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The English language doesn't exist – it's just French that's badly pronounced
- coisasdavida 11mo agowell, makes me think of this guy reading labels in french in Canada: https://www.instagram.com/steven.massicotte/ https://www.instagram.com/steven.massicotte/
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- waffletower 11mo agoOh yeah, say this in French: That jumbo jet's glitchy huddle of passengers found the giggle and fluke of landing to be randomly serendipity-inducing.
- wk_end 11mo agoI can barely say that in English, and I'm a native speaker.
- cbm-vic-20 11mo agoLMGTFY: https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=fr&text=That%20jumbo%20jet%27s%20glitchy%20huddle%20of%20passengers%20found%20the%20giggle%20and%20fluke%20of%20landing%20to%20be%20randomly%20serendipity-inducing.&op=translate https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=fr&text=That%20jumbo%...
- projektfu 11mo agoA glitchy huddle of passengers? I think that glitchy is not used meaningfully. A huddle of glitchy passengers, perhaps, if they are all androids.
- sterlind 11mo agodo androids dream of electric airliners?
- projektfu 11mo agoThis one does.
- waffletower 11mo agoThey weren't staying in their seats is another more prosaic explanation.
- cadr 11mo agoHaving Google Translate take that into French and then back gave me "The passengers of this jumbo jet, caught in a quagmire resembling an ocean liner, found a happy accident in this chaotic and surprising landing." I quite like both sentences.
- seanhunter 11mo agoThis reminds me of the the onion's piece "I bet I can speak Spanish" https://theonion.com/i-bet-i-can-speak-spanish-1819583640/ https://theonion.com/i-bet-i-can-speak-spanish-1819583640/
- chrisweekly 11mo agohahahaha thank you for that, it hit my funny bone just right
- b800h 11mo agoIf you actually put the sentences in that article into Google translate, it things you're speaking Ilocano, which is apparently a language from the Phillipines.
- jandrewrogers 11mo agoHa, you made me read that article. Google translate is actually making an eminently reasonable guess. Filipino languages are full of transliterated Spanish loan words. The syllabic structure of the sentences, though it still looks like gibberish to me, also bear more than a passing resemblance to Filipino languages.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- cestith 11mo agoThe syntax has morphed from Germanic languages, but with Norman vocabulary. Norman was a dialect of French from before the standardization of l'Académie Française.
- dfawcus 11mo agoNah - there are two vocabularies, the 'posh' Norman French one, and the common western Germanic one. (There is also an admixture of Norse influence, so the combination of Old English (Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Frisians) with Old Norse then knocking the edges off. That probably did for grammatical gender.) The Germanic core still generally gets used by all in high stress environments.
- cestith 11mo agoLatin and various forms of French are bigger contributors to overall vocabulary than German and Dutch. It does seem to me that much of the core vocabulary day to day or that would be used in a pidgin of English by word use frequency is more Germanic, but I personally don’t know of a study showing that. And yes, certain situations do tend to favor the Germanic portions to include especially coarser words.
- dfawcus 11mo agoI was not referring to the well known 4 letter words used to describe parts of the anatomy. They merely get used for emphasis. Under fight / violence / battle conditions, the active vocabulary is Germanic, and not lacking in expressive power, nor subject to misunderstanding.
- astrobe_ 11mo agoYes, and Norman was a "creole" of a Germanic language brought in by the viking conquest and French, which itself is a creole of a Celtic-based language and Latin (due to the conquest of France by romans). Celts and Vikings were already presents in the British islands. See [1] for the "genealogy" of European languages. So William the Conqueror brought to England more of the same things plus a few more (and the endemic mismatch of spelling and pronunciation I guess). France is sort-of at the crossroads of Europe, so it's no surprise that there's a little bit of everything in the French language. This is particularly visible in place-names of Normandy [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indo-European_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indo-European_language... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_toponymy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_toponymy
- vonnik 11mo agoThe author is right to critique Cerquiglini. The French legacy is largely lexical. The syntax and the old, short words of English are Germanic. Its several influences drove the relatively large lexicon we have, and probably adapted English to be a globally adaptive language, borrowing words readily.
