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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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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (3 children)

    By saying forever they're talking about the future, not the past.

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

    There weren't many amateurs desiring to learn English back in eleventh—fifteenth centuries, when it was losing the remaining complexity in the grammar.

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

    it’s tendency to aggressively ransack other languages for vocabulary

    I feel like this hasn't happened as much as people think in the last century or so, it's much more the other way around, almost every language now adds a lot of english vocabulary.

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

    You have a whole smörgåsbord of recent word thefts

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago (2 children)

    the word first appeared in English in the later part of the 19th century. By the mid-20th century smorgasbord was being used outside of food-related contexts to refer to something that comprises a mixture or assemblage of different parts.

    Source

    You got anything more recent?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 child)
  • [–] 1 point 1 month ago

    German uses these two words as well, and until 5 minutes ago I didn't even know they were of Swedish origin. And it connects nicely to my original comment in this thread where I said that it's not just english that takes words from other languages and it's not something that makes english particularly special.

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

    This gives it an unusual amount of flexibility

    English grammar is the opposite of flexible, since it relies on word order where other languages use inflections. In Russian, you can often jumble the word order, and the meaning wouldn't change. Vocabulary of Russian was extensively borrowed from Greek, Arabic and Turkic languages in middle ages, German and French during the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries, and English in the twentieth, particularly in regard to trade, new technology, or societal developments. If you pay attention, you'll notice that a language borrows or invents words when there's a shade of meaning missing in the existing vocabulary, that is precisely represented by the new word. None of that has anything to do with the initiative in industrial development, as you may have noticed from the fact that Russia was an agrarian country into early twentieth century.

    Your idea is a form of linguistic relativity, which has only some evidence for a small subset of it.

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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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