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Comments
Oh well, we already had a shitstorm over that sort of thing...
English is my co-first-language along with Cantonese. I was born and raised in the United States. Grew up in the midwest then the southeast. I normally use a generic U.S. accent, though I can produce an illegitimate mixture of Southern drawl and Texan accent if I feel like it. Poor imitations of British, Japanese, Chinese, and Indian accents also available.
How dare you disobey my orders in order to find on your own time a language more rapidly and chaotically changing than English? Also, I am quite certain that the concept of learning is not a female dog.
Depends on how you define alive. For the English language is like Buffalo Bill, a language who is unclear of its own identity and is dressed with the skin of the shambling corpses of the language it has assaulted. Besides, Null Subject construction are lacking, which forces you to use pronouns everywhere.
^^^^ Actually, you're... really, really wrong, Alex. For shame, man. If anything, English is a mutant subspecies of Frisian or maybe Old Saxon, which has about as much to do with German as Czech does with Polish.
^^ Your choice to misread my enthusiasm and bravado as defensiveness for rhetorical purposes strikes me as a bit defensive in and of itself. Methinks I have struck a nerve! Shall I continue to prod it for fun and profit?
...maybe! But I can't think of any terribly clever incisions to make into your character that would not cross from the playful into the genuinely insulting, and seeing as I like you a lot, I don't want to do that.
^ Null-subject is convenient, but a lot of languages lack it, so moot point. As for the cannibalism argument, a cannibal is still very much alive, and in his own way living life to its fullest. The homicidal maniac knows no shame or restraints.
English is a mad beast with terrible teeth that will assimilate your language's living flesh into its mass without a second thought. That it can do so with little artificiality may not be a testament to its cohesion, but is certainly one to its versatility. It is for that very reason that the English lexicon is the vastest in all of language at this point in history.
As a word-fiend, to be raised in this language is, to my mind, a great privilege. This does not invalidate the merits of other languages, nor say that English is without flaws—only that it is the best fit for me, to my mind.
Please do not mistake me for one in favour of cultural hegemony; to the contrary, I believe that languages of all sizes and shapes are to be treasured and cultivated for what makes them unique. I simply think that all this territorial nonsense about why this or that language is awful is insulting, particularly when levelled at a language that I feel a deep personal connection with. So I defend my language.
P.S. I am very, very sleep-deprived, yet nonetheless strangely proud of that rant...
I'm gonna wait what comes out of it... mweh heh heh.
Old Saxon has pretty much everything to do with German, doesn't it? I'm pretty sure it became Middle Low German, which, while not as important as Middle High German in the formation of the modern German language, was pretty distinctively the common language of the Holy Roman Empire for much of the Middle Ages.
I can't speak for Old Frisian, so I might be wrong about this, but I recall reading something about Old Frisian being mutually intelligible with Old Saxon. Or perhaps Old English. Either would make sense.
I don't know too much about etymology, but I'm pretty sure Malay language is a freakish chimera of loanwords from a shitton of cultures.
edit: there's a small list of examples on (English) Wikipedia. (the article specifically says some examples)
Polish had a period of replacing loanwords with Polish equivalents, which among other things led to entire generations of students tormented with the same emperorawful old jokes based on the fact that the word for integral is also an archaism for a virgin.
Suomi on paras
ESpanish on parasect
Yeah right no, SPANISH FTW!
O mejor dicho, andate a mierda cabrón. Que un idioma que dificulta su aprendizaje hablado debido a su canibalismo de otros idiomas formando una sintaxis sin sentido sea la lingua franca del mundo es deprimente.
/threadhop
So in a week I'm taking an English 200 class for the Summer Session II. I'm really dreading it, since I actually had to drop it the first semester to focus on my other classes since I have no idea how to write essays properly.
I've never had to write anything more than two and a half pages, three, tops. This class requires me to write a six page essay. Seriously, what the fuck? They're asking me to write in six pages ideas that can only fill three.
^^ So, the fact that I disagree with you on something gives you a right to say that I'm full of it and a terrible person? Or, alternately, gives me the right to say the same of you? Isn't that a massive degradation of discourse?
Honestly, this thread is incredibly bitter and intolerant...
@Alex: Low German has little to do with High German and somewhat more to do with Dutch, despite the name. Furthermore, conflating Modern German with Old High German, let alone the very different Old Saxon or Old English, is pretty absurd given that they are mutually unintelligible.
Now, is Old English closer to German than Modern English is? Most certainly. But that does not make it German, just as (again) the West Slavic languages are not all one in the same.
I was being entirely facetious when I said that this mistake was shameful, but that doesn't make you any more right about the matter.
Also, brief aside: The influence of Celtic languages on English is pretty slight outside of heavily Celtic areas with the exception of the grammatical formations using the non-productive "do," which is Brythonic in origin.
