October 14, 2008

1066 and all that. 942 years ago today, the pesky French turned up.

October 14 seems to be a busy day That tapestry previously on Mofi.

posted by kitfisto 15 years ago
  • Back in my restaurant-worker days, $10.66 was the price of 50 wings when you added the tax. I chuckled every time, but none of the stupid customers ever got it.
  • That's 25 chickens' worth!
  • 50 wings for ten bucks? Woot. At Wing Stop they give you half a wing and a punch in the boob for that.
  • A linguist friend tells me that after the cheese-eating surrender monkeys moved across the channel, the first word they brought with them was "pride". Apparently they took their priests with them and while the Anglo-Saxons already had words for six of the seven deadly sins, not yet being french they lacked this one. The second word to make it into the language was "juggler". They brought their clowns too.
  • Well, it was a long time ago. Maybe it was 25 wings.
  • today is also my father's birthday. I don't know how I would remember if he hadn't been born on the date of the battle of hastings!
  • Seems like an awful lot of fuss for a rainy island full of alcoholics.
  • my ancestors came along for the ride! my surname is derived from gilet.
  • What's with kitfisto and the memory sink? He probably remembers the Battle of Hastings before it was a pile-up in a bookstore. Viva la fromage mangeant des singes de reddition! *stands* Allons enfants de la Patrie, Le jour de gloire est arrivé! Contre nous de la tyrannie, L'étendard sanglant est levé...
  • My brain refuses to process the idea of the Normans singing the Marseillaise.
  • Gee, I thought you were talking about Hastings Kilgore, who hates the French, Cyclopses, ex-wives, his brother and Elliot Krauthammer.
  • A pity Harald Hardraada didn't make it a month earlier.
  • Stand up and sing the Hastings fight song!
  • A linguist friend tells me Your linguist friend has a good story, but the one thing I know about the influence of Norman French on English is that we don't know a lot of the details. English language texts between 1066 and c1250(? maybe later?) are very few and far between - they exist (I have a friend who is writing on several), but our knowledge of how the Norman Invasion changed English is largely based on our knowledge of English in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, rather than earlier.
  • (not to say that the words didn't come from French, just that the timing is probably very unclear. And also that while new words are often adopted for new things or ideas, but others are adopted for a variety of reasons. The English had a word for the skull before they adopted "skull" from the Norse languages - probably Danish - but for some reason the Norse word replaced the Old English.) -------- Back to 1066 - that was the beggining of the end. Long live King Harold!
  • > for some reason the Norse word replaced the Old English I thought Old English was close to Norse anyway?
  • LINGUIST FIGHT!!!
  • I like how the farm words for things (cow, chicken, swine, etc) stayed Saxon but the kitchen words turned French (beef, poultry, pork ...)
  • LINGUIST FIGHT!!! Math.
  • *clenches*
  • This isn't 'nam, cappy. THERE ARE FUCKING RULES!!!!!