(riffing off the "Is this Arabic" that was posted a few days ago - it's a lot easier in english, ie if the speaker says ti's english, it's english)
Is this English? Cool cool, it finna be.
If the intended dialect and meaning are what I think, the definition of 'finna' and the overall usage are wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Arabi...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1e62d6wHIU
Explanation to get around HN guidelines : The guy says : "Hey Morsi [ndlr. common male name in Egypt], Is this English ?". It started when Modamed Morsi was president of Egypt and spoke in incomprehensible English. Since most arabic speaking people are notoriously bad at English, it became a meme used when someone says something incomprehensible in any language
I was watching the subtitled video of a speech made by a Hungarian minister recently and the few words that I could make sense of were all similar to the their French counter-parts (or how I would think a French technical word loaned into Hungarian would sound like). Ditto for German, even more so, I'd say. Russian, too.
In fact even a word that we've now stopped regarding as "technical", such as bicycle [1], comes in English via modern French (so not via the French spoken by the Normans back in the day):
> Borrowed from French bicycle (modern bicyclette), from bi- (“bi-”) + cycle (“cycle”). First attested in English in 1868, and in French in 1847.
Or via anything else, really. E.g. the word for car "kocsi" seems oddly similar to Spanish "coche" (I think French would be voiture) and "tombola" to mean "bingo" seems Italian (french/english should be raffle, I think).
Spanish is considered a "Romance" language, along with French, Italian int al. English is considered a "Germanic" language along with German, Dutch int al. English alone has at least three major periodic based "versions" - Old, Middle, Modern. There were also events such as a major vowel change where the way we pronounce vowels today differs from before that event.
Spanish seems to have a famed "lisp". However that simplistic approach to a complex language and Spain as a whole ignores rather a lot of history, culture and is frankly an insult! As we say in Britain - "Viva la difference".
English as spoken in Britain and elsewhere should borrow and bother from every language it ever trips over. It should always evolve and mutate and continue to become ever more flexible. It should also continue to enable useful "pidgins" which are amalgams of English bolted on the side of another language and vice versa.
What English seems to have lost compared to the other Germanics is a lot of formal complicated verb conjugations and nounal declensions and noun genders and quite a lot more. Complexity can be bolted on but it is optional. Subject object verb is also quite fluid too in English. I believe German at least insists on a verb dump at the end of a sentence. English still has many of these structures - active, passive, subjunctive verbs (transitive, intrans etc); Nom, Voc, Acc, Gen, Dat, Abl for your nouns but they are largely implied via other words instead of suffixes.
English is quite literally and vocally French!
(lingua franca - language of the Franks)
Spanish does not have a lisp. During the medieval age, in the territory that would be called Spain in the future, there were several dialects (or "norms") of Spanish. One of them pushed for seseo (no /θ/, "th" as in think) and other for a combined approach. The latter was chosen by a king (Alfonso X the wise), and the rest is history.
However, all dialectal varieties are accepted by the RAE (Royal Academy of Spanish) jointly with the Spanish Academies of the American Continent regulates the language (like the Académie française for the French language).
So, in Seville (Spain) most people does not use the /θ/ sound, as in Venezuela, for example.
To sum up, please stop saying "Spanish has a lisp" because it has the same "lisp" than English or other languages with the sound /θ/.
Some of it is a social division that originates back to the Norman conquest of Britain. The guy in the field would call a cow's heart (the Old English equivalent of) a cow's heart. The lord would call it the (Norman French equivalent) of coeur de beouf. His doctor or priest would probably speak French or English but would write in Latin. Cordis bovem (or something I don't Latin).
From this mishmash modern English has cow, beef, bovine, heart, cardiac (Greek but clearly influenced by Latin cor). The original Anglo-Saxon word for cow, beef from French to refer to the meat of cow, and bovine from Latin, the fancy adjective. So even now a thousand years later, an overwrought academic writes of a cardiac arrest experienced by a bovine (Graeco-Latin), while in normal speech we might say the cow's heart gave out (Anglo-Saxon).
