Poetry is more Germanic than prose | Hacker News Reader

Poetry is more Germanic than prose

jlauf.com

2 pointsjlauf4 comments

Whats the data weights going into the source? Seems a bit off to not clarify the relative linguistic contributions going in, to characterise them by source language coming out.

Given the amount of french poetry in the courtly love cycles, I'd be amazed if the corpus included them at high volume reporting such low french contributions. On the other hand if it's saga heavy, or has a lot of German romanticism influenced stuff like the sublime (good french word that...) then well.. DUH

It's all lyric poetry (as specified) and all English language, both American and British. Of course, there are influences non-English poetic traditions here and there, but quantifying those is difficult and I'm not sure they'd correlate with the data meaningfully. No non-English words were counted. That'd be another interesting mini research project!

As for French, French is low because Latin-derived French goes in the Latin bucket. Only where there's no clear Latin derivation is it listed as French/Norman in origin. If there comes to be more interest, I'd be happy to share more specifics on the methodology. More a proof of concept!

You appear to be saying you select origin but not always: you stop in Germanic but press through romance to root Latin.

I think I'd stop at the first source. It's more consistent. We got orange through naranja from Spain. There's no Latin in orange. But in your methodology we got amorous from Latin not French. What's the Ur language behind german?

It stops at whatever is closest to PIE, if applicable. Then, I divided it up into what I think are the easiest to understand families. Germanic (not German, necessarily) words are generally categorized as a distinct sub-branch. Latinate words are. Greek words are. So for naranja, it will categorize that as World/other, since it's not Latinate. Amorous would be Latin.

There is no 'language behind German'. Germanic is just a grouping for any word that derives from one of the related Germanic languages (oftentimes going back to Proto-Germanic). There's certainly another interesting study you could do of the languages of most direct borrowing! But this is in regards to language families or groupings which are significant for English. This would represent something much different, though. Some words, like 'seminar', which have passed through German, would be listed as German, when they're really ultimately Latinate. In my opinion the vibe of the word has much more to do with language family, as any language can be borrowed from regardless of origin.

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