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Every American Is Bilingual

justevilenough.com

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Re: Every American Is Bilingual

#31

Post by curionymous »

cjohnson318 wrote: post #16
op00to wrote: post #4

“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.

It's just a clever title. The article immediately walks the thesis back, and then relates some trivia about English. Five minute read, three stars.

> It's just a clever title.

Also known as clickbaits

Re: Every American Is Bilingual

#32

Post by clauderoux »

keiferski wrote: post #19

It would be interesting to see if the English spoken in Europe as an international secondary language uses more Germanic or Latinate words. The assumption might be that they tend toward shorter, simpler Germanic words, but, I wonder if the location where it’s spoken has an effect on this. For example do English speakers in Romance countries use more Latin-origin words in English, even though they are “more difficult”…

The answer is very easy. Latinate words (mostly of French origin for the matter), first because of the number of people speaking romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian and Portuguese) is the largest in Europe, second, because most European languages have also borrowed a lot from Latin, Greek and French during the last centuries, which means that latinate words are usually the subset which is shared across most languages. Furthermore, English and other Germanic languages have started evolving quite early one from the others (around the 6 century) and cognates might be quite difficult to recognize: through/durch, for instance.

Re: Every American Is Bilingual

#33

Post by xboxnolifes »

reilly3000 wrote: post #15
xboxnolifes wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet we have multiple languages. So, at some point English must stop being English.

But must we apply judgment to such boundaries? If it ceases to be English is it ‘good’ again?

Must judgement be applied when categorizing? Yes, because categorization is judgement.

Re: Every American Is Bilingual

#34

Post by keiferski »

clauderoux wrote: post #32
keiferski wrote: post #19

It would be interesting to see if the English spoken in Europe as an international secondary language uses more Germanic or Latinate words. The assumption might be that they tend toward shorter, simpler Germanic words, but, I wonder if the location where it’s spoken has an effect on this. For example do English speakers in Romance countries use more Latin-origin words in English, even though they are “more difficult”…

The answer is very easy. Latinate words (mostly of French origin for the matter), first because of the number of people speaking romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian and Portuguese) is the largest in Europe, second, because most European languages have also borrowed a lot from Latin, Greek and French during the last centuries, which means that latinate words are usually the subset which is shared acr…

I looked into this a bit since posting and it’s not such a simple answer.

From the research I browsed, a few things seem to be true: speakers tend to choose words that resemble cognates in their native language; Germanic speakers seem to prefer Germanic words; the educational method and exposure to English has an effect, in the sense that Northern Europeans often have more informal exposure (and thus Germanic preference) whereas Southern Europeans have more exposure to English in an academic, Latin-preferred context.

Re: Every American Is Bilingual

#35

Post by Quarrel »

raincole wrote: post #17

> If you read this post, you probably won’t look at the world the same way ever again. I immediately wanted to close the tab. But I decided to not judge an article by the first sentence. So I read on and it's just talking about how English has words with similar meanings but different etymological origins, plus some English grammar trivia. Title: > Every American is bilingual. is completely unjustified. In the same v…

> > Every American is bilingual. > is completely unjustified. In the same vein every Japanese is bilingual or more.

Or just as stupidly, so many of us are just mono-lingual, we just speak proto-Indo-European.

Re: Every American Is Bilingual

#36

Post by triyambakam »

adzm wrote: post #24
triyambakam wrote: post #14

Angish 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…

That's a wonderful example, thank you. Especially considering I misspelled Anglish

Re: Every American Is Bilingual

#37

Post by cjohnson318 »

curionymous wrote: post #31
cjohnson318 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just a clever title. The article immediately walks the thesis back, and then relates some trivia about English. Five minute read, three stars.

> It's just a clever title. Also known as clickbaits

Yeah, well, I was trying to be generous.

Re: Every American Is Bilingual

#38

Post by scoreandmore »

esseph wrote: post #29
scoreandmore wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

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.

We can literally read the original folios, so much for your point.
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