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English is not "sloppy", not any more than any other language. Any language with a large number and geographic spread of speakers will develop varieties and acc

by brettp 2y ago

English is not "sloppy", not any more than any other language. Any language with a large number and geographic spread of speakers will develop varieties and accents. In fact people do it deliberately to distinguish themselves from other speakers of the same language (just take a look at how teenagers' language innovates). French, Spanish, and German all have huge variation in dialects and accents too. English, like many other languages learnt widely as a trade language by non-native speakers, has lost a lot of complexity, notably case system and gender. (Indonesian is perhaps the canonical example of this.) Unfortunately its spelling was standardized just before it underwent a huge change in pronunciation, and its habit of borrowing words from other languages without changing their spelling, has left it with fairly chaotic orthography. A few phonetic features - unusual consonants like th, difficult to learn rules around stressed syllables, nasty consonant clusters (squirrel!) - do make it tricker than it could be for second language learners. It didn't become the default international language of trade due to any features of the language itself (it did that thanks to the British Empire and in particular its former colony in North America) - but many features of modern English are the result of so many people learning and speaking it. Because it is so widely spoken by so many people, it does have a large vocabulary and a lot of idioms. But the grammar is generally not too difficult - no grammatical gender, no case aside from a few pronouns, outside of a handful of irregular verbs conjugations are pretty easy ("put an 's' on the third person singular"), and so on.

shiroiushi 2y ago
>English is not "sloppy", not any more than any other language. Yes it is, and you say so yourself: >Unfortunately its spelling was standardized just before it underwent a huge change in pronunciation, and its habit of borrowing words from other languages without changing their spelling, has left it with fairly chaotic orthography. >A few phonetic features - unusual consonants like th, difficult to learn rules around stressed syllables, nasty consonant clusters (squirrel!) - do make it tricker than it could be for second language learners. Most other languages don't borrow words so profligately, and have much more regular relationships between their written form and their pronunciation. >but many features of modern English are the result of so many people learning and speaking it. Right, and that makes the language "sloppy", which was my point before. You can't have a language shared by so many different people and cultures as a common trade language and have it stay as orderly and precise as German, for example. >But the grammar is generally not too difficult - no grammatical gender, no case aside from a few pronouns, outside of a handful of irregular verbs conjugations are pretty easy Yes, and these features all make the language much easier for people to adopt as an international language, despite the sloppiness. I have a hard time imagining Russian or German having had this success in a parallel universe. As an example, look at Dutch: the Netherlands is another country that got rich from trade, and was also a colonial power. But who outside of the Netherlands speaks Dutch? South Africa is the only place the language actually went anywhere. Meanwhile, the former colonies of Spain all still use Spanish.
- brettp 2y ago
  Dutch isn't an international language because they just weren't as good at colonisation as Britain, or Spain. (And Belgium would like a word with you if you think no-one else speaks Dutch.) Look at the international languages before English - Latin and Greek - both beasts of languages to learn. Vulgar Latin's simplified offspring (French, Italian, Spanish) are largely the result of second language learners casting off the bits of Latin they couldn't or wouldn't learn. I don't believe that English borrows more profligately than any other language. Historically it was hugely influenced by Norman French but nowadays I'd suggest more languages borrow from English than English does from other languages. The eternal fight between the Académie française and the people who actually speak French over borrowed words vs "native" ones is a good example of this.
  - gattilorenz 2y ago
    > Vulgar Latin's simplified offspring (French, Italian, Spanish) are largely the result of second language learners casting off the bits of Latin they couldn't or wouldn't learn If Latin was tbe second language and Spanish/Italian was not there yet, what was their main language then?
    - brettp 2y ago
      Celtic languages like Gaulish or Germanic ones like Frankish.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- brettp 2y ago
  ... and if you think that German is "orderly and precise" then you've obviously never had to learn its plurals.
  - shiroiushi 2y ago
    I have. German is complicated, but it's regular. The plurals are crazy, but they're regular: once you know the rule for them and how they map to singular/plural and case and gender, you can apply it everywhere. "Orderly and precise" doesn't mean simple. A Rube Goldberg machine can be orderly and precise, while still looking like a ridiculous amount of unnecessary complexity.

by brettp 2y ago

shiroiushi 2y ago

>English is not "sloppy", not any more than any other language. Yes it is, and you say so yourself: >Unfortunately its spelling was standardized just before it underwent a huge change in pronunciation, and its habit of borrowing words from other languages without changing their spelling, has left it with fairly chaotic orthography. >A few phonetic features - unusual consonants like th, difficult to learn rules around stressed syllables, nasty consonant clusters (squirrel!) - do make it tricker than it could be for second language learners. Most other languages don't borrow words so profligately, and have much more regular relationships between their written form and their pronunciation. >but many features of modern English are the result of so many people learning and speaking it. Right, and that makes the language "sloppy", which was my point before. You can't have a language shared by so many different people and cultures as a common trade language and have it stay as orderly and precise as German, for example. >But the grammar is generally not too difficult - no grammatical gender, no case aside from a few pronouns, outside of a handful of irregular verbs conjugations are pretty easy Yes, and these features all make the language much easier for people to adopt as an international language, despite the sloppiness. I have a hard time imagining Russian or German having had this success in a parallel universe. As an example, look at Dutch: the Netherlands is another country that got rich from trade, and was also a colonial power. But who outside of the Netherlands speaks Dutch? South Africa is the only place the language actually went anywhere. Meanwhile, the former colonies of Spain all still use Spanish.

brettp 2y ago
Dutch isn't an international language because they just weren't as good at colonisation as Britain, or Spain. (And Belgium would like a word with you if you think no-one else speaks Dutch.) Look at the international languages before English - Latin and Greek - both beasts of languages to learn. Vulgar Latin's simplified offspring (French, Italian, Spanish) are largely the result of second language learners casting off the bits of Latin they couldn't or wouldn't learn. I don't believe that English borrows more profligately than any other language. Historically it was hugely influenced by Norman French but nowadays I'd suggest more languages borrow from English than English does from other languages. The eternal fight between the Académie française and the people who actually speak French over borrowed words vs "native" ones is a good example of this.
- gattilorenz 2y ago
  > Vulgar Latin's simplified offspring (French, Italian, Spanish) are largely the result of second language learners casting off the bits of Latin they couldn't or wouldn't learn If Latin was tbe second language and Spanish/Italian was not there yet, what was their main language then?
  - brettp 2y ago
    Celtic languages like Gaulish or Germanic ones like Frankish.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
brettp 2y ago
... and if you think that German is "orderly and precise" then you've obviously never had to learn its plurals.
- shiroiushi 2y ago
  I have. German is complicated, but it's regular. The plurals are crazy, but they're regular: once you know the rule for them and how they map to singular/plural and case and gender, you can apply it everywhere. "Orderly and precise" doesn't mean simple. A Rube Goldberg machine can be orderly and precise, while still looking like a ridiculous amount of unnecessary complexity.