Why did English survive?

[Queequeg]

TBH I'm actually really interested in Iron Age Europe right now for....reasons that are known only to whatever the whim of my interest-fairies determine.  The bizarre mixture of Proto-Slavic, German, and Celtic in Central Europe extremely interesting.   

[Razgovory]

English didn't really survive, not anymore then Latin did.  The language of the Saxons is gone, and what replaced it can't really be called the same thing.

But we aren't speaking a Celtic language.  That's my entire question.

Okay.

[Queequeg]

In the year 980 a huge chunk of Europe was Viking-ruled.  Kievan Rus, the largest state in Europe, was founded and run by the Norse, the Norse and mixed Norse people ruled Ireland, large parts of France, most (and eventually all) of England, etc...It's pretty impressive.  Sum linguistic influence?  A lot of terms in English, some grammar changes.  Minimal in Normandy, or Russia, or the Celtic-ruled parts of the British Isles.

The Dark Age Germanic peoples ruled a larger area, going from Tunisia to Edinburgh.  Yet even today the divide between French and Dutch or German is generally pretty close to the site of the Roman frontier.  England seems a big exception.  It's relatively far-off from Jutland, was the site of the settlement of as few as 100,000 Anglo-Saxons, but English still completely assimilated the greater part of England and half of Scotland.  There should be a reason for this.  The Franks left a big impact on French, the Visigoths on Castilian, but the English people speak the language of the barbarian invader.   Given the proximity of France to the frontier, you'd expect it to be assimilated, not England.

[Razgovory]

The Norse really did affect the French language, just more regionally.  Norman French was a major Dialect for a while.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_language

German was much wider spread before WWII and I'm not sure it's fair to Franks made an impact on French, since I don't know if those people spoke French prior to the Franks, they probably spoke a form of Latin.

You are making some odd assumption regarding German languages and Russian languages, how wildly they were spoken at a time when they didn't have written languages and what forms they had.  I'm not sure I see the point.

[Queequeg]

German was much wider spread before WWII

I was obviously referring to the border between the Germanic and Romance languages, which are clearly based on the frontiers of the Late Empire.  The border between the Baltic and Slavic languages is different.   

I'm not sure it's fair to Franks made an impact on French, since I don't know if those people spoke French prior to the Franks, they probably spoke a form of Latin.

Fine.  Call it "Frankish influence in Northern Gallo-Romance dialects that became French."

You are making some odd assumption regarding German languages and Russian languages, how wildly they were spoken at a time when they didn't have written languages and what forms they had.  I'm not sure I see the point.

1) No such thing as "Russian languages."  East Slavic languages.
2) You can trace this through sound changes.  See Proto-Germanic Kuningas-Russian Knyaz, English King, German Koenig,  while hyper conservative Lithuanian keeps it as kunigaikštis.  So a relatively recent Russian borrowing from German (German Hertzog-Russian Gertsog) isn't affected by historical sound changes in the language like older ones are (kuningas-knyaz).
3) There's a pretty intense layer of proto-Slavic German borrowings roughly corresponding to the Gothic expansion to the Black Sea after the collapse of Sarmatian authority and before the Huns.  There's also a layer of super-ancient Iranian borrowings corresponding to Scythian, Sarmatian, Alan, and maybe even Kimmerian influence.  The Slavic languages actually have a p. good claim of being the branch closest to the ancestral Indo-European tree in terms of where they live and conservative nature of the languages. 

There's not really much of a Viking or Swedish influence.  There's some cultural concepts that might reflect Varangian heritage-burning concubines during funeral rights is mentioned by some Arab travelers, the druzhina have Norse antecedents, and Russian focus on Perun might have a basis in the Thor cult.   Might. 