Something like "nephropathology induced by neurofibromatosis" was/is a sort of guild jargon or cant. It just means kidney disease caused by fibrous tumours of the nerves disease. Of course, you then lose the precision. How I put it is not unambiguous like neurofibromatosis is. A precise jargon is necessary anyway, and will often be misleading to the uninitiated. I can see why doctors just keep their cant.
[0]https://www.etymonline.com/word/bi-?ref=etymonline_crossrefe... [1]https://www.etymonline.com/word/bicycle
Also there were no bicycles in ancient Grece, that's why the word is different in modern Greek, but kyklos is still a greek word with the same meaning.
Old words come from German, because we were part of AustroHungary. Old-but-reformed words come from Czech, because in the 1800's we wanted to stop being so Germanic. Somewhat old words come from Serbo-Croatian, because we were part of Yugoslavia. Modern words come from English, because internet.
So we have a language where words you use around the home are often germanic, jokes and swear words are south slavic, and anything to do with computers is english.
Plus a few French words here and there from the time of Napoleon.
And in other areas, like the arts (from painting and photography to film and the novel), legal, and political terms. That's because France in those past 2-3 centuries was a huge power in Europe and globally, along with the UK).
For France, this ended with WWI and was a done deal with WWII but there was still some momentum up to the 70s.
So it was kind of like countries today copy US terms, fashion, politics, music, etc.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_Lingua_Franca
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." --James D. Nicoll
What English had and still has, and say, Romanian, doesn't, is the wide exposure.
Romanian was traditionally spoken in the region of Romania, so Eastern Europe, with some interaction with Central Europe, Southern Europe, Even-More-Eastern Europe, the Middle East. So those are the influences, plus some recent additions from international languages such as French or English.
English, on the other hand, was needed to describe and interact with Western Europeans, Eastern Europeans, Souther Europeans, Native North Americans, Pygmys, Indians, Native Australians, Chinese, Japanese, Incas, Ethiopians, etc and their associated environments and lifestyles.
If you saw curry, you needed to either come up with a word or adopt theirs. Or avocado. Avocado wasn't even a word in Romanian until 2000-something, I'm quite sure.
Admit I can't come up with an example at the moment though.
That also happens in other languages, too, but English has a great affinity.
I think that's just drive by English having, what, 40-50 sounds? Which is quite a lot for a language, and English speakers having a huge aversion towards words with many syllables. 1 is perfect, 2 is okish, 3 is a lot, 4+ is an abomination.
So they tend to import anything they can pronounce and is under 3 syllables.
Despite another responder’s assertion that William the Conquerer was Norse, the fact is that he spoke French. So you had a ruler who didn’t even speak English, and a ruling class that was familiar with French.
Which, by the way, is why English names for animals and their meats are such a mess. For the most part the peasants raised the animals and the aristocracy ate them (still an era when protein deficiency limited the upward mobility of peasants). So animal names are from one linguistic root and meat names from another. Sheep/mutton, cow/beef, pig/pork,ham.
* when do I have to give it back?
* Is it "by permission"
* do I have a library card limit how many I can borrow?
* can I borrow from the 'enfer' shelves? (there's a loan word...)
I'd say "steal" is a better fit. The word isn't coming back. Capice?
'borrowed' carries the same implications with a down-note on the giving back.
taken, adopted, brought in, co-opted... there's a thesaurus of choices which to my way of thinking do a better job of describing english's habit of .. adopting other languages words.
the key point is that gate-keeping in english doesn't work. we don't have the academie francais to police loanwords, and nobody gets to say loan or borrow words are bad, and that better ones exist: they are what they are.
I'm really just howling at the moon. (I wonder if howl and moon, in some sense are loan words from latin, or anglo saxon)
And of course, British English has both pot au feu and pho.
You see this a lot with modern Greek. As an example, appointment is ραντεβού, and elevator is ασανσέρ.
On a slight tangent, I've noticed when translating from English to Chinese (mandarin) many of the equivalent literal translations do not have a unique single purpose word where English does. So it can sound much like this Anglish e.g the literal translation of "thigh" is just "big leg", and this is not a one off. I have no idea why this is.
