Re: Why does English have so few compound words?

In article <2006111000113678840-paul@hiddenfortressten>,
Paul D <paul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 2006-11-09 23:07:19 +0900, erilar <drache@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> said:

In article <1163016656.114598.175950@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
"Jake" <Jake.Pentland@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Does English have so few compund words, in spite of it being a germanic
language, because it takes most of them from the Latin and the Greek
and the french? For example survive corresponds to ueberleben, I can't
think of any others at this second, but I will post some in soon.
Is this lack of compound words because people thought that English was
too lowly to go back to its roots when its culture was ruled by the
Normans?

I doubt that this was a conscious choice; real languages don't evolve
that way. However, French was the language of the aristocracy and
those who dealt with them at a critical period and Latin the language
of the intellectual/religious elite for a much longer period. This
brought a wealth of Romance language vocabulary into English. Blame it
on Billy *** 8-)

Actually, wasn't there a whole lot of conscious borrowing from Latin by
English writers during the Inkhorn controversy period?

Not just then 8-) English has been a happy-to-borrow language from
before it was "English", actually. We have a lot of words we tend to
think of as historically English that came in from Scandinavian, even
before the Norman influence.

--
Mary Loomer Oliver (aka Erilar),
philologist, biblioholic medievalist

http://www.airstreamcomm.net/~erilarlo


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