brewfreeordie
Well-Known Member
I hear it all the time. Can't stand it.
I literally can't stand it.
I literally can't stand it.
I hear it all the time. Can't stand it.
I literally can't stand it.
I know that many people will very intentionally refrain from saying irregardles in order to distinguish themselves from the people who are irretarded.
I think you got that backwards. Irretarded, while also not a word, can be inferred to mean not retarded.
Maybe he only has one big foot?
Inflammable
OK, I am intrigued. Without googling, it means: Not flammable. Not able to be on fire. Right?
Nope, it means the same thing as being flammable. Another case where "in" is from the Latin, and means "on".
OK, I am intrigued. Without googling, it means: Not flammable. Not able to be on fire. Right?
Nope, it means the same thing as being flammable. Another case where "in" is from the Latin, and means "on".
Nope, it means the same thing as being flammable. Another case where "in" is from the Latin, and means "on".
A parallel example would be "duh" and "no duh".
Another fun one is naprons and noranges. Over time, "a napron" and "a norange" got reanalyzed as "an apron" and "an orange".
So we see some clashing where Latin collides with some of the evolutions it spawned. Interesting.
emjay said:English is not derived from Latin...
English is not derived from Latin...
Not directly, but it's been a major superstrate language for as long as English has been around. I'd say cheezy's description of the ongoing borrowings, reborrowings, and reanalyses was accurately stated.
Spanish and French are "romance" languages, and are derived from Latin.
English is "Germanic" and is derived from Proto-Germanic which originates in northern Europe. (A whole 'nother D) branch of language.)
The numerous words of Latin origin in English are due to it's extensive borrowing from other languages.
Over the last few decades, there's be a general trend...
Am I the only one who read this in a pirate voice?
Over the last few decades, there's be a general trend towards regarding Modern English as a creole of a Germanic language and a Romance language. The structure of English is actually pretty consistent creole typologies. It's a fairly technical distinction, but a fun idea nonetheless.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothesis
Fascinating. At what point is the threshold from "extensive borrowing" passed to "creolization"? Is it a function of grammar as opposed to simple loaner words?
I'd say that several dialects of pidgin contributed to English, but that English was modified for them, as opposed to descendant from, in the cases of Chinese, Hawaiian, etc. I'd also guess that this was simply true to a larger degree with French.
Some of you posting here might enjoy Bill Bryson's The Mother Tongue - English and How It Got That Way
Not a comprehensive analysis, but fun and illuminating. Ever wonder why 'teeth' and not 'tooths'.
It's a somewhat arbitrary distinction, but it basically comes down to how the language is learned and passed on.
A creole is essentially the second+ generation of a pidgin. A pidgin is an ad-hoc communication system built to facilitate functional communication between the speakers of two different languages. When children learn a pidgin as a native language, however, they tend to embellish it with particular kinds of syntactic regularities. Loan words tend enter a language gradually and in some registers faster than others. Like you say, it tends to expand vocabulary without fundamentally altering functional structure. A creole, on the other hand, tends to come about very abruptly, and it frequently takes on features that neither of the parent languages have.
Considering that this all happened a thousand years ago, much of the thinking is speculative, but there's more and more evidence accruing that the shift from Old to Middle English was dramatic and sudden. Most people can understand Middle English with a bit of training, but Old English may as well be Greek.
This is great, I'd never heard this. And it makes pretty good intuitive sense.
Here's a question though: If modern English is the descendent of a pidgin between French and Old English, then presumably it would have less in common with other proto-German descendants than say, Spanish and French. Let me clarify - since Spanish and French and Italian are all descended directly from Latin (correct?) then they might have some level of familiarity with each other. Is that approximate to the similarity between say, English and Swedish, or English and German? Or Swedish and German?
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