Ancestors

Written by Yoïn van Spijk on 2025-01-15 at 17:55

The English words 'no' and 'no' don't share a common ancestor. 'No', the opposite of 'yes', comes from Proto-West-Germanic *naiw (never), while 'no' as in 'no pain, no gain' comes from *nain (not any): it arose as a variant of 'none'.

'No' as opposed to 'yes' isn't related to German 'nein' and Dutch 'nee' either. Their only common part is 'n-', which comes from the Germanic negation particle *ne, also found in words such as 'not', 'neither' and 'never'.

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Written by Meercat ✅ on 2025-01-15 at 18:12

@yvanspijk what? I did not expect this. I always thought they had something in common in their etymology

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Written by Peter Brown on 2025-01-17 at 02:47

@meercat0 @yvanspijk English grammar comes from Welsh but vocabulary comes from many languages

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Written by Yoïn van Spijk on 2025-01-17 at 08:20

@peterbrown @meercat0 No, English grammar was inherited from Proto-Germanic. That's why English is a Germanic language. The influences of Welsh on English have been practically non-existent, which specialists agree on.

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Written by Peter Brown on 2025-01-17 at 08:48

@yvanspijk @meercat0 you can’t say I am going in German.

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Toot

Written by Yoïn van Spijk on 2025-01-17 at 09:08

@peterbrown @meercat0 'Ich bin am gehen'. Dutch has 'ik ben aan het gaan'.

The English progressive tenses developed centuries after the arrival on the British Isles, when linguistic contact with the Celtic speaking peoples wasn't strong enough to cause grammatical changes. Contact has to be very intensive for that, a situation in which English would've been flooded with loanwords as well.

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Descendants

Written by Peter Brown on 2025-01-17 at 09:44

@yvanspijk @meercat0 you’re not listening are you?

The underlying grammar, the syntax and various other elements highlighted in that chart are from Brythonic. The present continuous tense didn’t “arrive” from anywhere. It was already here - spoken throughout France throughout England and probably most of Scotland. Caesar commented before invading England that the language spoken on both sides of the channel was the same. The French call it Gaulish and the Welsh call it Welsh.

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Written by Yoïn van Spijk on 2025-01-17 at 09:48

@peterbrown @meercat0 It was there in Celtic - Welsh, Gaulish etc. - not in English. Old English was brought to the British Isles by Germanic colonists (Angles, Saxons, Jutes) and didn't have a progressive tense. This tense only started to develop many centuries after this arrival.

All of this can be observed in the texts.

If you don't want to see that English and the Celtic languages are two different things that only had occasional influences on each other, our discussion ends here.

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