12-04-2021, 01:15 AM
So I'm reading Koen's post and my first thought is "what does beame mean in Middle English?" And yet I see that the word is Dutch, "would assent" 
(Kidding, Koen, kidding!!)
It's funny that JKP and Koen both mention more Germanic words and fewer French/Romance words in Middle English, yet both words in my [qokeedy qokeedy qokeedy] = "neecə neecə neecə" = "nece nece neece" idea come from French. The Norman / French influence on the English language was a long process.
More Middle English than Finnish, yes. It so happens I have an interest in Uralic (Finno-Ugric), Eskimo-Aleut, and other circumpolar languages, so I actually studied Finnish for a year at university level as well as independently. It's much harder than a Germanic or Romance foreign language, to be sure, but in my opinion not necessarily all that much harder than other foreign languages for an English speaker. The main issue is that it's not really necessary to learn it, unless you literally intend to live in Finland. If for some reason it became practically necessary to learn it, it actually wouldn't be terribly more difficult to learn than Russian, and it would probably be objectively easier than Korean. The difference is that Korean is much more practically useful, so the practical motivation is there for Korean in a way that it just can't be for Finnish. The authors of my Finnish language learning textbook invented a brilliant scenario where a South African, a Russian, and a Brazilian are living in Finland, and literally the only way they can communicate is in Finnish -- the Brazilian only speaks Portuguese, so the South African can't even use the Spanish that he studied! But to be honest this is a rather unlikely scenario.
I can tell you that in the United States, the average English speaker can surely read more Spanish than Middle English, because it's hard to escape some exposure to Spanish in most places, and because so many words are cognate due to the extremely heavy influence of French and Latin on modern English and on our non-basic vocabulary in particular. Of course this only holds true for modern Spanish, not for say reading Cervantes, and not for medieval Spanish.
(Kidding, Koen, kidding!!)It's funny that JKP and Koen both mention more Germanic words and fewer French/Romance words in Middle English, yet both words in my [qokeedy qokeedy qokeedy] = "neecə neecə neecə" = "nece nece neece" idea come from French. The Norman / French influence on the English language was a long process.
More Middle English than Finnish, yes. It so happens I have an interest in Uralic (Finno-Ugric), Eskimo-Aleut, and other circumpolar languages, so I actually studied Finnish for a year at university level as well as independently. It's much harder than a Germanic or Romance foreign language, to be sure, but in my opinion not necessarily all that much harder than other foreign languages for an English speaker. The main issue is that it's not really necessary to learn it, unless you literally intend to live in Finland. If for some reason it became practically necessary to learn it, it actually wouldn't be terribly more difficult to learn than Russian, and it would probably be objectively easier than Korean. The difference is that Korean is much more practically useful, so the practical motivation is there for Korean in a way that it just can't be for Finnish. The authors of my Finnish language learning textbook invented a brilliant scenario where a South African, a Russian, and a Brazilian are living in Finland, and literally the only way they can communicate is in Finnish -- the Brazilian only speaks Portuguese, so the South African can't even use the Spanish that he studied! But to be honest this is a rather unlikely scenario.
I can tell you that in the United States, the average English speaker can surely read more Spanish than Middle English, because it's hard to escape some exposure to Spanish in most places, and because so many words are cognate due to the extremely heavy influence of French and Latin on modern English and on our non-basic vocabulary in particular. Of course this only holds true for modern Spanish, not for say reading Cervantes, and not for medieval Spanish.