Originally Posted by
Jean
that is very close to what I think, too. Not as much Latin to us, but Latin as it was in the time of the latest stage of decline, and soon after the fall, of the Roman Empire.
A similar, though mirrored, situation can be seen a few centuries later elsewhere. Walter Scott says (Ivanhoe):
At court, and in the castles of the great nobles, where the pomp and state of a court was emulated, Norman-French was the only language employed; in courts of law, the pleadings and judgments were delivered in the same tongue. In short, French was the language of honour, of chivalry, and even of justice, while the far more manly and expressive Anglo-Saxon was abandoned to the use of rustics and hings, who knew no other.
So, such words as bed or cow stem from Saxon (German Bett, Kah), while pleasure or beef – a cow eaten – from Norman (French plaisir, boeuf). This state of things, however, can’t last for long:
… the necessary intercourse between the lords of the soil, and those oppressed inferior beings by whom that soil was cultivated, occasioned the gradual formation of a dialect, compounded betwixt the French and the Anglo-Saxon, in which they could render themselves mutually intelligible to each other; and from this necessity arose by degrees the structure of our present English language, in which the speech of the victors and the vanquished have been so happily blended together…
Thus, the existence of two languages in a society is usually due to some external reasons, and doesn’t last long. How come there are two languages in the world we’re talking about? Was there a conquest? Who conquered whom? What allowed the two languages to coexist for so long without blending?