Hi, Friday, May 14, 2004, 4:28:16 PM, Gianfranco wrote:
> Jens Bladt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> You may very well be wrong. >> Danish - as well as English - is a Germanic language. In fact > there's a lot >> of English words, that are originally Danish (old nordic), > brought to >> England by the Vikings. The word "table" is one example. > "Strand" is >> annother (beach). > I'd like to dissent, but only about the word "table": derived > from the old French, was in origin the Latin "tabula"). many Latin words found their way into Germanic languages which subsequently found their way into English via the Anglo-Saxon and Danish invasions. The plosive sounds like 'p' and 'b' are very close physically to the fricatives 'f' and 'v', so a word like 'tabula' could easily become something like 'tafel' and then go back to 'table', so it is certainly plausible that it could have come into English via its Germanic predecessors rather than through Norman French. In fact, according to my dictionary, Chambers, it is "partly OE 'tabule', 'tabele', partly OFr (and Fr) 'table', both -L 'tablua' a board". OE=Old English, the direct descendant of Anglo-Saxon, OFr = Old French via the Normans Fr = French L = Latin so it looks as though German 'tafel' is a later switch. Some Latinate words have also come into English through the ancestor of Welsh, which picked up a few Latin words during the Roman occupation. And of course all these languages have a common ancestor so some words which look kind of Latin have in fact been preserved from the common ancestor. -- Cheers, Bob
