Ironically, same with Japanese. They have an entire alphabet dedicated to foreign words, Katakana. You want a hamburger and a beer? That’s a “ハンバーガーとビール” (Hanbāgā to Biru). Coffee from Starbucks on your way to work? That’s a “ドライブスルーコーヒー” (Doraibusurūkohi - a drive-thru coffee). Better fried chicken than anyone has a right to can be found at the “コンビニ” (Konbini - aka the convenience store). Learning Japanese it’s rife with these borrowed words. Half the time it’s “you’re fucking kidding.” The other half the time it’s learning some insane formalism that makes saying “thank you” take five minutes.
Awhile back, I watched an anime about camping. It was chill, and cute, and I enjoyed it. But every time they stopped to discuss some kind of camping equipment, it was all English loan words, and it drove me a bit bonkers.
What do you mean Japanese just straight up borrowed the phrase “ground tarp” from English??? Surely they already have words for that!
Ya Katakana was actually super intuitive if you could recognize and pronounce the symbols. I was amazed at how well I got along there with basically just the alphabet lmaoo.
What’s cool is how English then adds those loanwords or portmanteau back into its lexicon like karaoke or, as I’m seeing more recently, egg sando. I really love how languages do that.
He had another one I think recently about a dentist who kept dropping random English words in sentences while talking with Dogen but he had katakana pronunciation so it was basically impossible to understand (one example was he threw in the word “jaw” but said “jō” instead).
I have been saying it for years, English is a very informal and open language, have fun with it. Sky water is not technically a wrong way to refer to rain, liquid laundry soup is absolutely a sauce for your laundry, dish bricks, day star, the list goes on
I think this is one of the reasons why English (or it’s descendants) will forever be the international language of trade. If it’s not your first language, it’s damn difficult to make yourself sound like a native speaker, but it’s damn easy to make yourself understood.
I think you’re confusing a reasonably short period in recent history with “forever”.
In History there were quite a lot of “international languages of trade” other than English. It seems to depend very much on which nations were the top empire of the age and because the last two top empires were English-speaking countries (first Britain, then after that the United States), the English language has been dominant as a second language for a over a century now, but before that the English language already existed in a form very similar to the modern form and yet it wasn’t at all an “international language of trade” (in fact, at least in Europe, before English it was French that was the dominant language of trade).
I bet that the next “international language of trade” will be Chinese.
On the flip side, a lot of other languages have retained structures which require a detailed knowing of grammar in part because they haven’t needed to be learned by amateurs.
There weren’t many amateurs desiring to learn English back in eleventh—fifteenth centuries, when it was losing the remaining complexity in the grammar.
There were a lot of native French speakers in England at that time, so a bunch of normalizing like what happened a couple hundred years earlier with the Norse meeting Anglo-Saxons
Idk about Vikings, but to my knowledge Normans didn’t give a crap about English, speaking their language among the ruling class, and all documents were in French. This is evidenced by the fact that there’s little written record of how English developed at the time. On the other hand, French was perceived as prestigious, since people had to deal with the ruling class and bureaucracy in French, thus many ‘high-society’ words were borrowed into English — hence typically when talking about everyday matters, the words are mostly of Germanic or Norse origin, and grandiose abstract ideas or upper-class life are French/Latin.
It’s not like trade with Normans started only after the conquest, after all.
Yes, and because of that there was a lot of interaction and blending, right up to the point where trials were required to be performed in English in the mid-14th century, then in the 15th everything was switched to English.
The Peterborough Chronicle perfectly demonstrates the transition from Old English to Middle. It was written over about a hundred years (11th to 12th Century) and gradually starts incorporating French vocabulary and dropping old Germanic grammar.
I speak several languages, most of which are Romance languages (such as French and Italian) which have a specific word order which pretty close to english (though adjective come after nouns rather than before, plus there are some additional verbal times though those are uncommon to use).
Amongst those I also speak Dutch and German, which have quite a different word order (though, curiously, Dutch from Belgium has a similar word order to French) and I constantly fuck it up (especially in German, which is the one of the two I speak worse) and the natives always understand me.
