91–95 of 95 posts
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> all non-PIE languages besides Basque have been lost Do you mean non-PIE European languages?
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Don't jump down people's throats based on uncharitable readings of what they wrote.
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> all non-PIE languages besides Basque have been lost Do you mean non-PIE European languages?
Yes of course (I would generally expect most European linguists and anthropologists to be more interested in studying European languages due to obvious reasons).
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And then since pronunciation shifts, you’ll periodically want to have international treaties adjusting spelling, hyphenation, capitalization and other rules, as the German-speakers have done. Or freeze it once and for all as the French have chosen to do?
I think the pronunciation shifts might be the real issue with English. All languages shift, but I've got the feeling that English shifts a lot more, faster and more dramatically than most languages. And I'm not sure why. Dutch seems to be quite the opposite: spelling changes a lot. The best way to read old Dutch texts is to sound them out in your head, because the words look totally different, but they sound the same…
Probably because they go off to colonize very far away places and then develop separately.
Isn't Afrikaans pronunciation shifted Dutch?
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I think the pronunciation shifts might be the real issue with English. All languages shift, but I've got the feeling that English shifts a lot more, faster and more dramatically than most languages. And I'm not sure why. Dutch seems to be quite the opposite: spelling changes a lot. The best way to read old Dutch texts is to sound them out in your head, because the words look totally different, but they sound the same…
> All languages shift, but I've got the feeling that English shifts a lot more, faster and more dramatically than most languages. And I'm not sure why. Probably because they go off to colonize very far away places and then develop separately. Isn't Afrikaans pronunciation shifted Dutch?
I've got the feeling that most of the shifts in English don't come from the colonies, though, but more from mainland Britain. Various city accents rising in popularity and spreading their quirks around the country, like the recent i -> oi shift.
Also, I heard recently that American is actually closer to how English used to be in the 17th-18th century than UK English, which has had more development, including color -> colour and that sort of stuff.