubt that Charlemagne spoke a language that didn't exist yet, i.e., French. He probably spoke Frankish, a Germanic language.
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He probably spoke Frankish
Speaking frankly is (almost) always a good thing.
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As opposed to speaking rankly.
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Ferengi as a term for Europeans in the Middle East is from the Arabic for Frank (faranj). The original Lingua Franca was not French, but a Romance based pidgin used in the Levant by traders.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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