- tsenturk 11mo agoThanks, mate. If you’ve got other theories like that, I don’t want to hear them either
- sterlind 11mo agoit's tongue in cheek. the book is an act of mild trolling.
- antisthenes 11mo agoAs a person with ears who is mildly versed in English and enough Spanish to get some landscaping done, it's extremely obvious that French is the badly pronounced English, and not vice versa.
- detectivestory 11mo agoI am equally surprised and enertained by how offended some people are regarding this article. FYI: The above sentence contains 7 words that come from old french/latin, and 7 that come from old english/german
- weinzierl 11mo ago"English isn’t a dialect of French. The grammatical structure of English is almost entirely Germanic and no amount of sophistry can change that." It might be seen as a dialect of German but with the heavy influence English had on the German language in the past decades it's more that German is like an English dialect now.
- kelipso 11mo agoI wouldn’t say historically a dialect of German. English and German are both Germanic languages, so closely related languages not dialects of either.
- weinzierl 11mo agoYou are right, of course. My point was more that German nowadays borrows more from English than vice versa. I should not have written "historically" (and have deleted it since), because that is obviously wrong. What I meant to say is that over time the direction of influence switched around.
- z500 11mo agoExcept it didn't get those Germanic qualities by borrowing them from German, it got them by shared heritage.
- nkrisc 11mo agoGerman and English are related, but not that closely. The Germanic language groups are not the same as German the (modern) language. English is more closely related to Frisian than German.
- weinzierl 11mo agoYou are right, see my comment to kelipso.
- cosmicgadget 11mo ago> The author knows this of course. His point is not to win the argument, but rather to give a new perspective on the traditional rivalry between the English and French languages. Englandbros - we ride at dawn.
- steve_gh 11mo agoI'm thinking about this. I'm sitting on my veranda in my pyjamas having just enjoyed a pukka curry!!
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- ternus 11mo ago> it was French that equipped English to become the language of international communication, _a state of affairs which should be celebrated as la francophonie’s greatest achievement_. Imagine making this claim to a proud French language partisan. You'd have to rush them to the hospital.
- littlestymaar 11mo agoSomeone would be going to go the the hospital indeed, but it's not necessarily the one you think.
- pcrh 11mo agoFrench was in fact the language of international diplomacy prior to WWII. Russians, Germans, Poles, Hungarians, Italians, etc, would communicate in French. English adopted that position after WWII.
- jandrewrogers 11mo agoFrench still is the language of international diplomacy in some (dwindling) circles.
- jmclnx 11mo agoOne important thing not mentioned. English has no genders except in extremely rare cases. Other Indo-European languages are full of genders, like female tables, male autos, etc. Trying to learn Spanish in high school, it was genders that confused me the most. Safe to say I just remember some words at this point.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- dfawcus 11mo agoEnglish only has sex, not gender. He, She, It. The commonly cited example of referring to ships as 'she' is simply an affectation, grammatically a ship is an it. Or can you provide another example I may have overlooked?
- jmclnx 11mo agoI was thinking of ship, I am far from a language scholar.
- adamzwasserman 11mo agoOnly half correct. English is roughly 50% French and 50% German. The English dictionary is also about 50% larger than the French Dictionary. The length of the German dictionary is irrelevant because: Hottentotenstrottelmutterattentäterlattengitterwetterkotterbeutelratte It is very frequent in English to use both the French word and the German word for the same thing in different situation. Beef (French: bœuf) / Cow (Germanic) Pork (French: porc) / Pig/Swine (Germanic) Mutton (French: mouton) / Sheep (Germanic) Veal (French: veau) / Calf (Germanic) Venison (French: venaison) / Deer (Germanic) Poultry (French: poulet) / Chicken/Fowl (Germanic) Purchase (French) / Buy (Germanic) Commence (French) / Begin (Germanic) Inquire (French) / Ask (Germanic) Receive (French) / Get (Germanic) Odor (French) / Smell (Germanic) Aroma (French, positive) / Stench (Germanic, negative) Cardiac (French/Latin) / Heart (Germanic) Ocular (French/Latin) / Eye (Germanic) Dental (French/Latin) / Tooth (Germanic)
- guerrilla 11mo agoGermanic* not German.
