4 ms·

English also seams to borrow heavily from latin for anything medical. The words in Spanish for your bones, bacteria, etc would all be recognizable to your docto

English also seams to borrow heavily from latin for anything medical. The words in Spanish for your bones, bacteria, etc would all be recognizable to your doctor.

gerdesj 4y ago
... and Old/Ancient Greek. When you see -phth- you know you are in for a right old tongue twister. Not human but fish related: ichthyophthirius. In English it's called "white spot" - both of those words are very Anglo-Saxon. 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)
- wageslave99 4y ago
  > 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". 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/.
retrac 4y ago
It's quite systematic. Latin was the language of medicine. When they switched to English, or other local languages, they kept a lot of jargon. Religion and government and academic areas are similar. 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. I can see why doctors just keep their cant.
- somewhereoutth 4y ago
  Cow - said by the Anglo-Saxon serf that would rear it. Beef - said by the Norman noble that would eat it. Same with deer/venison, pig/pork, sheep/mutton.

English also seams to borrow heavily from latin for anything medical. The words in Spanish for your bones, bacteria, etc would all be recognizable to your doctor.

gerdesj 4y ago

... and Old/Ancient Greek. When you see -phth- you know you are in for a right old tongue twister. Not human but fish related: ichthyophthirius. In English it's called "white spot" - both of those words are very Anglo-Saxon. 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)

wageslave99 4y ago
> 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". 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/.

retrac 4y ago

It's quite systematic. Latin was the language of medicine. When they switched to English, or other local languages, they kept a lot of jargon. Religion and government and academic areas are similar. 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. I can see why doctors just keep their cant.

somewhereoutth 4y ago
Cow - said by the Anglo-Saxon serf that would rear it. Beef - said by the Norman noble that would eat it. Same with deer/venison, pig/pork, sheep/mutton.