justcolleen
Joined: 07 Jan 2004
Posts: 654
Location: Egypt, baby!
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 Posted: Tue Feb 17, 2004 2:13 am Post subject: |
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| mb2086 wrote: |
| Nevertheless Americans do use ...ize. Maybe the Greeks had more influence than we thought. |
Of course they did. The history, in a nutshell, is:
There once was a language that reached the stage in its life where it was later labeled to be of "Germanic origin." It's geographic location made it open to invasion by land and by sea. Lots of bad guys stopped by. When they left, they left language.
The Romans only stayed a short while, but it was long enough to add the "thinking" kind of words they snagged from the Greeks (among other things), words which did not live in what is now the English language.
However, some 80% of those words have a French origin; they stayed longer. We Americans know the difference between blond and blonde, fiance and fiancee (without accents, always), and that a woman can be referred to as a divorcee but a man is never a divorce. |
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