"against the official lingua franca"
Beautifully put: the official language of the Franks! I'm not joking either. There are some fundamental concepts that get given a particular epithet and gradually it becomes a errr "thing". It doesn't really matter what that epithet is, provided we all agree on what it means. It doesn't really matter which language it is in either. English is particularly flexible in this regard.
The British isles have seen quite a lot of coming and going over the last few thousand years and the locals have always been welcoming of incoming ... income. The mineral wealth is all mined out now but the outward looking attitude that has characterized the place for millennia due to trade links and easy access via longboat and later the Empire thing is still lingering for now. Anyway, English happily appropriates foreign words wholesale.
So we have the Latin phrase: "lingua franca" The language of the Franks. The Franks are roughly France these days. So very old French was the interchange language in Europe for quite a while. Thanks to the invasion of 1066 in England, French really did become the lingua franca hereabouts but as it turns out it largely lost out eventually to a more Saxon (German) language. We ended up with a Germanic language base that had huge dollops of French, pots of Latin and wodges of Greek interspersed with lashings of nearly every other language spoke on the planet.
English is a relative newcomer to the game of communicating what is going on behind your eyes to making the air vibrate and causing tiny hairs on tympanic membranes to vibrate and finally making neurons fire in another brain. I think it is quite good at it.
However, I never want to see the demise of other languages or them becoming secondary or whatever. English is not perfect. Language like all other things needs diversity. English in its current form could not possible exist without all its predecessors and frankly (lol) all other languages. Modern English has a simplicity and fluidity that is probably due to becoming the language of the Franks - the lingua franca.
I suspect that its fluidity is actually due to foreign speakers and not built in. I think that English has been shaped more by foreigners than locals (whatever that means).
EDIT: Removed silly nonsense (sorry).
Beautifully put: the official language of the Franks! I'm not joking either. There are some fundamental concepts that get given a particular epithet and gradually it becomes a errr "thing". It doesn't really matter what that epithet is, provided we all agree on what it means. It doesn't really matter which language it is in either. English is particularly flexible in this regard.
The British isles have seen quite a lot of coming and going over the last few thousand years and the locals have always been welcoming of incoming ... income. The mineral wealth is all mined out now but the outward looking attitude that has characterized the place for millennia due to trade links and easy access via longboat and later the Empire thing is still lingering for now. Anyway, English happily appropriates foreign words wholesale.
So we have the Latin phrase: "lingua franca" The language of the Franks. The Franks are roughly France these days. So very old French was the interchange language in Europe for quite a while. Thanks to the invasion of 1066 in England, French really did become the lingua franca hereabouts but as it turns out it largely lost out eventually to a more Saxon (German) language. We ended up with a Germanic language base that had huge dollops of French, pots of Latin and wodges of Greek interspersed with lashings of nearly every other language spoke on the planet.
English is a relative newcomer to the game of communicating what is going on behind your eyes to making the air vibrate and causing tiny hairs on tympanic membranes to vibrate and finally making neurons fire in another brain. I think it is quite good at it.
However, I never want to see the demise of other languages or them becoming secondary or whatever. English is not perfect. Language like all other things needs diversity. English in its current form could not possible exist without all its predecessors and frankly (lol) all other languages. Modern English has a simplicity and fluidity that is probably due to becoming the language of the Franks - the lingua franca.
I suspect that its fluidity is actually due to foreign speakers and not built in. I think that English has been shaped more by foreigners than locals (whatever that means).
EDIT: Removed silly nonsense (sorry).