We all only speak two languages: English and bad English
Ok, now let me see what is an English standard? A Britton from Sheffield pub or girl from local Waffle House in Atlanta?
Every American Is Bilingual
21–30 of 38 posts
Re: Every American Is Bilingual
#22still count as one (language)
I agree if you have rubber tire and metal disc, you indeed have only one wheel, not two.
Re: Every American Is Bilingual
#23Does the author think that English is spoken only in the US? Could English have perhaps originated in a country with a somewhat similar name?
Re: Every American Is Bilingual
#24Angish is a fun project that imagines English if it never took on all the Latin/French/Greek/etc. loan words
Uncleftish Beholding [1] is a famous example which explains basic atomic theory.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding
From the link:
The title phrase uncleftish beholding calques "atomic theory."
To illustrate, the text begins:
> For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.
It goes on to define firststuffs (chemical elements), such as waterstuff (hydrogen), sourstuff (oxygen), and ymirstuff (uranium), as well as bulkbits (molecules), bindings (compounds), and several other terms important to uncleftish worldken (atomic science). Wasserstoff and Sauerstoff are the modern German words for hydrogen and oxygen, and in Dutch the modern equivalents are waterstof and zuurstof. Sunstuff refers to helium, which derives from λιος, the Ancient Greek word for 'sun'. Ymirstuff references Ymir, a giant in Norse mythology similar to Uranus in Greek mythology.
Re: Every American Is Bilingual
#25Isn't it just the difference between daily speak and higher speak and educated higher speak, or kinds of? I mean, may be I'm not proliferate enough to understand why a synonym is put as "a new language" and find it not surprisingbto see "two ways of saying the same thing".
We have synonyms for, sure, each word in most/all of the spoken languages (except the functional, deterministic and immutable one's lol) - I just think of Chinese "就" (jiu) which has rndabt 90 different meanings or the twenty-what-so-ever different ways of saying I love you. Can a Chinese speaker now say he/she/it is a polyglot and me 20-languaged??
What about Russian which is (heavily) relying on imported or lend words? So many words used in Russian can be linked back to French, German and other languages. Example: saray in Turkish, saray in Russian. One translates to a (king's) palace, the other to an wooden stall for animals. Kindergarten in English/German.. "cosmos" in English, Russian, German, ...
The other thing is.. English is accounted to be the language with the most words of round about 900k. This much words is the result of different ethnic influences that are being taken over into English. It's a mix of a lot of languages today. Like Russian, German too. I'm sure this is true for every still spoken language. But no one sayed bilingual until now.. ;)
Re: Every American Is Bilingual
#26“Latinate” vs “Saxon” is a word-origin story, not two languages. etymology doesn’t equal meaning. His pairs aren’t true synonyms anyway: “terminate a contract” vs “end a movie,” “encounter errors” vs “meet a friend,” “manufacture cars” vs “make dinner.” That’s normal register, not a second tongue. And lots of everyday English doesn’t fit cleanly in either bucket, so the two-bucket premise falls apart.
Linguists would call this "register variation" or "diglossia" rather than bilingualism - a phenomenon found in virtually all languages where speakers shift vocabulary and syntax based on social context.
Re: Every American Is Bilingual
#27Does the author think that English is spoken only in the US? Could English have perhaps originated in a country with a somewhat similar name?
I'm not aware of a country with a similar name to US where English might perhaps have originated in ;)
Re: Every American Is Bilingual
#28If this sort of thing interests you, I highly recommend the book Latin Alive , which traces the transformation of Latin over a thousand years into Spanish, French, and Italian, as well as its impact on modern English. This blog post claims to make you never see things the same way again, but for me that book actually did accomplish that lofty claim. Mainly because I'll never really look at "mistakes" the same way aga…
It's a bit surprising for me to see you describe final -g as such, because a lot of English speakers while they have lost the final plosive, still frequently pronounce the final nasal at the back of the mouth, hence analyzing -ng as a digraph representing that sound. Writing it as -n explicitly signifies the other more innovative pronunciation that just uses the usual nasal at the front of the mouth instead, that some but not all speakers use. Few speakers pronounce the plosive. I also wonder if assimilation may occur, e.g. a speaker may simultaneously prefer nuthin', and also lugging.
Re: Every American Is Bilingual
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is elitist. Language is descriptive not prescriptive
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Language is fluid and changes all the time, which is why we are not conversing on this website in Shakespeare's English.
The history of this pattern over the ages continues to repeat itself and shows no sign of going away across languages.