111–120 of 166 posts
The vast majority of our grammar rules come from German, whereas our vocabulary is a lot of French, however, mixed in with several hundred years of cultural integration due to the English-speaking world being hotbeds for immigration.
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> It started, and continues, as an effort to legitimize a set of languages OK, but this is not a scientific definition. Nothing wrong with such words, but trying to logically reason about them is not going to be fruitful.
The subject of the quote is Creolistics, not the definition of Creole. If you are looking for scientific definitions of linguistic categories you are going to be very disappointed. Language involves humans. Language is messy . As well, any question that involves “meaning” must itself answer the question “to whom?” I answered from the perspective of (some) linguists, but as another user pointed out, non-linguists migh…
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Once upon a time I was walking with a friend around Amsterdam and a man walked up to me and asked me where something was (a nearby restaurant), I answered in English with directions and he thanked me, then a moment later this exchange happened: - Wait! You can speak Netherlands? - No. Sorry. - But you can! I am speaking it! - No you're not! You're speaking English! He just blinked and walked off, probably assuming I…
Very much reminds me of a Kids in the Hall skit from ages ago. Two guys are at a party, one says "hello", the other says -- in perfect English -- "Sorry I don't understand you, I don't speak English. please don't beat me up." The first guy assumes it's a joke and plays along until he gets annoyed at the perfect accent and responses ("no really, I don't understand what you're saying, nor what I'm saying, I've just pra…
It's closer to Dutch or German. I had no issue understanding transit signage in Amsterdam. The difficult words are calques and idioms that don't directly translate, i.e. opponthoud . Exit is uitgang , literally an "outgoing". Entrance is ingang , ingoing.
This is very much debatable. Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin, whereas half of English words are Latinic or Romanic. [1] Some properties of English's grammar are also more similar to Romance languages than Germanic ones. For example, whereas Germanic languages only mark tense on verbs, English verbs (like Spanish verbs) are marked with aspect in addition to tense: there is a distinction bet…
That's the % in the dictionary. More than half of Japanese vocabulary in the dictionary is based on Chinese but no one argues Japanese is a Chinese creole. I forget by whom but it was once pointed out to me that in some genres - ranging from drinking songs to nursery rhymes - the words that come from Old English often make up more than 90% of the words. Similarly, if you sample the dialog in a kitchen or office while people gossip the ratio is also going to skew heavily like 70 - 80% Germanic. (Japanese shows a similar effect with all its Chinese vocabulary.)
Indeed, it's not tricky to write about everyday grounded things with nothing but straight Anglo-Saxon roots. (I've been doing it so far this whole paragraph -- oh that's Greek.) Difficult to achieve similar results utilizing exclusively Latinate vocabulary.
Of course, a history book or engineering manual will be different, and Graeco-Latin vocabulary might well be in the majority there.
Is English just badly pronounced French [video]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40495393
Here is a different video by the same person (the `robWords` channel) “How to translate French words WITHOUT KNOWING FRENCH (3 clever tricks)” https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3BGaA3PC9tQ I learned a lot from this and continue to find words that these lessons apply to.
Creole is both a sociohistoric and linguistic term. The fact that the linguistic attributes are difficult to put boundaries on is extremely common for linguists: we won’t even claim to tell you what the definition of “word” is! As for whether English is a Creole, it’s important to understand the motivation for Creolistics at its origin. It started, and continues, as an effort to legitimize a set of languages that bef…
My personal definition of “word” is “a unit of semantic meaning”. Don’t ask me to define that. Are numbers words? Are abbreviations words? Can a words contain other words? Can the same sentence have a different number of words when spoken versus written? Yes to all, and more.
A good definition of "a unit of semantic meaning" might be "fulfills a 'part of speech' in a sentence" - but even that is hard in English. For example: "I set the table up" - up modifies set to create the "phrasal verb" set up, and isn't related to its typical meaning of position. But remove that little word and the whole meaning of the sentence drastically changes. I've seen "up" in this instance described as an adverb, which tends to be the "throwaway stat" for words that don't fit any of the other traditional parts of speech.
It's closer to Dutch or German. I had no issue understanding transit signage in Amsterdam. The difficult words are calques and idioms that don't directly translate, i.e. opponthoud . Exit is uitgang , literally an "outgoing". Entrance is ingang , ingoing.
And it's closer to Frisian than Dutch. If the Battle of Hastings hadn't happened, these languages would be easily and mutually comprehensible. But that just shows that English descends from a branch of West Germanic. It changed gradually over time, kept a core Germanic vocabulary for its basic terms, and borrowed a lot from other languages as it needed more complex concepts, moreso than Modern High German which allow…
As a Norwegian speaker, I can also pick up much of that dialogue without the subtitles (though I have the advantage of also speaking passable German)
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"Spelled" is a perfectly cromulent word in UK English (the best English).
Interesting. I thought spelt and learnt were UK English.
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>Here's my opinion: English is the result of a simplification of grammar caused by Old Norse and Old English crashing into each other with the same words but different grammar; then the French forced French usage in commerce, so most people started using a ton of French words with this English grammar. That last part sounds exactly like a creole. Grandparent's point is that you're stretching the meaning of the term t…
They definitely did think English was not a language worth engaging with. Even literate people in England barely thought of English as a language worth studying -- they wrote everything in Latin. Certainly the Norman conquerers only bothered to learn the minimum amount of English they had to to talk to the locals. That's why there are so many French words in English. I think the status of a "creole" language is sort…
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Germanic conquerors may be first partially reverse-colonized by the culture they conquered (which heavily romanized with Celtic substrate) and then later further colonized by norman conquerors who were themselves carriers of the remnants of the Roman cultural heritage. Germanic people (franks) conquered Gaul and you wouldn't call modern french a Germanic language. Linguistic dynamics are utterly fascinating and compl…
I've been listening to The Rest is History podcast lately, and a lot of this happened in Islam via converts. Tom Holland was saying that many now fundamental Islamic practices were imported into the faith via converts. For example such as praying 5 times a day was apparently a Zoroastrian practice.
The Eucharist may have originated in the cult of Dionysus.
Probably also Christmas is also a tradition that bears the roots of a pre-christian festivity that has been merged with / subsumed in Christian tradition