121–130 of 166 posts
Is English just badly pronounced French [video]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40495393
https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/spelling-reform.h... If so it is equally badly spelled German.
(E.g.compare ship, schip, Schip, skib, skip vs. Schiff, or day, dag, Dag, dag, vs. Tag etc. - we'd have a far neater, gradual Germanic transition around the North Sea if Low German had "won".
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French is just badly pronounced Latin/Italian. Seriously, French is just a very crassified Romance language. As a near-native French speaker I was shocked one time in Paris at a restaurant where our server was from Italy and pronounce every letter in every French word and I still understood him. Dropping 's's (and leaving behind a circumflex to remind one of the dropped 's')? That's a pretty crass evolution (but see…
You're totally right, but just a minor correction: the word oui comes from oïl, which was the way to say "yes" in a family of languages called the langues d'oïl. [1] The word oïl is a shortened form of hoc ille in Latin. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langues_d%27o%C3%AFl
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"that strategy of borrowing a word but giving it a slightly narrower meaning" – I think this happens with most borrowing, into any language. E.g. "opsjon" in Norwegian is from "option" but only means stock/legal options, never used in the common meaning of "choices". (And the video's own example with "les peoples".) But my favorite example is when going into English from Norse, "fjord" has a quite narrow meaning in E…
Well of course, fjords should have a narrow meaning. That's kind of what separates them from bays isn't it?
Bukt or gulf are the words mostly use for major bays, but bukt in particular can also be used for very short, narrow inlets, while fjords are used for some of our largest bays.
The Oslo fjord for example, is quite broad and open for most of its length. Most of the smaller bays in the fjord are bukter, but the largest, longest of them are also named fjords.
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English verbs (like Spanish verbs) are marked with aspect in addition to tense: there is a distinction between "I played tennis"/"I have played tennis"/"I was playing tennis". Where is the verb marking you speak of? Because I don't see any difference between played and played . Your example of how English uses auxiliary verbs to convey different verb aspects is a Germanic construct. I don't really understand how you…
I think they're saying the difference is between "played" and "have played." The difference is more distinguished in other verbs, like "ate" vs "have eaten." The word "ate" is the past tense, and "eaten" is the participle. And it's different in that "have" implies some sort of connection to the present. You wouldn't say "When I was a kid, I have played a lot of video games." You'd say "When I was a kid, I played a lo…
In German, this doesn't happen. Imperfect tense is often formed by using a "-te" ending to the verb (so "spiel(en)" -> "spielte"), while the past participle prepends "ge-" and appends "t" or "en" (so "gespielt" - (I have) "played"). The form "... was playing" would also exist, "... war spielen", and again with a difference how the infinitive is formed (-ing vs. -en).
To me, grammar of temporal forms in English is more Romance-language than German language. The fact that English lost any form of case, and most of gender, is neither German nor Romance though.
I sometimes used to joke with English friends that the language is the least common denominator of all the people overrunning the Island in the last 3000 years. Use a bit of everything, leave all the hard stuff out, and write it in a nonphonetic way like Irish.
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> The Anglo-Saxon's colonisation by the Romans That never happened; it was the other way around.
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'm not sure if any such "foundational" documents exist for English.
English is basically a dialect of German spoken with French words. 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.
1. Word order
2. Morphology (ie you combine morphemes to create words differently in english and german)
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.
Not the interesting part, I think.
Is the English un- a word? Before you reflexively say no, consider that it has a specific meaning even though it never appears on its own and never receives word stress.
Is the French je a word? Before you reflexively say yes, consider that it never appears on its own and never receives word stress even though it has a specific meaning.
Is the Latin que a word? (The Q in SPQR, “senatus populusque Romanus”, although perhaps it’d be more authentic to write “SENATVSPOPVLVSQVEROMANVS”.) It has a well-defined meaning: “and”. It goes after whatever word you’d put “and” before; not syntactic constituent, word. It counts as a part of that word for the purposes of stress, so POpulus but popuLUSque.
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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.
Well, a good example is "ice cream" - I've seen it described as a "compound word without a hyphen" - which is fair because while ice cream has ice and cream as things that are used to make it, "ice cream" is definitely something distinct that is not trivially decomposable from the individual words. A good definition of "a unit of semantic meaning" might be "fulfills a 'part of speech' in a sentence" - but even that i…
Another I like is contractions. If say “can not” but it sounds like “can’t”, how many words is that?
I might say that “not” does not have any semantic meaning in isolation, as its only use is to negate the meaning of some other word, so perhaps “can not” and “can’t” are both just one word.
Perhaps such graphemes and phonemes aren’t actually words.
Another interesting question is whether words are truly a product of language (the natural skill) or writing (the synthetic technology). Did “words” exist before writing?
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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…
Which 'aspect' is supposed to be missing in Germanic language verbs? Because I can say those three example forms (aspect tenses?) in both Swedish and German without any limitation.
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.
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…
A friend who is learning Dutch once complained to me that Dutch speakers will switch to English the moment they hear you are struggling with the language. I suggested she should explicitly ask people to keep the conversation in Dutch.
In one instance, she did that, and the (native Dutch-speaking) person she was talking to agreed to her request, and then proceeded in English anyway! She asked that person multiple times, and they just kept speaking English without addressing her request. Baffling.