Less salty today...

Went to the pub with Mick last night, and I've got a thick head today... but he told me to send all of you his best.

Interesting thing I saw yesterday... there was a documentary (possibly BBC, but I'm not sure) about the historical connection between many modern cultural experiences we are all familiar with here in America (and other places) and actual events of the past. Some I was already aware of, like the "Ring around the rosey" rhyme being associated with the English experience of the Black Death in the 14th Century. Some I was not aware of, like the children's tale of the Pied Piper.

That particular story goes back to 1284, in the actual German town of Hamelin (in Saxony, near Hanover), and may be a communal recollection of two separate events, the first being a migration of youths and children out of Hamelin and east towards less populated areas and the second (happening about a century later) being a massive infestation of rats at almost the exact time when such an infestation meant increased likelihood of plague exposure. What I found really cool was the way the investigators went about detailing the possible historical roots to the cultural experiences.

References were made to our modern understanding of the story of the lycanthrope, or werewolf. Another documentary, this by the History Channel, detailed the series of attacks by a mysterious wolf-like creature in the south-central portion of France that began in the late 1600s and continued (in four year cycles) until 1954. Over a 12 year period between 1765 and 1777, more than 200 documented killings were attributed to the "Beast of Gevaudan" and caused such an uproar that King Louis XV had to send a professional hunter to the region to kill the Beast.

Anyway, the topic that prompted me to post was that the language we speak today stems from two, distinct and separate languages brought to England by two different waves of settlement separated by more than 200 years, the Saxon invasions and the Viking invasions of England. The Saxons began coming with the departure of the Romans from Britain in the 5th Century, and the Vikings (or "Danes") began coming in the 7th Century. While we know that a Dane and a Saxon, living in the same area at about the reign of Alfred the Great, would be able to converse with each other to a degree, the melding of the two tongues would simplify the grammar of both tongues and give us the amazingly easy pluralization of nouns (and the lack thereof for adjectives) by simply adding an "s", while providing our language with a rich and varied vocabulary stemming from the same objects or actions having both Dane and Saxon names associated with them. That is why, when we write, speak or read anything in English, we see so many words associated with the same thing... we here are all fathers, and we can describe ourselves as "rearing" children (English) or "raising" children (Norse). When those children misbehave, we can tan their "hides" (English) or their "skin" (Norse). We look up to see birds flying through the "air" (English) or in the "sky" (Norse).

Of the 400 most commonly used English words, more than 80% are of Saxon and Danish roots, while the rest are adopted from French, Latin and the extant Celtic tongues of the era (which, despite the fact that Celtic was the mother tongue of the British Isles, make up less than 1% of our modern language). In fact, 70 years ago this month, Winston Churchill gave a speech to the House of Commons (now called the "We shall fight on the beaches" speech) that is entirely comprised of words that any Anglo Saxon of Alfred's day would understand... with one exception: the word "surrender" came with the French spoken by the Normans and had no meaning to the Saxons of Alfred's time.

I'm done rambling, and my coffee is just about out, so I'll leave you all to your weekend.