I'm talking about the path of Middle German, though. That is, Old Saxon -> Low Middle German + High Middle German -> Modern German. I know, at least, that High Middle German is much more intelligible from a Modern German perspective than Middle English is to a Modern English one. (Also, I'm aware of Old and New German(s), but the fact that German from c.1200 or so to c.1500 is startlingly close to Modern German is the point.)
Also, if I might engage in some facetiousness at the expense of Insanity Addict:
> implying Dutch isn't just wrong German
And, for a more general audience:
> implying German isn't just wrong Saxon
You might be taking this a bit too seriously.
Dude, if this thread is incredibly bitter and intolerant to you, then I do hope you'll never stumble upon anything I'd call this way.
Alex, I think, has a big problem that I've finally pinned down, namely he has a tendency to use personal definitions. Then, time after another, things fall into the same tracks. Get in a discussion, say something which is ridiculous from everyone else's point of view, get called out. What happens later depends on his mood and the other person's temper, I'm inclined to say. That's why I said I'm interested in watching how things unfold.
However -
- this time, I think, Alex has given me a key to the problem. Apparently, whichever definitions he's using, he just pulled them out of whichever century he's mentally in. Now that I've finally figured it out - my bad, I guess, it shouldn't have taken me that much time - things should get easier.
Gacek, I think it's time you stopped your analytical bent. You have a tendency to behave arrogantly from the sidelines, which doesn't do anything for anyone. Whether you're right or wrong about me has nothing to do with it, but how you handle this does. And whether I say ridiculous things or not, others take the effort to discuss things and sometimes succeed in changing my views or perspective. If you have no intention of engaging in constructive discussion -- which JHM has done, for instance, despite his frustration with me -- then I suggest you don't comment at all.
I regret if I've caused JHM any distress or discomfort, naturally.
Well, I do agree the last two sentences might've come out as more confrontative than I had in mind.
It's just that you have a tendency to get snarky when tensions are already (arguably) high. JHM is getting frustrated on my account, and now I'm a little on edge because I'm frustrating someone else, and I really dislike that. For the most part, I don't have any issue with snark at my expense (I mean, I've openly invited it time and time again), but there's a time and place.
I'm not asking you not to take the piss out, mind you, just not to do it when one or more participants in a thread are a little strung out.
^^^^ In retrospect, I think that I might have taken Vandro's statements in particular as more serious than they actually were. But that doesn't mean that they don't strike me as passive-aggressive and insulting.
Language is something that I take very seriously and has a deep emotional resonance for me, and despite how I might have sounded earlier, I really don't hold any language as superior to any other. To hear my own language degraded without a fair counterargument offends me to some degree, just as my ragging on Spanish or Serbian might well insult Vandro and Ironweaver respectively.
^^^ You have not. I am simply being oversensitive and a bit of a know-it-all.
Were this a different time or place, however, and were I less keyed up, I would have gladly sic'd Anne on you over the German thing...
Hmmm, to finish that thing. No reason to snark, if it's randomly pulling out irrelevant half-forgotten old quotes. Sounds more confrontative than relevant old quotes, if you ask me. But, I guess, I can see reason in what you ask for, so I'm gonna grant you that and let you guys duke it out on your own.
Miss Anne's linguistics, I guess, I'd snark over too, but I'm not gonna snark of those not present. So, as they say, "so yeah".
(edit: I mean, JHM, I don't speak Spanish, so if Vandro wrote something nasty enough, then I might've been simply wrong in my assessment of the thread.)
My Spanish is not exceptional, so I had to look up a few words, but the gist was basically what he already said, albeit in somewhat more offensive terms and with a bit of name-calling as a garnish.
Unrelated aside that Glenn might find useful: English does have the guttural n in the form of the -ng syllable coda. However, unlike in Cantonese and Okinawan, it does not have full syllabic or moraic value. As for the guttural ch, it does occur in Scottish, which is an offshoot of English.
I wonder if there's a language with an 1:1 SPR (That means every letter is always pronounced the same way) The only one I can think is latin, but even then there are some exceptions
I think Milos once said something about Serbian having the alphabet designed to work this way.
Indeed, I think that the Serbo-Croatian cyrillic script is the only one with perfectly phonemic orthography.
It's not much passive agressiveness as it is me being completely absurd. Prefacing a personal opinion with a flat-out insult because it makes me sound less serious.
^^ The Finnish variant on the Roman alphabet is similarly precise, at least according to the majority of linguistics texts that I have read. Aside from direct references to other languages and a few very archaic proper nouns, the correspondence between letter and sound is exact without duplicates in every major dialect.
^ I am not very good with tone in text, either in conveying or receiving it. I have gotten better, but I still have moments where it takes me a while. Having to mentally translate said text only made the distinction less clear because it required a certain degree of effort on my end to decipher what you were trying to get across, thus missing your point. I am sorry.
I think Slavic languages do rather well in this regard, although Russian written in Cyrillic has its bad moments.
So is Russian relatively phonetic or unphonetic? I've heard both.