In 1066, William the Conqueror and his army of Normans established themselves as the dominant power in Britain, and the form of French they brought with them quickly became the language of the powerful classes in British society, while the lower classes still spoke English (English Club, 3). For the second time in just over five-hundred years, a major conquest of the Isle of Britain was conducted by an invading tribe with a foreign tongue. This time, however, the existing language and people were not replaced, but instead the Latin influence of the Norman tongue began to seep into English, creating the first elements of a "bastard" tongue (Anglik.net, 6). Words such as "beef" and "cow" illustrate how the class difference that existed at first between speaker of the Norman and Anglo-Saxon languages eventually resulted in a language with a greater diversity of words than any other -- cow has a Germanic root, and was originally an Anglo-Saxon word, whereas beef is Latinate, and was spoken by the Normans, but now both are common English words (Anglik.net, 7). This effect only deepened when English came back into grace.
Isolation in the period following the Norman conquest was not so intense, but it was enough of a presence to allow English to romanticize slowly, absorbing and adding Norman elements rather than being replaced by them (Merriam Webster, 13). Certainly, the grammatical structure of the developing language did not find its root in Latin or the romance languages. Despite Marsh's assertions that the early Anglo-Saxon tongue had nothing in common with contemporary mainland grammatical structures, Albert Baugh and Thomas Cable assert that modern English has a definite grammatical relationship with the other Germanic languages (Baugh and Cable, 9). They all agree, however, that one of the benefits of English as a world language is in the breadth of its vocabulary and the subtle shades of meaning it is capable of, which would not be the case without the multiple sources of Middle English and the geographical ability of the language to ferment, as it were, into the intoxicatingly accurate and yet elusive language that it is today (Baugh and Cable, 9; Marsh, 93).
Of course, the language would not be a global one if it weren't...
(60) The Norman conquest had forever altered the face of history and the face of the English language. Middle English The period thought of as the Middle English period roughly from 1150-1500 is a period that is demonstrative of the massive changes associated with the Norman conquest. Though there is some evidence that French did not completely overtake English in common or official use the language had a great influence upon English
Dead Body in War Poetry Analysis of Poets War Poetry War is a brutal reality on the face of history. Thousands of lives have been wasted in the name of battles and millions of people were affected by it. Poet is a rather sensitive part of our society and feels the brutality of war more than a normal individual. During World War I, the world went through havoc during which millions of
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