Where Left Is Right / The Old Site

Anyone who cares about the English language should know about today. Remember all those history/trivia questions about the year 1066 -- the Norman Conquest? Well, it all started today: on September 28, 939 years ago, William the Conqueror landed in England (specifically at Pevensey, on the southeast coast).

So what's this got to do with the English language?

Prior to the Norman conquest of England, the native language -- what we now call Old English -- had been Celtic and Germanic (specifically Danish and Norwegian) in character,with a little bit of Latin influence. This combination gave us the legacy of about half of the language we use in everyday informal speech and writing (pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, and a whole bunch of more important examples), including all those famous "four-letter words" -- Anglo-Saxonisms. Here's a famous example of a prayer in Old English:

Thu ure fæther, the eart on heofonum, sy thin nama gehalgod.
Cume thin rice, Sy thin wylla on eorthan swaswa on heofonum.
Syle us todæg urne daeghwamlican hlaf.
And forgyf us ure gyltas swaswa we forgyfath thampe with us agyltath.
And ne lae thu na us on costnunge, ac alys us fram yfele

Looks weird, eh? But when you sound it out phonetically, it's a lot easier to "get" it (though it's still a little garbled):

Thu our father, thee art on heavenum, say thine nama holyod.
Come thine rich, say thine will on earth swas-wa on heavenum.
Sell us today ourne day-wham-lick hloaf.
And forgive us our guiltas swas-wa we forgiv-ath themp with us a-guilt-ath.
And no lee thu us on costnun-ya, ash all-lees us from evil.

What the Normans brought with them, and imposed on their new island territory, was a form of French. (This is especially interesting because the Normans were, after all, literally Norse-men -- their area of France had come under Viking, i.e. Norwegian, domination some time ago.) Over time, the heavily Latin-influenced French language became (owing to the Normans' status as conquerors) the language of the intelligentsia of the time. It didn't mean they were any smarter, of course; it just meant they "sounded better."

(Latin itself had been introduced to the British Isles by the Romans themselves, centuries before the Norman Conquest, and had weaseled its way into the language here and there. But it took the Normans to make the influence really felt.)

This dichotomy is all around us even now. It just sounds so much more genteel, for instance, to say "unintelligent" than "dumb." Henry James just reads so much more elegantly -- intelligently -- than pulp novels, right? The first thing college freshman "learn" to do in order to make themselves better writers (or so they think) is to load their writing up with Latinated words, many of which came to us via the Normans. Unfortunately, many of these words have subtly different meanings from a half-dozen "synonyms," which is why all that flowery language doesn't do squat for their grades (as long as the instructors know the differences, of course) -- their papers, though longer, don't mean any more, and maybe quite a bit less.

The second thing these people learn, if they keep on writing, is how much simpler and clearer and less ambiguous everything sounds, and is, when they replace many of those polysyllables with their terse counterparts -- while keeping an eye out, always, for opportunities to deploy the heavy artillery when justified.

(No political point to make here, by the way; I just wanted to acknowledge the day.)