In my experience learning two of those languages just by living there (and with people that are learning my own native language), it’s using the wrong words that confuses people, then using the wrong accent (mainly by putting the emphasis in the wrong syllable) and only as a far third is word order and even that only in specific cases such expressions (where it’s the whole expression as is that has a meaning, rather the meaning being a composition of the meaning of the individual words in it).
In my experience there really is no special quality of the English language that makes it easier to understand when people use a wrong word order.
True, though I would personally count that as a bad thing. Purity of language, to me is irrelevant. That opinion may be coloured by the fact that I’m a native English speaker, and there hasn’t been anything resembling purity in this language for thousands of years. To me, the point of language is open communication. Any impediment to that is a negative.
Whereas English has adopted so many idioms from other languages with different grammar that we’re entirely comfortable with the exotic phrasing, or if it’s ambiguous we make puns and/or poetry from it.
I remember an interview with Lisa Kudrow in which she described her French boyfriend’s failure to remember the English word for toes, and said they were foot fingers.
English: if the people you’re talking to understand what you’re saying, you’re ok. Even if the people you’re talking to don’t understand what you’re saying, you’re still ok. Just be fancy with your words, and everyone will like it.
It’s the same in Dutch - “aardapple” - but using the Dutch words for earth and apple rather than the French ones.
And don’t get me started on French numbering - for example 98 is “four twenties eigtheen”.
One doesn’t get it for one’s own language because all the weird stuff is “normal” but when you’re learning other languages you discovered they’re all riddled with funny constructs like this (and then there are expressions, which are often hilarious - for example on of the Dutch expression for wasting time on small details literally translates to “fucking ants”)
Originally tomatoes were called pommes d’amour. There is pommes de terre (potatoes) pommes de pin (pinecones). If we would translate literally pomme de pin it would give us pineapple.
There were also other fruits beginning with pomme originally but I can’t seem to recall them.
I still like the theory that the industrial revolution kicked off in England due to the English language.
English has an amalgam of several different root languages. This gives it an unusual amount of flexibility and granularity. This helps hugely with crystallising newer ideas into words. This, in turn gave English a slight advantage over France, Germany etc.
English grammar is the opposite of flexible, since it relies on word order where other languages use inflections. In Russian, you can often jumble the word order, and the meaning wouldn’t change. Vocabulary of Russian was extensively borrowed from Greek, Arabic and Turkic languages in middle ages, German and French during the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries, and English in the twentieth, particularly in regard to trade, new technology, or societal developments. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that a language borrows or invents words when there’s a shade of meaning missing in the existing vocabulary, that is precisely represented by the new word. None of that has anything to do with industrial development, as you may have noticed from the fact that Russia was an agrarian country into early twentieth century.
Your idea is a form of linguistic relativity, which has only some evidence for a small subset of it.
Like 25% of English words are straight from Latin, and up to 75% have etymological roots in Latin (according to one Latin professor). And the grammatical rules are not divided equally by the “source” languages, either. It is an amalgam, but the flexibility stemming from the roots, is not so simple.
(Also maybe hilariously in this context, as a native Finnish speaker, to me English appears as a very stiff language. In my own, word order does not really matter, you can basically create as many new words as you like, with combining words and switching the endings to change their grammatical role, and most words can be bent, to have a lot of different nuance with just tweaking the endings a bit. The classic funny example being: juoksen, juoksentelisinkohan / I run, I wonder if I should run aimlessly around in short bursts.)
My favourite examples of English rigidity are adjectival hierarchy and ablaut reduplication. Very few native English speakers realise they apply either of these rules and yet they are applied almost without exception.
Oh they do, but the weird multi root nature of English, and it’s tendency to aggressively ransack other languages for vocabulary tends to give it a little more wiggle room for describing ideas. The cost being it’s evil to learn, compared to a lot of languages. Just try reading the poem “The chaos” aloud.
