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Re: [OM] In case you hadn't heard....

Subject: Re: [OM] In case you hadn't heard....
From: Andrew Fildes <afildes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2014 18:17:23 +1100
Not quite - they spoke Norman French which was a bit different. They were after 
all, North Men, Vikings who had settled there some 150 years before over the 
top of the Bretons (Amorican Celts) and France itself was home to many dialects 
so variable as to be almost different languages. 
England pre-1066 was home to equally variable dialects such as Wessex and 
Northumbrian, based on layered incomings of different Teutonic tribes. That 
doesn't include remnant  Celtic languages like Cornish close to Breton). The 
language wasn't codified and standardised until around 1400 and then more so 
with the emergence of the printing press. Even so, there were dialects that 
were difficult to understand within my lifetime - pure D.H. Lawrencian 
Nottingham for instance - although that was more due to local idiom and 
tortured vowels than actual linguistic features.
Andrew Fildes
afildes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
www.soultheft.com

Author/Publisher: 
The SLR Compendium: 
revised edition - 
http://blur.by/19Hb8or
The TLR Compendium
http://blur.by/1eDpqN7



On 21/03/2014, at 8:02 AM, Chris Crawford wrote:

> In the middle ages, the nobility and kings of England did not speak
> English; they spoke French, a result of England's conquest by William the
> Bastard (that's what he was called in France, because he was born to his
> father's mistress, not his wife). Many of them never learned to speak
> English at all.

-- 
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