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- "Quis Anglice loquitur?"
9 Comments
Yes, it was rather Ænglisc, than the non existent English.
They say it was called "Lingua Anglo-Saxonia":
https://la.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_Anglo-Saxonica
It looks like English with a lot more of Germanic roots, and without the Norman/French roots.
Do you talk old Saxon? Could you make a course one day on Duo?
Like, you have level ten in German and you couldn't guess "Ic sprece" means the same as "Ich spreche" in German? or that "englisce" means "English"?
Certainly not the Yanks, even though they insist on representing it with that flag.
Notāte bēne: Even though Anglice is translated as "English" in this sentence (and indeed on the exercises which ask for a translation of "English" with a US flag inside a word balloon), this word does not mean "English" in the general sense. That would be lingua anglica — in the same sense that lingua latina denotes the Latin Language. Same with lingua hispanica and lingua germanica, by the way.
What does anglice mean, then? It means, roughly, "Englishly." It is an adverbial form of the adjective anglicus, anglica, anglicum "English." In ancient Indo-European languages, when one spoke a language, the name of the language was used as an adverb to modify "speak" or "talk". Latin is like this, as well as Ancient Greek, and Hittite as well (they referred to their own language as speaking nešili, that is, in the way of the people of the city of Neša).
