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So the English aristocracy used to speak French.

Jolanta 9 Apr 18
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This is also where the cultural taboo of four-letter words originates.
The Normans wanted their Anglo-Saxon subjects to say urinate instead of piss, coitu instead of fuck, defecate instead of shit.( "Non, non, non, you Saxon pig!" "We do not piss in the bushes! We urinate in the bushes!""That's what I said mate! I just marinated the bloody bushes!" ). In the aftermath of the Conquest, the Normans stayed cooped up in their castles, for fear of being stabbed or beaten to death by the peasants. And ultimately, the Normans became more Anglo-Saxonized, than their subjects became Normanized.Initially, the Normans wanted the English to drink more wine, and less beer.But the English soon had them drinking less wine, and more whiskey, beer, and gin.

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The English royalty used to speak German.

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same exact thing in Russia....a completely phonetic language, and when i took a course and sounded out my words that were written in Cyrillic they had a French accent built in! Fun!

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English only began really, when the Anglo-Saxon spoken by the people blended with the nobles French, old Gallic from Wales and Scotland, the churches Latin and a little Old Norse borrowed from the Danes. It is really a dialect made up of several original languages, and not a true pure language at all.

Which is the strength of English today.
What other tongue has words like swine (from nordic) and pigs (from old English) for the animal and pork (from French) for when it is cooked?

What would be an example of a pure language?

@Thibaud70 Pure languages still in use, (as in least corrupted) are possibly some of the American Indian languages or the Basque language in Spain.
Otherwise, languages like the Hittite might qualify. Tamil has evolved, but very little could have corrupted the original language, other than cave-man grunts! 🤣

@Thibaud70 Very few are pure yes, but English is perhaps one of the most corrupted, having almost no single source.

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Of course it was. The Normans were vikings who, 300 years earlier, had been granted a vast swathe of France in return for leaving the rest of France alone.
They had "gone native", speaking French with a bit of Danish thrown in. When the Normans conquered England, they became the new aristocracy. It took another 300 years before they "went native" again.
However, the language of diplomacy remained French until very much later.

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