91–100 of 203 posts
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English speakers themselves are quite capable of sorting this kind of thing out for themselves without waiting for the deliberations of the appointed whose decisions they'll probably ignore anyway - as do the French, one gathers. Life and English are both messy but we muddle through.
> Life and English are both messy but we muddle through. As a french, it is not muddling that I want but reasoning.
Huh I never noticed this peculiarity of English before. "I am an Italian/Australian/Canadian" - fine. "I am an English/French/Swedish" - hell no. Traditionally you'd say Frenchman, nowadays you'd avoid the gender and use "I am French" directly as an adjective.
Anyone know why -an words can be used as a noun and -sh words can't?
The Latin language was destroyed by pompous academicians who refused to allow the language to grow organically. The Academie Francaise has set in motion the destruction of the importance of the french language, because if you don't allow flexibility in your language, eventually people abandon it. Dante's Inferno was i believe one of the first novels done in the vernacular Italian. They can claim they are protecting i…
Spanish is the most spoken Latin language and each region has differences in how they use the language, just like the UK/US/Australia,... in how they use English.
EDIT: btw, my wife uses the word "computadora" for computer.. seems close enough. I think others use Ordenador in Spanish which is close to the French "ordenateur" or something like that.
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> Life and English are both messy but we muddle through. As a french, it is not muddling that I want but reasoning.
> As a french, it is not muddling that I want but reasoning. Huh I never noticed this peculiarity of English before. "I am an Italian/Australian/Canadian" - fine. "I am an English/French/Swedish" - hell no. Traditionally you'd say Frenchman, nowadays you'd avoid the gender and use "I am French" directly as an adjective. Anyone know why -an words can be used as a noun and -sh words can't?
The English language readily makes adjectives from nouns, but not the other way round. Nominalized adjectives are used for collective groups at most (which is why you can say "the French") but rarely become regular nouns.
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I don’t know French, but according to Wiktionary the main French word for “computer” is “ordinateur”, which is: > From Latin ordinator (“one who orders”), from ōrdinō (“to order, to organize”). > In its application to computing, it was coined by the professor of philology Jacques Perret in a letter dated 16 April 1955, in response to a request from IBM France, who believed the word calculateur was too restrictive in…
Spanish (in Spain) is El ordenador - I'm guessing mimicking the French? Lovely comment on some of the different words for computer in a variety of languages: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Talk:computer
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> Neither English, Spanish nor German have a dedicated powerful centralized institution that makes those decisions for the language, and I guess Chinese doesn't either? Among this list, only English doesn't have an institution. All three other languages (Spanish, German and Chinese) have multiple institutions, basically one per country that speaks the language, just like French.
German does not have such an institution - I am German and that's just a fact. Spanish might have such an institution, but it evidently does not work - Mexican Spanish != Spanish Spanish != .... Note that I did not say it does not exist, I said there is no "powerful centralized" instance deciding this. I stand to this judgement, also for Spanish. The extent of the actual influence wielded by the academie francaise se…
I believe French has this problem as well. I don't speak the language but I don't think the Quebecois and "mainland" French agree on the language or care for each others' variants.
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It’s interesting they’re taking the German route rather than the English route which is to erode most feminine gendered trade words: waitress, stewardess, actress, governess, baxter, etc. likewise the male equivalent have become neutral so actor, governor, baker, waiter, etc don’t only apply to men.
There have been various attempts to "neutralize" the French language in the past, without much success. There are many reasons for that, some of them cultural and political, but it's also a problem from a purely grammatical perspective. French is much more gendered than English, nouns, adjectives and certain verbal constructions reflect one of the two genders. Thus "eroding" an arbitrary selection of words to stop ha…
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None of those are accidents, or maybe all of those are accidents, like it is mostly common in languages
Define accident. None of them seem particularly well thought out, or planned.
The question is: is anything planned?
People don't even use the correct possessive version of 'it' on the internet.
Ox became Oxen because the plural 'en' was the productive plural construction at the time, and it made more sense than writing 'Oxes'.
For the other words there might have been a historical reason (or just no reason at all) for it.
What I find in total disarray is the anglosphere. Both epistemologically and socially. Britain and US are not the places to look up to anymore, nor even in pop culture.
We'll see in 10 years time, but I think continental Europe looks better than the anglosphere.
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Define accident. None of them seem particularly well thought out, or planned.
> None of them seem particularly well thought out, or planned. The question is: is anything planned? People don't even use the correct possessive version of 'it' on the internet. Ox became Oxen because the plural 'en' was the productive plural construction at the time, and it made more sense than writing 'Oxes'. For the other words there might have been a historical reason (or just no reason at all) for it.