zompist bboard

A while ago, I was wondering how English would look like if William the Conqueror failed to conquer Britain?
Because I haven't a lot af knowledge of historical linguistics, I would like to ask this question to the more experienced conlangers
and the native speakers of English, for I am not a native speaker.

It would probably look very similar to how it does today. Grammatically... possibly identical. However, we probably wouldn't have the c=s/k problem we do today. Can someone add to this?

Old English was already using <c> for both /k/ and /tS/, so the letter having two uses can't really be blamed on the Normans. We'd have fewer French loanwords I guess, but would we necessarily respell those where a French <c> represents /s/ ? Wikipedia says Dutch started replacing <c> with <k> in the tenth century ... would we necessarily have wound up doing the same if England weren't conquered in the eleventh? I don't see why that would have to happen.
(Dutch by the way also has the c=k/s "problem" in loanwords anyway so ...)

Well, one source I read (don't remember what) said that after the Normans arrived, English started respelling native words containing an 's' to have a 'c'. The example it gave was i:s > ice. Although, yes, it does appear that the pronunciation of 'c' would have to be learnt. But it's not as if we don't have to do that with some words.

We'd probably also have kept the Futhorc for longer, maybe even into our super-power era. We'd probably have switched to Latin eventually, but not in the 11th century.

Edit: look at this

KathAveara wrote:We'd probably also have kept the Futhorc for longer, maybe even into our super-power era. We'd probably have switched to Latin eventually, but not in the 11th century.

I think you are misinformed on this; Old English used the Latin alphabet already before the Norman conquest. Futhorc went out of use in the 9th century, after the Anglo-Saxons had been converted to Christianity.

WeepingElf wrote:

KathAveara wrote:We'd probably also have kept the Futhorc for longer, maybe even into our super-power era. We'd probably have switched to Latin eventually, but not in the 11th century.

I think you are misinformed on this; Old English used the Latin alphabet already before the Norman conquest. Futhorc went out of use in the 9th century, after the Anglo-Saxons had been converted to Christianity.

Really? Oh.

Sveinn Ástríðarson would come and finish Haraldr's job

I don't see an English with a defeated William the Conqueror looking identical to Anglish. There would be borrowings, but likely not as many. For meats, we'd likely just use the animal name as we do for chicken, turkey, and other more "exotic" forms of meat that we don't have a French-derived word from. For some reason I find us likely to retain the use of the word "pig" to mean the animal, with "swine" retained for the meat.

Overall, it'll depend much on how the alternate history progresses. Scientific vocabulary will probably still be Greek or Latinate; the question is which one will be used. I could see such an English, for instance, using a Germanic word (likely "shapeshift" or something along those lines) in most of the senses where real English uses the Latinate "transform", and using "transform" where real English would use the Greek "metamorphosize".

(Or alternatively they could use metamorphosize where we use transform... or something else entirely. That was just an example of a possibility.)

I'd predict maybe about as much non-Germanic vocabulary as Dutch or German? Or maybe a bit less, given the extra factor of the English Channel.

Now that I think of it, you might want to give William the Conqueror his proper name in the title... ^^

Hallow XIII wrote:Now that I think of it, you might want to give William the Conqueror his proper name in the title... ^^

William the Would-Be Overrunner?

bulbaquil wrote:I don't see an English with a defeated William the Conqueror looking identical to Anglish. There would be borrowings, but likely not as many. For meats, we'd likely just use the animal name as we do for chicken, turkey, and other more "exotic" forms of meat that we don't have a French-derived word from. For some reason I find us likely to retain the use of the word "pig" to mean the animal, with "swine" retained for the meat.

Overall, it'll depend much on how the alternate history progresses. Scientific vocabulary will probably still be Greek or Latinate; the question is which one will be used. I could see such an English, for instance, using a Germanic word (likely "shapeshift" or something along those lines) in most of the senses where real English uses the Latinate "transform", and using "transform" where real English would use the Greek "metamorphosize".

(Or alternatively they could use metamorphosize where we use transform... or something else entirely. That was just an example of a possibility.)

Btw, it's metamorphose.

bulbaquil wrote:

Hallow XIII wrote:Now that I think of it, you might want to give William the Conqueror his proper name in the title... ^^

William the Would-Be Overrunner?

Conqueror.

To metamorphosize exists. I've probably even heard it much more often than to metamorphose.

Serafín wrote:To metamorphosize exists. I've probably even heard it much more often than to metamorphose.

Not sure I've heard it. Wiktionary lists it as "(US)".

My two cents:

Honestly, I think that the most noticeable change would be in the spelling. The issue of c has been brought up, but I think that it probably would have continued with k/tS, without use to represent [s]. There were quite a few other spelling features that we have that I imagine owe there place in English to Norman scribal conventions.

Vocab wise, I think there would still be a heavy Latinate contingent, as a lot of them came into English centuries after the Conquest. We probably wouldn't have the "deeper" Latinate vocabulary that was truly Norman, such as the beef/cow style distinctions we have now, as well as the Norman-French/Parisian French doublets we have, like warranty/guarantee or chief/chef.

Grammatically, that's a bit harder to say. One the one hand, I'm of the opinion that the biggest factor in making English so distinct among its Germanic brethren (things like the rapid inflectional attrition, and some other syntactic peculiarities) was not the Norman conquest, but the Norse settlement of the Danelaw. This can be seen in the fact that the most innovative, modern looking dialects were the ones in the north, and their features spread south over the Middle English period. In the south, meanwhile, the Southern and Kentish dialects (which had no norse influence) were quite conservative.

On the other hand, one of those conservative southern dialects (the descendant of the West Saxon dialect) probably would have continued to be the prestige dialect, the language of court. It was already the basis of a somewhat standardized written language late in the Anglo-Saxon period, and might have worked to arrest the spread of northern innovations. This is more speculative though.

If I had to give a description of Non-Normanized English, I'd guess it would be spelled a bit different, RP would sound more like the West Country dialect, and grammatically it would be about as distinct from "real" English as Scots is, except more in the direction of Dutch or Frisian, if that makes sense. Probably still quite understandable, but it might be tricky to read initially, and trickier to speak "correctly".

Most importantly, the English monarch would be Cwene Elizabeth II. Which is nice.

Oh yes, little/no native 'qu'! Hurrah!

I remember somebody writing a long passage of un-Normanised English somewhere. Has anyone else seen anything like that?

Update: I found this while I was looking for it. Not What I wanted, but it might be useful to somebody.

Ha! Found something.
This post on Yahoo Answers.
Poul Anderson's essay

Yes, but not exactly. A Norman defeat doesn't necessarily mean the English would be spurred towards maintaining "linguistic purity" - there would still be Greek/Latinate loanwords, just not necessarily as many, and not necessarily with the same connotations.

All it means is we never got the core vocab that we did get, plus whatever orthographical nightmares came with.

I suspect modern English would look and sound like a West Germanic version of the Scandinavian languages.

Perhaps another question would be what would have happened if the Danes had conquered beyond the Danelaw...would Danish be the equivalent of French in vocabulary overlay?

KathAveara wrote:All it means is we never got the core vocab that we did get, plus whatever orthographical nightmares came with.

This is the most important part.

Tolkien believed (rightly, in my meaning) that the French overwinning was a fearful goatsong for the English wordhoard.

FearfulJesuit wrote:I suspect modern English would look and sound like a West Germanic version of the Scandinavian languages.

Perhaps another question would be what would have happened if the Danes had conquered beyond the Danelaw...would Danish be the equivalent of French in vocabulary overlay?

Or if the Norwegians had won Stamford Bridge.