This is exactly analogous to "little finger" in English.
I think such feeling can be caused by languages that rely strongly on creating compound words rather than borrowing a new ones (example from the site: Dictionary > Wordbook).
all that being said, I think uncleftish[0] beholding is an amazing piece of text and a good exercise for young physicists
[0]https://groups.google.com/g/alt.language.artificial/c/ZL4e3f...
Your description only applies to a word phrase "word book". The lexicalized word "wordbook" would have its own meaning (presumably one of your suggestions), just like "dictionary" does, but without requiring additional foreign morphemes.
According to Google Translate, apparently Wörterbuch also means thesaurus so OP is correct, it is more ambiguous than dictionary.
The first suggested translation for thesaurus is... thesaurus... so much for compound words eh?
https://shop.duden.de/collections/worterbucher-und-sprache/p...
English just draws vocabulary from many roots and attaches connotations to them which have to be made a bit more explicit in englisch. So english for example has from the Germanic root "hunger", and from the french root (compare french "faim" hungry -> french "famine") "famine". Now in German, famine is "Hungersnot" (hunger crisis) and "hunger" is "Hunger".
Both languages are precise, yet I would say as a German native speaker, that French is more precise than English (also German is more precise but in this argument I am not impartial).
Just to be clear I am no opponent of loan words, and overall I believe modern-day languages that have a written culture probably converge towards an optimal information transmission rate, which is why english will gain and lose words, so will French and German.
Personally, I feel like I can be much more precise in English than I can in German (although that's probably mostly impartiality again!) Yes there are lots of words that are ostensibly just synonyms of each other, but they're mostly not true synonyms, because they have different connotations and can be used in different ways. I miss that wealth of vocabulary in German, where it often feels like I say more to get across the exact idea that I want to.
That said, a lot of that is probably familiarity and bias. I grew up in English, and learned German later in life, and I suspect you did the opposite, so obviously we're going have more intuition for our native languages.
In many languages the airplane is a “flying machine” and that makes way more sense than “flat thing in the air” if you think about it.
As a foreigner trying to learn the language (not in DE anymore) I have to remind myself just how weird English is, and not to place unreasonable expectations on people doing the reverse of my journey. Having had to have, so to speak.
There is a certain logic to German. How about:
Wheel -> das Rad
Wheels -> die Räder
Bicycle -> das Fahrrad
Bicycles -> die Fahrräder
Cyclist -> der Radfahrer / die Radfahrerin
Cyclists -> die Radfahrer / die Radfahrerinnen
* English has no inflections; nouns and adjectives stay the same no matter what role in a sentence do they have.
* English has no noun-adjective agreement, and a very rudimentary verb-noun agreement (only third person singular).
* English words have unpredictable pronunciation: like in Chinese, there are some hints and rules, but they are full of exceptions. Try to find a pattern: "busy" / "Suzy" / "circusy", "corps" / "thorps", etc. No way to predict the sound without knowing both the etymology and tradition.
* English has no grammatical gender.
* Though unlike Chinese, English has a sharp distinction between singular and plural.
No wonder even German looks somehow distant from English :)
Also, while Proto-Indo-European had plenty of grammatical cases, the current theories are that it had fewer grammatical genders than modern languages. The PIE grammatical genders are generally attributed as "animate" and "neuter" and there's a lot of interesting debate on exactly where and when (and why) what today are called "masculine" and "feminine" split from animate (and how much they were "masculine" and "feminine" to PIE is also an interesting debate). That split might have been very late indeed, which seems reflected in the evidence of how few Indo-European languages agree on grammatical genders beyond people and a very small list of animals. (Also, late enough that for instance Farsi might not have "lost" much at all, simply missed out on some of the late splits and evolved around them.) Grammatical gender especially has stopped being seen as a key common trait in IE languages given what linguists have seemed to reconstruct of PIE.