[Razgovory]

I was under the impression that German pushed pretty far into Latin territory and stayed there.  The provinces of Rhatiea, Noricum and Pannonia both became fairly German.  The German settlement of Romania does not involve Balts or Slavs.  In the West, Belgica had strong German influence, what provinces that the Romans called Germania probably had few Germans in them when they were established.  More later on, but then that is sort of the point we are getting at isn't it?

Is saying "Russian languages" some sort of nationalist faux pax?  I imagine the languages that would one day become standardized into Russian were quite varied before Christianization.  Anglo-Saxon certainly was.

[Queequeg]

Is saying "Russian languages" some sort of nationalist faux pax?  I imagine the languages that would one day become standardized into Russian were quite varied before Christianization.  Anglo-Saxon certainly was.

The opposite.  A Slav could pretty easily go from Murom to Prague and be understood in reasonably complex conversations all the way though at the year 900.  Even today there's less differences between the entire Slavic family than there is between "dialects" of Arabic or "dialects" of Chinese.  Differences between Russian dialects or Russian-Ukrainian-Belorussian aren't that huge, still.  The Proto-Slavs were still Pripyat' marsh dwelling cousins of the Balts, routinely subjugated by Caspian Steppe peoples and hardly noticed by anyone, when Arabic, Latin, Greek, and German expanded in the Dark Ages.

I was under the impression that German pushed pretty far into Latin territory and stayed there.  The provinces of Rhatiea, Noricum and Pannonia both became fairly German.

Weren't those areas pretty substantially mixed?  They were pretty much the home territory of the Celts, but by the time of the Empire the Germans had been pushing the Celts out of the region for at least a century. 

The German settlement of Romania does not involve Balts or Slavs.

1) Romania speaks better Latin than most of the Romance-speaking world today.
2) Yeah, it did.  The early Goth settlement of the region probably already had a Slavic component, and once the Goths move en masse in to the Western Empire it's the first place we have records of recognizably Slavic peoples. 

TBH probably best example I can think of is that all of Flanders was once Dutch speaking, and Alsace and other parts of France German speaking, but were pushed back because French was the administrative language of the European courts, and the development and strengthening of Wallonian.  Then again, the frontier movied forward a few hundred miles rather than going over the North Sea and subjugating almost all of the good land on a large island.   

[Queequeg]

Example: The cow jumped over the great river.
Russian: Korova prygnula velikuyu reku
Czech: Kráva přeskočil velké řeky.
Polish: Krowa przeskoczył wielkiej rzeki.
Croatian: Krava preskočio velike rijeke.

And a lot of the differences here are orthographic. 

By comparison:
Swedish: Kon hoppade över den stora floden.
Danish: Koen sprang over den store flod.
German: Die Kuh sprang über den großen Fluss.


"Cow", "river", "over" and the article are all understandable, and for a native speaker "sprang" makes sense as jumped.  However just about everything else is different.

[Queequeg]

TBH the Danish makes it sound like a Jewish man leaped over the flood store. 

[The Brain]

Why did the cow jump the river?

[Queequeg]

I was trying to think of something simple yet silly.

[The Brain]

Fascinating slice of info: in Swedish the standard word for river is "flod", but no river in Sweden is ever called "flod" in Swedish. They are "älv" or "å". Makes you thimk.

[Queequeg]

Is there a difference between an älv and an å?

[The Brain]

Is there a difference between an ålv and an å?

An älv is generally bigger than an å.

[Syt]

Fascinating slice of info: in Swedish the standard word for river is "flod", but no river in Sweden is ever called "flod" in Swedish. They are "älv" or "å". Makes you thimk.

Hm. In German it's "Fluss", but I'm trying to think of any river that actually has that as part of its name and come up empty. The best I have is the Huang He (Yellow River) in China. Smaller bodies, like creeks might have the corresponding word in their name (-bach or -au).

Additionally, rivers in German will be male or female - die Elbe, die Donau, der Rhein, der Mississippi

(Though to be fair, the Elbe's name is most likely derived from the old nordic word for river, i.e. elv/älv)