Walter's Famous German Language Essentials Guide

[Laeeth Isharc via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 3 May 2016 at 08:53:49 UTC, Claude wrote:
>> LOL. Well, every language has its quirks - especially with the 
>> commonly used words (they probably get munged the most over 
>> time, because they get used the most), but I've found that 
>> French is far more consistent than English - especially when 
>> get a grammar book that actually explains things rather than 
>> just telling you what to do. English suffers from having a lot 
>> of different sources for its various words. It's consistent in 
>> a lot of ways, but it's a huge mess in others - ...
>
> Several years ago, I read "Frankenstein" of Mary Shelley (in 
> english), and I was surprised to see that the english used in 
> that novel had a lot of french sounding words (like "to 
> continue", "to traverse", "to detest", "the commencement" etc), 
> which are now seldom used even in litterature. There was very 
> few verb constructions like "get up", "come on", "carry out"

http://isteve.blogspot.de/2012/07/norman-v-saxon-after-946-years.html?m=1

The reverberations of 1066 have not yet extinguished 
themselves...  We are in a mass democratic age and the language 
reflects that.