I speak 7 different european languages and they’re all like that.
It’s not by chance that “yogurt” is pretty much the same word in just about all languages (different spelling at times, similar sounding), being originally a Turkish word, and similarly for “helicopter” which comes from the Greek, whilst all the ways to say “tea” in the whole wide world pretty much derive from just three root words - tea, cha and chai.
My own native language - Portuguese - seems to have spread around the world for just nautical terms around sailing and pretty much nothing else which kinda makes sense since at one point when Portugal was an empire, that’s the technology is developed. (Curiously the word in India for a certain kind of bread - “Pao” - derives from the Portuguese word for bread - “Pão” - probably because the Indian city of Goa was controlled by Portugal for a couple of centuries),
it’s tendency to aggressively ransack other languages for vocabulary
I feel like this hasn’t happened as much as people think in the last century or so, it’s much more the other way around, almost every language now adds a lot of english vocabulary.
the word first appeared in English in the later part of the 19th century. By the mid-20th century smorgasbord was being used outside of food-related contexts to refer to something that comprises a mixture or assemblage of different parts.
One nice thing about English, it will lexical borrow from you in an instant.
We just love new ways to say old boring stuff.
Ironically, same with Japanese. They have an entire alphabet dedicated to foreign words, Katakana. You want a hamburger and a beer? That’s a “ハンバーガーとビール” (Hanbāgā to Biru). Coffee from Starbucks on your way to work? That’s a “ドライブスルーコーヒー” (Doraibusurūkohi - a drive-thru coffee). Better fried chicken than anyone has a right to can be found at the “コンビニ” (Konbini - aka the convenience store). Learning Japanese it’s rife with these borrowed words. Half the time it’s “you’re fucking kidding.” The other half the time it’s learning some insane formalism that makes saying “thank you” take five minutes.
It’s a syllabary.
Awhile back, I watched an anime about camping. It was chill, and cute, and I enjoyed it. But every time they stopped to discuss some kind of camping equipment, it was all English loan words, and it drove me a bit bonkers.
What do you mean Japanese just straight up borrowed the phrase “ground tarp” from English??? Surely they already have words for that!
Ya Katakana was actually super intuitive if you could recognize and pronounce the symbols. I was amazed at how well I got along there with basically just the alphabet lmaoo.
What’s cool is how English then adds those loanwords or portmanteau back into its lexicon like karaoke or, as I’m seeing more recently, egg sando. I really love how languages do that.
One of my favorite Dogen videos, about how many loanwords can sound normal in a conversation
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pW4AiEqKGto
He had another one I think recently about a dentist who kept dropping random English words in sentences while talking with Dogen but he had katakana pronunciation so it was basically impossible to understand (one example was he threw in the word “jaw” but said “jō” instead).
I have been saying it for years, English is a very informal and open language, have fun with it. Sky water is not technically a wrong way to refer to rain, liquid laundry soup is absolutely a sauce for your laundry, dish bricks, day star, the list goes on
I think this is one of the reasons why English (or it’s descendants) will forever be the international language of trade. If it’s not your first language, it’s damn difficult to make yourself sound like a native speaker, but it’s damn easy to make yourself understood.
I think you’re confusing a reasonably short period in recent history with “forever”.
In History there were quite a lot of “international languages of trade” other than English. It seems to depend very much on which nations were the top empire of the age and because the last two top empires were English-speaking countries (first Britain, then after that the United States), the English language has been dominant as a second language for a over a century now, but before that the English language already existed in a form very similar to the modern form and yet it wasn’t at all an “international language of trade” (in fact, at least in Europe, before English it was French that was the dominant language of trade).
I bet that the next “international language of trade” will be Chinese.
Words ordering with grammar can be unimportant to being known.
On the flip side, a lot of other languages have retained structures which require a detailed knowing of grammar in part because they haven’t needed to be learned by amateurs.
There weren’t many amateurs desiring to learn English back in eleventh—fifteenth centuries, when it was losing the remaining complexity in the grammar.
