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The standard joke is that English isn't actually a language: it's three languages stacked on top of each other wearing a trench coat, which go around beating up
by nkoren 1y ago
The standard joke is that English isn't actually a language: it's three languages stacked on top of each other wearing a trench coat, which go around beating up other languages and rifling through their pockets for loose vocabulary and spare grammar. This is funny because it's true.
Modern Italian, on the other hand, makes a modicum of sense because it was explicitly constructed during the 19th-century unification of Italy, when somebody had the bright idea that if you wanted to have a nation called "Italy", you should also have a language called "Italian" and it should make a modicum of sense. This is a memo which English has somehow never gotten.
- egypturnash 1y agoThe monkey's paw curls a finger: "Today Donald Trump announced a new initiative to teach all children a new AI-normalized language known as Americish. All English signage will be replaced with Americish."
- Zambyte 1y agoAbsolutely tremendous! rocks out on invisible accordion
- nayuki 1y ago> English isn't actually a language: it's three languages stacked on top of each other To give an example, number words are often covered 3 times in English - one from English (Germanic?) roots, one from Latin roots, and one from Greek roots. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeral_prefix#Table_of_number_prefixes_in_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeral_prefix#Table_of_number... one / uni / mono two / bi / di three / ter / tri four / quad / tetra Other examples include: A dentist works on your teeth, a canine is a dog, the meat from a cow is beef, a foreword is a preface.