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[–] 229 points 1 month ago (67 children)

One nice thing about English, it will lexical borrow from you in an instant.

We just love new ways to say old boring stuff.

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  • [–] 131 points 1 month ago (52 children)

    I have been saying it for years, English is a very informal and open language, have fun with it. Sky water is not technically a wrong way to refer to rain, liquid laundry soup is absolutely a sauce for your laundry, dish bricks, day star, the list goes on

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  • [–] 87 points 1 month ago (18 children)

    I think this is one of the reasons why English (or it's descendants) will forever be the international language of trade. If it's not your first language, it's damn difficult to make yourself sound like a native speaker, but it's damn easy to make yourself understood.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    I think you're confusing a reasonably short period in recent history with "forever".

    In History there were quite a lot of "international languages of trade" other than English. It seems to depend very much on which nations were the top empire of the age and because the last two top empires were English-speaking countries (first Britain, then after that the United States), the English language has been dominant as a second language for a over a century now, but before that the English language already existed in a form very similar to the modern form and yet it wasn't at all an "international language of trade" (in fact, at least in Europe, before English it was French that was the dominant language of trade).

    I bet that the next "international language of trade" will be Chinese.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago* (2 children)

    A forecast not backed by anything other than wishful thinking and which runs counter everything that has always happened.

    Claiming that English will forever be the "international language of trade" is like putting up a statue and under it the message: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!""

    More in general, nothing lasts forever.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    You can't really look at past examples now that globalization is a thing. An ubiquitous language wasn't really possible before then.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago*

    You see, I don't even have to show any evidence of anything, it's those who are claiming that "This time is different" and that this specific trading language, right now specifically (by an amazing coincidence, right when they live and make said claim, never before and - given that claim being "forever" and "global" - logically never again for a different one) will, unlike all trade languages before hold that position and endure, not just 100 years, not just 1000 years, but "forever".

    Such a huge, massive, gigantic forecast needs equally huge, massive, gigantic proof.

    So far, against that theory we have History, not just of trading languages but of languages themselves and nations showing that until none of those things lasts forever. On the side in favor of it we have ... *crickets*

    That whole forecast stinks of jingoism and ignorance.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 month ago (11 children)

    On the flip side, a lot of other languages have retained structures which require a detailed knowing of grammar in part because they haven't needed to be learned by amateurs.

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  • [–] 21 points 1 month ago

    True, though I would personally count that as a bad thing. Purity of language, to me is irrelevant. That opinion may be coloured by the fact that I'm a native English speaker, and there hasn't been anything resembling purity in this language for thousands of years. To me, the point of language is open communication. Any impediment to that is a negative.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago*

    I speak several languages, most of which are Romance languages (such as French and Italian) which have a specific word order which pretty close to english (though adjective come after nouns rather than before, plus there are some additional verbal times though those are uncommon to use).

    Amongst those I also speak Dutch and German, which have quite a different word order (though, curiously, Dutch from Belgium has a similar word order to French) and I constantly fuck it up (especially in German, which is the one of the two I speak worse) and the natives always understand me.

    In my experience learning two of those languages just by living there (and with people that are learning my own native language), it's using the wrong words that confuses people, then using the wrong accent (mainly by putting the emphasis in the wrong syllable) and only as a far third is word order and even that only in specific cases such expressions (where it's the whole expression as is that has a meaning, rather the meaning being a composition of the meaning of the individual words in it).

    In my experience there really is no special quality of the English language that makes it easier to understand when people use a wrong word order.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (4 children)

    There were a lot of native French speakers in England at that time, so a bunch of normalizing like what happened a couple hundred years earlier with the Norse meeting Anglo-Saxons

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

    Idk about Vikings, but to my knowledge Normans didn't give a crap about English, speaking their language among the ruling class, and all documents were in French. This is evidenced by the fact that there's little written record of how English developed at the time. On the other hand, French was perceived as prestigious, since people had to deal with the ruling class and bureaucracy in French, thus many 'high-society' words were borrowed into English — hence typically when talking about everyday matters, the words are mostly of Germanic or Norse origin, and grandiose abstract ideas or upper-class life are French/Latin.

    It's not like trade with Normans started only after the conquest, after all.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Yes, and because of that there was a lot of interaction and blending, right up to the point where trials were required to be performed in English in the mid-14th century, then in the 15th everything was switched to English. The Peterborough Chronicle perfectly demonstrates the transition from Old English to Middle. It was written over about a hundred years (11th to 12th Century) and gradually starts incorporating French vocabulary and dropping old Germanic grammar.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago (1 child)

    Ah. I misremembered about the Peterborough Chronicle being the one switching to French because of a new French abbot.