There were a lot of native French speakers in England at that time, so a bunch of normalizing like what happened a couple hundred years earlier with the Norse meeting Anglo-Saxons
Idk about Vikings, but to my knowledge Normans didn’t give a crap about English, speaking their language among the ruling class, and all documents were in French. This is evidenced by the fact that there’s little written record of how English developed at the time. On the other hand, French was perceived as prestigious, since people had to deal with the ruling class and bureaucracy in French, thus many ‘high-society’ words were borrowed into English — hence typically when talking about everyday matters, the words are mostly of Germanic or Norse origin, and grandiose abstract ideas or upper-class life are French/Latin.
It’s not like trade with Normans started only after the conquest, after all.
Yes, and because of that there was a lot of interaction and blending, right up to the point where trials were required to be performed in English in the mid-14th century, then in the 15th everything was switched to English. The Peterborough Chronicle perfectly demonstrates the transition from Old English to Middle. It was written over about a hundred years (11th to 12th Century) and gradually starts incorporating French vocabulary and dropping old Germanic grammar.
I speak several languages, most of which are Romance languages (such as French and Italian) which have a specific word order which pretty close to english (though adjective come after nouns rather than before, plus there are some additional verbal times though those are uncommon to use).
Amongst those I also speak Dutch and German, which have quite a different word order (though, curiously, Dutch from Belgium has a similar word order to French) and I constantly fuck it up (especially in German, which is the one of the two I speak worse) and the natives always understand me.
In my experience learning two of those languages just by living there (and with people that are learning my own native language), it’s using the wrong words that confuses people, then using the wrong accent (mainly by putting the emphasis in the wrong syllable) and only as a far third is word order and even that only in specific cases such expressions (where it’s the whole expression as is that has a meaning, rather the meaning being a composition of the meaning of the individual words in it).
In my experience there really is no special quality of the English language that makes it easier to understand when people use a wrong word order.
Mate we’re all amateurs here. Unless you are being paid to learn languages
I’m not paid specifically to speak English, but I feel like meetings would go a lot longer without it
True, though I would personally count that as a bad thing. Purity of language, to me is irrelevant. That opinion may be coloured by the fact that I’m a native English speaker, and there hasn’t been anything resembling purity in this language for thousands of years. To me, the point of language is open communication. Any impediment to that is a negative.
I lik your way of doyng byzness
They’re talking about English, not Welsh
I just fixed your dumb spelling >:(
Here he is, fuckin get em
Whereas English has adopted so many idioms from other languages with different grammar that we’re entirely comfortable with the exotic phrasing, or if it’s ambiguous we make puns and/or poetry from it.
I remember an interview with Lisa Kudrow in which she described her French boyfriend’s failure to remember the English word for toes, and said they were foot fingers.
English: if the people you’re talking to understand what you’re saying, you’re ok. Even if the people you’re talking to don’t understand what you’re saying, you’re still ok. Just be fancy with your words, and everyone will like it.
In french, that’s really the name that is given to them, colloquially : doigts de pied (foot fingers)
The real term is orteils (toes)
In Québec, we don’t say that and I didn’t even know French people say that.
They’re really good at it, too. Sometimes it’s even charming. For example, potatoes are “earth apples.”
It’s the same in Dutch - “aardapple” - but using the Dutch words for earth and apple rather than the French ones.
And don’t get me started on French numbering - for example 98 is “four twenties eigtheen”.
One doesn’t get it for one’s own language because all the weird stuff is “normal” but when you’re learning other languages you discovered they’re all riddled with funny constructs like this (and then there are expressions, which are often hilarious - for example on of the Dutch expression for wasting time on small details literally translates to “fucking ants”)
I wonder if the meaning of pomme was broader in Old French, like how meat (from mete) used to mean food in Old English.
I vaguely heard that ‘berry’ and iirc ‘apple’ were used the same way in English, one for small fruits and the other for larger ones.
Yes it was the case, broadly pomme meant fruit.
