Carol's questions for New Steve Was: Tempest in a teapot/cup/kettle

[Geoff Bannister]

--- In HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com, "Cabal" <md at ...> wrote:
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com
> [mailto:HPFGU-OTChatter at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of potioncat
> Sent: Wednesday, January 14, 2009 7:41 AM
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> Subject: [HPFGU-OTChatter] Re: Carol's questions for New Steve Was: Tempest
> in a teapot/cup/kettle
 
> But I wonder why the US uses the term buck at all? At the time we were 
> building the country and naming animals, we were still English.
 
md:
> English? Spanish. French. Virtually everyone that could get on a boat and
> come here. Plus, don't forget, the natives who had already built here. We
> didn't build this country, we conquered it, plundered it (still are) and
> purchased other humans to build it. 
> 
> But, that aside, English is an adoptive language, very little of it is
> "ours." First, it was actually German first, since what is now England was
> originally settled by Germanic tribes, which were then combined with the
> conquering / settling Anglos and Saxons but didn't emerge as English as we
> know it until after the French occupation. So the English language was and
> is many languages all put together. 

Geoff:
Strictly speaking, that isn't accurate. At the time of the Norman Conquest, 
the general language of Britain was Anglo-Saxon. German and English are 
closely related languages. During the early years of the Normans, French 
was the official language and Anglo-Saxon was left in the hands of the 
yeomans and peasants and in the intervening period, they did interesting 
things like largely demolishing gender and annihilating most of the case 
structure and inflection, the combination of the two ending up by giving 
us possibly one of the most expressive languages in the world.

Tolkien was a great upholder of the Anglo-Saxon/German background of 
the language and scorned the "French connection".

Like any living language, English absorbs new words and often adapts them 
to its own usage.

Moving on to bucks and stags, Tim obviously lives in the wild, untamed wilds 
and trackless forests and mountains of East Anglia. :-))

I live in an area where deer hunting has been a part of the culture for years; 
I do not hear the word buck being used. There are certainly a number of White 
Harts around - I had a meal in the one at Exford just a couple of weeks ago.

One use of stag in connection with men is "stag night" where a bridegroom
-to-be gets together with male friends for an evening close to the marriage.
I suspect that this might be the same usage on the west side of the pond?