Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speaking English

Re:Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speak... by quickthrowman on Thursday May 20, 2021 @02:48PM (#27225422)

Norman/Saxon meat/animal word pairs are interesting; the saxons were the hunters and farmers, and the normans ate the meat. This led to a bunch of word pairs:

  Beef/cow  
  Poultry/chicken  
  Pork/pig  
  Veal/calf  
  Mutton/sheep

There are other areas of English vocabulary with dual Saxon/Norman words as well.

Bill Bryson has a great book that explores how English became what it is now: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_Tongue It’s an easy read with lots of interesting info.

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Re:Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speak... by Mediterraneo10 on Thursday May 20, 2021 @06:27PM (#27228219)

Please don’t recommend Bill Bryson’s The Mother Tongue. Bryson has no actual background in linguistics and there is a factual error or urban myth on nearly every page of that book. There are loads of pop-sci “history of English” books written by people who were actually competent in the subject.

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Re:Nonnative English speakers share their gripes about speak... by quickthrowman on Friday May 21, 2021 @01:19PM (#27236980)

Thanks for the heads up, I looked into criticism of this book and I won’t recommend it in the future.

If you happen to see this reply, would ‘Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English’ by McWhorter be a better choice for a pop-sci history of English? r/Linguistics seems to be fine with him.

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