- adamzwasserman 11mo agoyes
- xg15 11mo ago> Hottentotten etc I mean, you too can have an infinite vocabulary if you just leave out the spaces between words.
- adamzwasserman 11mo agohahaha. exactly!
- IncreasePosts 11mo agoI don't know how much truth there is to this, but I've heard a story about the difference in French/Germanic word usage may stem from inequalities from the Norman invasion - the masters were speaking French, and the common folk were doing the dirty work speaking old English derived from germanic languages. So, the masters were dealing with the finished product with French words - beef, pork, mutton, veal, venison, poultry - and the commoners were dealing with animals with Germanic words - cow, pig, sheep, deer, chicken, etc
- gip 11mo agoThe fact is that, for a long time, British kings considered themselves kings of France as well - and even believed that France was the senior kingdom. The language they spoke reflected that attitude. That said, as a Frenchman who has to speak English every day, I can assure you that English has long since become its own thing!
- mytailorisrich 11mo agoThey spoke French because they were Normans and married mostly with the continental aristocracy. Their claim to the French throne was based on the rules of succession and an argument over them (arising from those intertwinned lineages). An interesting fact is that King Richard I (Sean Connery in Robin Hood with Kevin Costner)'s mother was from South West France and he grew up there, and so he spoke French and Occitan but not really English. [1]
- mytailorisrich 11mo ago[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_claims_to_the_French_throne https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_claims_to_the_French_t...
- paleotrope 11mo agoHenry IV was the first English king to speak english natively since before the conquest. Mel Gibson's Braveheart is particularly ridiculous because everyone would have been speaking various amounts of Norman French to each other in reality. Wallace, the Bruce, Edward I and II, the various other nobles.
- gnfargbl 11mo agoÞis gewrit is scræp. Hit is alyfed to awritan fullice riht Englisc butan þæm fule Frenciscan wordum eallunga.
- TacticalCoder 11mo ago[dead]
- mrweasel 11mo agoRecently, as my kid is learning to read and write Danish, while I've started to use English more and more, due to work. My observation is that English isn't that great a language, it's just very popular. The more English I speak, read and write, the more I appreciate my own native language. It's really sad to see English language and words replace native ones, especially if your own language in many cases have better precision and quite frankly reads better. Recently I listened to a "Danish" podcast, about Charlie Kirk. I put Danish in " " because one of the hosts, a native Dane, struggles severely with expressing her thoughts and observation without the use of English. English is easy to criticize. It doesn't have all the letters it needs. It doesn't have compound noun. A significant part of the vocabulary is just borrow from Norse, German or French (and pronounced wrong). It is however VERY popular, billions speak it, and that's a quality all on it's own.
- marcellus23 11mo agoYou don't think you prefer Danish because Danish is your native language and English is not?
- mrweasel 11mo agoPossibly, but I wonder why so many Danes prefer English words, when we have Danish words that are often more descriptive. My preference have also change over the years, from more heavily favouring English previously, to now opting for Danish whenever possible (e.g. when reading books).
- HeinzStuckeIt 11mo agoI wonder if the Nordic languages would be in a healthier state in this respect, in terms of usage and not resorting to English in mixed groups, if their television broadcasting had been shared among each other more, instead of each country looking so much to the USA for programming. The Nordic countries used to be a single linguistic space for educated people and you can still witness this practice among the elderly. Why exactly couldn't young people growing up in, for example, Sweden and Denmark watch and learn from Norway's Uti vår hage just like Americans could watch Monty Python or Fawlty Towers?
- Night_Thastus 11mo agoAnd French is just bad Vulgar Latin and Gaulish. There is no such thing as purity or correctness in language - those concepts are farcical. Every second of every day language evolves with the words and pronunciations of the people currently using it. If enough people spell or pronounce the "wrong" way, it becomes the "right" way. French today is slightly different than it was yesterday, and the day before, and 50 years ago.