> No wonder even German looks somehow distant from English
A lot of that is inter-tribal politics more than just the syntactic shifts English experienced versus "trunk Indo-European". Modern German sometimes referred to as "High German" intentionally dominated in such a way as to push out all of its "Low German" rivals from the core of Germany which included the Anglo-Saxon tribes. At a raw level English is closer on the family tree to other "Low German" languages such as modern-day Dutch, but modern-day Dutch has its own cultural supremacy battles in its territories and mostly driven its rivals to extinction, several of which themselves were closer to English on the family tree. The closest living relatives of Anglo-Saxon German are the Frisian languages [1] most of which have been classified as endangered or nearly extinct due to cultural domination fights with Dutch (including events relatively similar to the Norman conquest in terms of massive linguistic after-shocks, just between Dutch and Frisian tribes). Modern English is like four tree-branches away from Modern German, even before taking into account the Norman invasion influenced language changes and slowly differently evolved syntax. So it shouldn't be a surprise English looks distant to German because it was always distant to German.
Certainly there are languages more closely related to English, like Dutch or Swedish / Norwegian, that stand sort of midway between English and (High) German. But if we take older languages, like classic Latin, or those with many archaic features, like Lithuanian, the distance from English syntax and grammar becomes pretty large.
I suspect that languages tend to simplify in grammar in areas where several different languages have to coexist: say, England had Germanic, Celtic, and French languages interacting for quite some time, with some Latin thrown in by the church.
I suspect that Mandarin Chinese also resulted from many languages on a pretty large territory interacting a lot, shaving grammatical complexity bit by bit.
English's grammar actually got far more complex because word order matters a whole lot more syntactically versus German or French or Latin. For one big instance that is often pointed out by English as a Second Language problems, adjective order in English is comparatively extremely rigid: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjective#Order
Another place you see this complexity is the old "sentences should not end in a preposition" early schooling "rule": in Latin word order mostly doesn't matter as long as key things agree on grammatical case/gender. Prepositions "can't" syntactically exist in Latin without their paired nouns inflected to the right grammar case. But the pair itself can be in almost any order in the sentence. Whereas English has a more rigid prepositional word order, because nouns don't inflect at all when used in a preposition (unless you are someone still trying to keep "whom" on life support centuries after it died in English and became a grammatical zombie). The syntax is more complicated, but the morphology is easier. One of the interesting "gains" from the complicated syntax is that some prepositions started working with intentionally dropped or elided direct nouns. That is also added syntactical complexity. In English there are many prepositions it is perfectly valid to end a sentence with. Parsing that is interestingly complex.
Extremely relatedly the similar childhood "rule" to "never split an infinitive". In many languages infinitives are a pure grammatical case involving word inflections that have to match, and the order generally doesn't matter if they involve multiple participles, and there is no such thing syntactically as a "split infinitive", it just can't syntactically exist. Whereas English relies on a more complex syntax for infinitives that relies more explicitly on rigid word orders, making split infinitives at all possible in the first place. Then regular usage of the different concurrent syntaxes started to diverge their meaning. "To boldly go" means something subtly different in English than "to go boldly", and forbidding split infinitives entirely forbids entire categories of creative expression in the language.
I don't think there's a simple answer for why English grammar evolved the way that it did in shifting morphological complexity for syntactical complexity. I just know that calling that evolution "simplifying" isn't entirely accurate either. (English syntax feels simpler to native speakers than it actually is.) The language certainly had some interesting linguistic pressures being confined to a highly regarded/desirable set of isles for centuries with a mixture of strong related languages immediately nearby, then when it was used as a language for helping bootstrap an industrial revolution and as a world-spanning empire.
Do non-european languages have genders?
"Aéroplane" originally referred just to the wing, as it is a plane moving through the air. In an example of synecdoche, the word for the wing came to refer to the entire aircraft.
So I don't think compound words magically remove ambiguity, at least not in the general case. Any given compound word could have multiple different meanings, and any given meaning can be described by several compound words.
Stuff is “Stoff” as in Brennstoff.
Fire-thing and burning-stuff.
Lighter is “Zünder“ in German.
Feuerzeug vs Zünder
To close to call regarding which is clearer.
Zünder is an igniter/detonator, Zündung is the ignition.
