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English is the most cobbled together language. It has a fascinating history. You can trace some of its words back to the Proto-Indo-European language that also

English is the most cobbled together language. It has a fascinating history. You can trace some of its words back to the Proto-Indo-European language that also branched off into Sanskrit. It has marks of conquest in it that cause it to have Anglo names for some animals, but Norman French names for their meat. However pronunciation in it is incredibly screwed up and inconsistent. To the point where we actually have Spelling Bees where children train like mad to get on stage and shake and sweat in a competition to demonstrate their mastery of this mess. The winner is always celebrated like they are a genius, when they've essentially accomplished the intellectual equivalent of knowing where more of the potholes are on the nation's highways than the other kid.

hinkley 3y ago
We've known for some time that English began as a pidgin language, but about ten, fifteen years back some linguists declared that they had convinced themselves that the pidgin that became English started as another pidgin language itself. It's a melting pot language full of borrowed words. There's a theory in cognitive science that the language you speak in can affect what thoughts you can have. English speakers as a whole seem to have intuited this long ago. If a complex idea has a word in another language, we just steal it. Math and Science tend to limit themselves to latin, but then higher education in Europe used to be taught in Latin. I suppose to make it easier (or at least more fair) to bring students in from other countries, and send trained teachers out (or to poach them).
- mrkstu 3y ago
  Yep, I always think of schadenfreude in this context. A single word that we've stolen for something that would take multiple English words to express. Why come up with our own new English word, when there is a perfectly cromulent one right over there in German? Meanwhile the French have to continually consult their academics to create new French words that their citizens keep trying to borrow from other languages (mostly English)...
  - hinkley 3y ago
    When the government owned a lot of businesses it was easier to enforce it. I wonder how well it’s working now that they’ve desocialized so many things.

hinkley 3y ago

We've known for some time that English began as a pidgin language, but about ten, fifteen years back some linguists declared that they had convinced themselves that the pidgin that became English started as another pidgin language itself. It's a melting pot language full of borrowed words. There's a theory in cognitive science that the language you speak in can affect what thoughts you can have. English speakers as a whole seem to have intuited this long ago. If a complex idea has a word in another language, we just steal it. Math and Science tend to limit themselves to latin, but then higher education in Europe used to be taught in Latin. I suppose to make it easier (or at least more fair) to bring students in from other countries, and send trained teachers out (or to poach them).

mrkstu 3y ago
Yep, I always think of schadenfreude in this context. A single word that we've stolen for something that would take multiple English words to express. Why come up with our own new English word, when there is a perfectly cromulent one right over there in German? Meanwhile the French have to continually consult their academics to create new French words that their citizens keep trying to borrow from other languages (mostly English)...
- hinkley 3y ago
  When the government owned a lot of businesses it was easier to enforce it. I wonder how well it’s working now that they’ve desocialized so many things.