- orwin 11mo agoI think we have like 5 words left from Gaul in modern french (only one I know is 'talus'). Old central French was mostly vulgar latin+frankish, with a bit of Gaulish and Arabic, then Gaulish was traded for latin and greek forcibly thanks to the french 'Academie' that made central/Parisian french the only french, and we lost a lot (a _lot_) of words. What's funny is that English, beside Normand french, borrowed a lot from French before that,and we borrowed those words back, with a different meaning, or sometimes a similar one.
- bryanlarsen 11mo ago> There is no such thing as purity or correctness in language There certainly is, in the case of French and other languages that have a central authority defining what is pure and correct. Defining something as pure by fiat seems nonsensical, but the world is strange that way. Especially if it applies outside the jurisdiction. Why should the Parisian government get to declare that Quebecois is impure?
- School-Cotton 11mo agoPeople massively overstate the power and influence of the Académie française. It is essentially just a cultural organization. Sure, it claims to officially regulate the French language, but its decisions are not actually binding on anyone, not even the government or the education system, and are in fact widely ignored. In actual practice, French is about as regulated as English is (i.e., not at all) and French people use tons of loanwords from various languages, especially English and Arabic.
- UltraSane 11mo agoBut it doesn't have grammatical gender which is a HUGE improvement.
- comrade1234 11mo agoGrammatical gender lets you be very precise with fewer words. I can say in German with just 4 words both "I am on the hill" and "I am passing over the hill" by just changing the case of one word. It's the same sentence but only one letter changes and it completely changes the meaning of the sentence. German was designed by a programmer.
- UltraSane 11mo agoIf you are going to have to remember an attribute for every single noun it should really be a MEANINGFUL one instead of something utterly arbitrary like gender. Some examples are animate or inanimate like Algonquian languages do or the physical properties of an object, such as its shape, size, or consistency like the Athabaskan languages do.
- paleotrope 11mo agoIs that grammatical gender or declension?
- jgwil2 11mo agoThat doesn't have anything to do with grammatical gender, it's because of noun declension that that is possible. It's only incidental that nouns of each of the three genders decline differently; case distinctions could still be made even if there was only one gender.
- Awesomedonut 11mo agoIsn't English a Germanic language though?
- detectivestory 11mo agoYes, it is a Germanic language. The title is a tongue-in-cheek jibe about how much the English language has borrowed from French and Latin. I believe the majority of English words come from Latin/French although the top 100 most spoken words are generally Germanic. People seem to forget that England was ruled by French speaking people for a long time, and that had a huge impact on the development of the English we speak today.
- beardyw 11mo agoThis seems to pay lip service* to Latin which was used in England for a thousand years before the Norman invasion and was still in use up to the 17th century. No, it wasn't used in the pub or the market, but it did influence the language strongly. * see what I did there
- 0xbadcafebee 11mo agoThis is a linguist troll, by a French linguist. English is West and North Germanic, with Norman French, Latin, and Greek loans. In fact Latin loans are the same amount as French, 28% each.
- sidewndr46 11mo agoJust wait until they find out Dutch exists
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- zkmon 11mo agoNone of the languages have their own static existence. Just like a river doesn't have a precise start location and end location, a language doesn't have a precise boundary in space and time. More so in time. Language can't be separated from culture, people and place. All of these - language, culture, people, and places change massively over time, to the extent of losing identity. If English doesn't exist on its own, French doesn't either. Nor does Latin, Greek or Sanskrit. All of these are incremental variations or dialects of some other language.