Zeug can be used as "thing", but it is frequently used when refearing to gear. So "Feuerzeug" is like "Firegear", "Werkzeug" is the "gear for working" (tools).
That’s not an invention, but a loan word from Latin ampulla (small oil bottle), which got a meaning “hanging lamp” (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Ampel)
Ampel is a loanword from latin, "ampulla", it was used for oil lamps hanging from churches and thus kind of made its way into the "Ampel".
The legal texts use "Lichtzeichen" instead of Ampel IIRC.
Don't know if you are still reading this but nevertheless I wanted to give a reply to this paragraph. Overall I think I really understand your point here, but these various connotations are to me not precision, but a symptom of a high-risk of imprecision if that makes sense. In German (there I am partial), or in french (there I would be impartial) I think that language is more precise because if in doubt, you just add a relative clause or another sentence.
You know, learning English and French in Germany, after 4 years of french classes (like 4h per week) my 4th year of french classes was with the same teacher who also taught English. She made a comparison, when learning english you basically are able to speak fairly easily already in your first or second year on a basic level. To become proficient it takes however a decade of learning and mastery. With french, most students are struggling for 4 years until the grammar is learned, but then they actually have all tools under their belt to speak and write proper french. the rest is filling a few wholes in your vocabulary-knowledge here and there and memorizing a few more irregular verb forms.
Written like a programmer. Information transmission is only one narrow purpose of language. We are not computers; language isn't a data structure. It's an Orwellian concept.
> No ambiguity
> Both languages are precise, yet I would say as a German native speaker, that French is more precise than English (also German is more precise but in this argument I am not impartial).
Measuring precision of a word requires a defined, precise or accurate (complete, correct, consistent) concept. I.e., to say Wörterbuch is precise, you need to have a precise concept of what it describes. But reality isn't precise; you never have complete, correct, or consistent knowledge of it. There is always another variation, invention, exception, etc.
The only exception is circular definition - if you define the object according to the bounds of the word. 'This object is a Wörterbuch, and an object that doesn't meet the definition is not one.'
In fact, the hallmark of writing/speaking good English is conveying yourself using the least words required with the utmost precision.
Don't believe it? Watch a British politician roast someone in Parliament. That is bloody masterful English literature right there.
Wait until you start studying Sanskrit ;)
As for English and bloated - I'm probably a high A2/low B1 Swedish speaker. I can read a lot better than I speak. I also dabbled in Norwegian out of fascination of how absolutely similar and yet different the two languages are. (It's like Czech and Polish.) So much looks the same, just spelt differently, but you also have a large corpus of vocabulary that is on the surface different - but in reality a native speaker would know there is a word that is equivilent (maybe just not used as much or archaic.) The one I found today, which blew my mind was "trenge". This means "need" in Norwegian. It is one of those odd "Norwegian seems to prefer another word". Swedish seems to mostly use "behöva" and Norwegian does also have "behøve", but I see trenge way more. Today I saw some Swedish song lyrics with "tränga" (which is basically a Swedish equivalent of the Norwegian spelling.) Synonyms happen in all languages. Even if languages that are purely Germanic with minimal Latin influence. Caveat: this is obviously my own observations. Not claiming any thing other than casual knowledge and no actual expertise.
More examples, from a Swedish speaking point of view, are jente/jänta (latter is archaic, flicka is more contemporary), snakke/snacka (the latter is normally tala or prata), bruke/bruka (bruka in Swedish is seeminly used to mean "usually" rather than "use", and änvenda is used for "use")... the list goes on. I find this really interesting. I think the Hanseatic league and Low German it brought explains an least some of these synonyms.
English is a very bloated language compared to its European neighbours - it's almost two languages in one. That doesn't make English bad per se, but it makes it more challenging for foreigners to learn.
Edit: From wikiquote[1]:
>(This observation is extensively quoted even outside of Usenet, and has appeared in textbooks. It has also been misattributed, in part and in whole, to Booker T. Washington, to Ambrose Bierce, to Terry Pratchett, and, in one case, to the painter James Nicoll (1846–1918).)