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> Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, French etc The pre-Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Britain have seemingly made little impact on English, aside from retention of s

> Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, French etc The pre-Anglo-Saxon inhabitants of Britain have seemingly made little impact on English, aside from retention of some British and Roman (and Romano-British) place names. > Considering that English has basically emerged as a "pidgin" languages, taking elements from the languages of various peoples coming to the islands -- Britons, Romans, Saxons, Danes, French etc -- and being simplified in the process There's no clear evidence that English was ever pidginised in England (though there are of course lots of English-based pidgins/creoles). There does, interestingly, seem to be some truth in there being an increased 'simplification' as languages gain more speakers, but mainly at the level of morphology, and not necessarily in syntax/semantics or phonology. (For instance, English still retains /θ/ and /ð/, which are really rare sounds crosslinguistically, especially having both of them.) Hindi is actually not so dissimilar to English in having been impacted by lots of different languages. Just as English is at its core a Western Germanic language (closely related to the Germanic languages of the low countries and neighbours), Hindi is at its core a northern Indo-Aryan language. But just as English was impacted by other Germanic languages (e.g. Norse) and then Norman French (itself a Romance variety acquired by Germanic speakers), and so forth, modern Hindi reflects the influence of a number of languages around the area of Delhi, including Punjabi, as well as heavy Persian influence (where Persian itself was already impacted by Arabic), and even retains some Turkic words carried into India by the Persianised Mughals, and then later on Portuguese and English. English's place in the world really seems to be the result of a snowball effect of socio-economic factors, rather than anything linguistic.

dorchadas 8y ago
> English's place in the world really seems to be the result of a snowball effect of socio-economic factors, rather than anything linguistic. Exactly. Not to mention that ease of learning is an extremely relative thing, and often comes down to what a person's native language is. Mandarin speakers would likely find Cantonese easier than English, for instance. And of course interest and necessity play a part in it as well; I actually met someone from Japan once who I could only communicate with through __Irish__. He found it much easier to learn because he was genuinely interested in it, so he could stick with it and focus on it.
BerislavLopac 8y ago
> There's no clear evidence that English was ever pidginised in England Actually, there's a plenty. "Old English had the crazy genders we would expect of a good European language – but the Scandies didn’t bother with those, and so now we have none. Chalk up one of English’s weirdnesses. What’s more, the Vikings mastered only that one shred of a once-lovely conjugation system: hence the lonely third‑person singular –s, hanging on like a dead bug on a windshield. Here and in other ways, they smoothed out the hard stuff." [0] As this article shows in more detail (and as I can confirm, being nearly bilingual), English is, grammatically, significantly simpler than most of the other (not only Indo-European) languages. (On the other hand, it has unnecessarily complex spelling, which hasn't changed along with the language itself, leading to many inconsistencies. The proverbial example is "ough"; also, in some cases spelling was forcibly changed for political reasons, like "queen".) [0] https://aeon.co/amp/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-different-from-other-languages https://aeon.co/amp/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-differe...
- dorchadas 8y ago
  Except it's not a creole, nor nowhere near it. For instance, a lot of the changes that we see in Middle English were already underway and documented even in our Old English texts. It's definitely outside academic consensus to consider the language a creole.
- _emacsomancer_ 8y ago
  I'm aware of the arguments. There's at least two things worth unpacking here: (1) creolisation =/= pidginisation, (2) not all language contact effects are the same thing as either of these. English isn't uniquely weird, at least no more so than any other language, in any linguistic sense. > On the other hand, it has unnecessarily complex spelling, which hasn't changed along with the language itself, leading to many inconsistencies Sure, in addition to typically keeping the spelling of words borrowed from other languages, even though those follow different conventions than does English spelling. But orthography and writing systems are a bolted on thing, they're not part of 'language' in any deep sense.

dorchadas 8y ago

> English's place in the world really seems to be the result of a snowball effect of socio-economic factors, rather than anything linguistic. Exactly. Not to mention that ease of learning is an extremely relative thing, and often comes down to what a person's native language is. Mandarin speakers would likely find Cantonese easier than English, for instance. And of course interest and necessity play a part in it as well; I actually met someone from Japan once who I could only communicate with through __Irish__. He found it much easier to learn because he was genuinely interested in it, so he could stick with it and focus on it.

BerislavLopac 8y ago

> There's no clear evidence that English was ever pidginised in England Actually, there's a plenty. "Old English had the crazy genders we would expect of a good European language – but the Scandies didn’t bother with those, and so now we have none. Chalk up one of English’s weirdnesses. What’s more, the Vikings mastered only that one shred of a once-lovely conjugation system: hence the lonely third‑person singular –s, hanging on like a dead bug on a windshield. Here and in other ways, they smoothed out the hard stuff." [0] As this article shows in more detail (and as I can confirm, being nearly bilingual), English is, grammatically, significantly simpler than most of the other (not only Indo-European) languages. (On the other hand, it has unnecessarily complex spelling, which hasn't changed along with the language itself, leading to many inconsistencies. The proverbial example is "ough"; also, in some cases spelling was forcibly changed for political reasons, like "queen".) [0] https://aeon.co/amp/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-different-from-other-languages https://aeon.co/amp/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-differe...

dorchadas 8y ago
Except it's not a creole, nor nowhere near it. For instance, a lot of the changes that we see in Middle English were already underway and documented even in our Old English texts. It's definitely outside academic consensus to consider the language a creole.
_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
I'm aware of the arguments. There's at least two things worth unpacking here: (1) creolisation =/= pidginisation, (2) not all language contact effects are the same thing as either of these. English isn't uniquely weird, at least no more so than any other language, in any linguistic sense. > On the other hand, it has unnecessarily complex spelling, which hasn't changed along with the language itself, leading to many inconsistencies Sure, in addition to typically keeping the spelling of words borrowed from other languages, even though those follow different conventions than does English spelling. But orthography and writing systems are a bolted on thing, they're not part of 'language' in any deep sense.