- mac3n 11mo agoalternatively, Modern English is North Germanic (Scandanavian) https://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/477070.html https://www.uni-goettingen.de/en/477070.html https://brill.com/view/journals/ldc/6/1/article-p1_1.xml https://brill.com/view/journals/ldc/6/1/article-p1_1.xml
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- PeterCorless 11mo agoFrench is actually <30%. There is a well-sourced Wikipedia article about this. • French (including Old French: 11.66%; Anglo-French: 1.88%; and French: 14.77%): 28.30%; • Latin (including modern scientific and technical Latin): 28.24%; • Germanic languages (including Old English, Proto-Germanic and others: 20.13%; • Old Norse: 1.83%; Middle English: 1.53%; Dutch: 1.07%; excluding Germanic words borrowed from a Romance language): 25%;[a] • Greek: 5.32%; • no etymology given: 4.04%; • derived from proper names: 3.28%; and • all other languages: less than 1% https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-language_influences_in_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-language_influences_in... Also, one could argue French itself is an agglomeration of Vulgar Latin (87%) as well as its own Frankish Germanic roots (10%), and a few of Gaulish and Breton Celtic origin. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_words_of_Germanic_origin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_words_of_German...
- School-Cotton 11mo agoIt is not straightforward to define a metric like this. What counts as an "English word" ? There are books full of the scientific names of plant and animal species, which usually come from Latin; do these count as "English words" ? What's the cutoff? IMO, a much better metric is frequency-weighted; that is, taking some corpus of real English and counting the words in it, rather than weighting "every English word" with the value 1. If you do this frequency-weighted analysis, Old English is far ahead of French and Latin combined (especially in colloquial speech; they're closer in formal writing).
- insane_dreamer 11mo ago> • Latin (including modern scientific and technical Latin): 28.24%; This skews the numbers because there are thousands (probably tens of thousands) of scientific terms, names of species, etc., that probably shouldn't be counted here if you're looking at the origin of the language and that is because we continue to use Latin for new scientific terms or names of species today. In other words, they're not Latin words that have been absorbed into English, they're just Latin words period. > 25% old Norse? That is almost certainly not correct.
- ThomasMiconi 11mo agoThe book's title is not from Clemenceau, but from Alexandre Dumas, in "Twenty years after" (the sequel to the Three Musketeers). Fun fact: this passage is somehow excised from the English translation of the book used by Project Gutenberg and Wikisource! (you can see it in the original French version, chapter 68: "l'anglais n'est que du français mal prononcé")
- siraben 11mo agoSee also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Germanic_and_Latinate_equivalents_in_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Germanic_and_Latinate_...
- prerok 11mo agoI have not read the linguist's essay, just the article, but I am almost certain the claims are preposterous. The article already mentions that the structure is definitely germanic in origin. Next are the words. Some are adopted from other languages, but many more have roots in Germanic and Latin. The reason is that Romans invaded Britain some 2000 years ago. Afterwards, Latin was spoken in learned circles until the renaissance and even later. When French became the language of diplomacy, IIRC at the time of Napoleon, only that's when French became a language of note. That's when the "sofisticated" words like veal, venison etc. enter the English language. But, even all that aside, my native language is Slavic. I speak both English and German, and a very little bit of French. In my limited personal view, German and English have much more in common than French and English.
- prerok 11mo agoReply to self: it seems I was wrong and veal, venison, etc. have roots in Old French, which has influenced Old English through Normandic invasion. Still, I stand by my assessment: while it's clear that influences are there to some of the words, it's clearly more germanic. Just as we say today that French is a romanic language and English is germanic. I see no evidence here to counter this common classification.
- riffraff 11mo ago"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary." --James D. Nicoll
- JuniperMesos 11mo ago> Cerquiglini argues that the role of French in the birth of the English language was much deeper than is generally admitted. It is the French influence, he says, that saved English from being just another variant of Dutch. As such it was French that equipped English to become the language of international communication, a state of affairs which should be celebrated as la francophonie’s greatest achievement. This sounds like either unfalsifiable bullshit being portrayed as scholarship, or deliberate trolling by a French guy who likes French and wants to mock English-speakers. I'd have more respect for the latter, since at least that's just making fun of a more powerful neighboring culture (a fun pastime for everyone) rather than trying to assert real facts about the world.
