Languages you didn't know you borrow words from (1)

[Betty Karlson]

Let's discuss some of the linguistic history of the English language.

We all know that English is what you get when you mix Angles and Saxons (with a hint of Jutes and Frisians) and top it off with a liberal dose of French. Most of us probably know that there is a susbstantial body of loan words from the Norse and Danish languages. Some Celtic, obviously, must not be forgotten.

But there are substratums (layers of loan words) that you didn't know about. You may not even have heard of the languages they have been derived from. And we might as well discuss them, just because we can.

Part 1: The Cananephates

Cananephates/ Kaninefaten/ Cananafati were swineherds in what is now The Netherlands. They had settled in the only place that, BCE, was habitable (no dykes and polders yet): the coast. Their language may or may not have been related to the languages of the European Hydronyms System. The EHS were the predominant group of languages in Western Europe before Celts, Italians, and Germanic tribes stomped in and took over the place(s). Little of them remains, exept a tendency to call a river something with R(h) and N - like Rhine, Rhône, Arno, Irno, and so on.

There is indeed a river Rijn floating through the coastal regions of the Netherlands. But the Cananephates left another contribution to the history of our language: swineherding jargon.

It is in the nature of any language to copy foreign words for distinctions that their own vocabulary doesn't make. That's why we don't say Bread Disc, but Pizza. That's why we don't say super-king, but emperor. And that is why we talk about pigs and soughs. Because those words were copied into the Saxonian and Frisian languages - and later retained in the developing English language) from the language of the Cananephates. Pig (Big in Dutch and Frisian) and Sough (Zeug, Sau) made meanings possible that the old word Swine just didn't cover or specify. As did a lot of swineherding oddities that haven't made it to our digital era.

The Cananephates are not attested in AD years. The toponyms at the Dutch coast indicate that they were violently replaced by the Frisians, before those gave way to the Saxons and Franks. Almost nothing of them remains, except some words for the animal you show to your son or daughter says: "oink".