Originally tomatoes were called pommes d’amour. There is pommes de terre (potatoes) pommes de pin (pinecones). If we would translate literally pomme de pin it would give us pineapple.
There were also other fruits beginning with pomme originally but I can’t seem to recall them.
Pomme comes from latin pomum which could be used for any fruit, apple specifically was malum.
I knew someone who used the term “bird leaves” which I find hilarious.
kennings are great
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenning
Apparently a lot of Old English poetry was written with ample use of kennings, e.g. ‘Beowulf’.
Laundry soup, yumm
I still like the theory that the industrial revolution kicked off in England due to the English language.
English has an amalgam of several different root languages. This gives it an unusual amount of flexibility and granularity. This helps hugely with crystallising newer ideas into words. This, in turn gave English a slight advantage over France, Germany etc.
English grammar is the opposite of flexible, since it relies on word order where other languages use inflections. In Russian, you can often jumble the word order, and the meaning wouldn’t change. Vocabulary of Russian was extensively borrowed from Greek, Arabic and Turkic languages in middle ages, German and French during the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries, and English in the twentieth, particularly in regard to trade, new technology, or societal developments. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that a language borrows or invents words when there’s a shade of meaning missing in the existing vocabulary, that is precisely represented by the new word. None of that has anything to do with industrial development, as you may have noticed from the fact that Russia was an agrarian country into early twentieth century.
Your idea is a form of linguistic relativity, which has only some evidence for a small subset of it.
Like 25% of English words are straight from Latin, and up to 75% have etymological roots in Latin (according to one Latin professor). And the grammatical rules are not divided equally by the “source” languages, either. It is an amalgam, but the flexibility stemming from the roots, is not so simple.
(Also maybe hilariously in this context, as a native Finnish speaker, to me English appears as a very stiff language. In my own, word order does not really matter, you can basically create as many new words as you like, with combining words and switching the endings to change their grammatical role, and most words can be bent, to have a lot of different nuance with just tweaking the endings a bit. The classic funny example being: juoksen, juoksentelisinkohan / I run, I wonder if I should run aimlessly around in short bursts.)
My favourite examples of English rigidity are adjectival hierarchy and ablaut reduplication. Very few native English speakers realise they apply either of these rules and yet they are applied almost without exception.
You think German and French don’t borrow words?
Oh they do, but the weird multi root nature of English, and it’s tendency to aggressively ransack other languages for vocabulary tends to give it a little more wiggle room for describing ideas. The cost being it’s evil to learn, compared to a lot of languages. Just try reading the poem “The chaos” aloud.
I speak 7 different european languages and they’re all like that.
It’s not by chance that “yogurt” is pretty much the same word in just about all languages (different spelling at times, similar sounding), being originally a Turkish word, and similarly for “helicopter” which comes from the Greek, whilst all the ways to say “tea” in the whole wide world pretty much derive from just three root words - tea, cha and chai.
My own native language - Portuguese - seems to have spread around the world for just nautical terms around sailing and pretty much nothing else which kinda makes sense since at one point when Portugal was an empire, that’s the technology is developed. (Curiously the word in India for a certain kind of bread - “Pao” - derives from the Portuguese word for bread - “Pão” - probably because the Indian city of Goa was controlled by Portugal for a couple of centuries),
I feel like this hasn’t happened as much as people think in the last century or so, it’s much more the other way around, almost every language now adds a lot of english vocabulary.
You have a whole smörgåsbord of recent word thefts
Source
You got anything more recent?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Swedish_origin
Moped
Arguably ombudsman also counts
Not sure what a dish brick is, but yeah, the others make sense 👍
Edit: just figured it out: it’s a Lego piece shaped like a dish
I was assuming one of these things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Detergent_tablet.jpg
Could also be a brick that’s designated for smashing dishes.
I’d say it’s a plate
My kid calls them “nose holes”.
I love the silly things we say!
They mean a slightly different way
but still connect to things I know
and make the silly language grow.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos
My family listening to the children’s grammar and syntax mistakes