- mc32 11mo agoThey’re just mad they lost the “lingua Franca” of the world title so this is the way for them to hang on to the coattails of relevance. The Normans didn’t even speak Parisian French but a Breton variant and also had with them some Norse words they kept. But they can pretend. The only thing that made French and English afterwards the lingua francas of the world was the commerce/trade and innovation offered by their speakers. We could all be using Spanish or Chinese as the lingua Franca if either of them had more influence in the world.
- merry_flame 11mo agoI agree with the sentiment, but Normans speaking a Breton variant of French… Oh gosh… And why "they"? What's with the lumping of 300+ million French speakers with the personal opinion of one person? What's that talk about relevance as if not being number 1 meant that the language was damned?
- comrade1234 11mo agoI hate (I know, strong word but I really do) French and Latin possessives and French pronunciation. German makes much more sense and thankfully English is a Germanic language.
- mc32 11mo agoDanish is even better. More simplified with the exception of integrating the article into the word itself; other than that slightly simpler than English.
- gwbas1c 11mo agoThe mutual borrowing between both languages is really amusing when visiting Montreal. I sat down in a restaurant in the historic part of the city, and the menu was loaded with "apostrophe s" and "le Hamburger". I then looked at my server and said, in plain English, "My high school French teacher used to make fun of this as 'franglais'". The server then laughed and told me, "oh, we mix English into French here all the time and don't care." The next day I walked by a youth American football league in a city park. Even my mother's household, which was Quebec-French speaking in the US, would say "poe-tat" instead of "pomme de terre." ("Potato" with a French accent instead of the literal "apple of the earth" word that I learned in school.)
- merry_flame 11mo agoNice anecdotes, but the last one is a misinterpretation that got me into a rabbit hole. "poe-tat" is juste "patate" and is widely used not the least because it's just faster to say than "pomme de terre" (following Zipf's law of abbreviation and the principle of least effort). It's more informal, but it's pedigree is excellent as it comes from Taíno via Spanish, was first recorded in 1582 and recorded by the French Academy in 1762… which was actually only the case for "pomme de terre" in 1835! It seems that "pomme de terre" referred to other tubers in the distant past, but that the famous agronomist Parmentier remarketed "patates" as "pommes de terre" in the 18th century to promote their acceptance.
- gwbas1c 11mo agoI think you're better at getting the phonetics across than I am.
- ajfkfkdjsfi 11mo agoI had an iconic Latin teacher that would wander the campus wearing headphones listening to opera at full blast and muttering to himself, "French is but a vulgar form of Latin."
- alsetmusic 11mo agoSee this excellent book: Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme and Other Oddities of the English Language It details the historical reasons why English is completely broken in terms of spelling and pronunciation. It makes sense of why it’s such a mess. Light read, kinda fun (said the history nerd who loves language). https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55332395-highly-irregular https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55332395-highly-irregula...
- litoE 11mo agoThe whole thing does not make sense to me because the grammars are so different. In English you say "Mary's house". In French it's "La maison de Marie."
- merry_flame 11mo agoAnd yet, you'd say "the House of the Virgin Mary" or "the House of Windsor" in English (which translate to "la Maison de la Vierge Marie", but the "Maison Windsor" in French). English grammar has incorporated a lot of key Romance features alongside its Germanic ones.
- penguin_booze 11mo agoBringing that to the present day: American is badly phrased (and written) English.
- _DeadFred_ 11mo agoThis is also anglo society. It's mixed, part the old English community where people worked and lived together, and part the top most Norman 'conquerors' who were above the peasants that they conquered and did not feel themselves a part of the local society other than to extract wealth/value from them. Modern capitalist business culture is Norman conquest culture, and we need to treat/understand that the grandpas meeting at the local McDonalds for a coffee who care about the community are not the same as the grandpa's running the businesses/government who care what they can extra/exploit from their holdings. Businesses do not care about community/health/safety/benefit tradeoffs any more than the Norman conquerors cared about the peasants/surfs they extracted from other than the Normans had to hold on by force but at this point we are so used to our Norman masters we maintain the system for them. They are all literally The Sheriff of Nottingham.