    Still not seeing how much of it was informed by the Frenchmen wanting to learn English, though. Englishmen for sure did borrow French vocabulary, not sure about the other way around. I'm yet to learn about switching the trials to English, as I'm right at the point of Norman conquest in the 'History of English Language' podcast. =)
    Seems so far that said history was in large part dictated by political happenings.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    Well, the aristocracy didn't just learn English overnight. The transition of official use over about 200 years shows them becoming more and more accepting and comfortable with it.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 month ago (11 children)

    I remember an interview with Lisa Kudrow in which she described her French boyfriend's failure to remember the English word for toes, and said they were foot fingers.

    English: if the people you're talking to understand what you're saying, you're ok. Even if the people you're talking to don't understand what you're saying, you're still ok. Just be fancy with your words, and everyone will like it.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 month ago (7 children)

    In french, that's really the name that is given to them, colloquially : doigts de pied (foot fingers)

    The real term is orteils (toes)

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (5 children)

    They're really good at it, too. Sometimes it's even charming. For example, potatoes are "earth apples."

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago (3 children)

    I wonder if the meaning of pomme was broader in Old French, like how meat (from mete) used to mean food in Old English.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 month ago

    Yes it was the case, broadly pomme meant fruit.

    Originally tomatoes were called pommes d'amour. There is pommes de terre (potatoes) pommes de pin (pinecones). If we would translate literally pomme de pin it would give us pineapple.

    There were also other fruits beginning with pomme originally but I can't seem to recall them.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

    It's the same in Dutch - "aardapple" - but using the Dutch words for earth and apple rather than the French ones.

    And don't get me started on French numbering - for example 98 is "four twenties eigtheen".

    One doesn't get it for one's own language because all the weird stuff is "normal" but when you're learning other languages you discovered they're all riddled with funny constructs like this (and then there are expressions, which are often hilarious - for example on of the Dutch expression for wasting time on small details literally translates to "fucking ants")

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago (7 children)

    You think German and French don't borrow words?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago*

    I speak 7 different european languages and they're all like that.

    It's not by chance that "yogurt" is pretty much the same word in just about all languages (different spelling at times, similar sounding), being originally a Turkish word, and similarly for "helicopter" which comes from the Greek, whilst all the ways to say "tea" in the whole wide world pretty much derive from just three root words - tea, cha and chai.

    My own native language - Portuguese - seems to have spread around the world for just nautical terms around sailing and pretty much nothing else which kinda makes sense since at one point when Portugal was an empire, that's the technology is developed. (Curiously the word in India for a certain kind of bread - "Pao" - derives from the Portuguese word for bread - "Pão" - probably because the Indian city of Goa was controlled by Portugal for a couple of centuries),

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago* (3 children)

    Not sure what a dish brick is, but yeah, the others make sense 👍

    Edit: just figured it out: it's a Lego piece shaped like a dish

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  • [–] 26 points 1 month ago (8 children)

    Ironically, same with Japanese. They have an entire alphabet dedicated to foreign words, Katakana. You want a hamburger and a beer? That's a "ハンバーガーとビール" (Hanbāgā to Biru). Coffee from Starbucks on your way to work? That's a "ドライブスルーコーヒー" (Doraibusurūkohi - a drive-thru coffee). Better fried chicken than anyone has a right to can be found at the "コンビニ" (Konbini - aka the convenience store). Learning Japanese it's rife with these borrowed words. Half the time it's "you're fucking kidding." The other half the time it's learning some insane formalism that makes saying "thank you" take five minutes.

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  • [–] 10 points 1 month ago* (1 child)

    What's cool is how English then adds those loanwords or portmanteau back into its lexicon like karaoke or, as I'm seeing more recently, egg sando. I really love how languages do that.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    Awhile back, I watched an anime about camping. It was chill, and cute, and I enjoyed it. But every time they stopped to discuss some kind of camping equipment, it was all English loan words, and it drove me a bit bonkers.

    What do you mean Japanese just straight up borrowed the phrase "ground tarp" from English??? Surely they already have words for that!

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago*

    I'm learning Korean, in South Korea they use so much English vocabulary and it's all spelled phonetically, for example table (yes they use that word) becomes 테이블 (teibeul) and then you have to pronounce it like a Korean word which always sounds a little weird. Japanese is similar, but the possible syllables in Japanese are much more limited so it ends up sounding even weirder and sometimes isn't immediately recognisable as English.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    They may have. Several Japanese words for everyday objects are taken from other languages despite having earlier words for those things. E.g. bread is pan (from Portuguese) and ball is boru (English).

    Though my personal favorite is black hole. Despite having different words for black and hole, black hole is translated as burakkuhoru

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  • [–] 4 points 1 month ago

    Sometimes it gets so ingrained into English that it feels natural.

    好久不见 (hǎo​ jiǔ ​bu ​jiàn), lit. long time no see, it's originally a Chinese phrase that became commonplace in English. Even though it doesn't quite hold up grammatically in English, no one will question it.

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