So, I was hearing some frog radio program and someone said that american english is what it is because all those people coming from such different places needed a simple language to communicate despite their vastly different cultural backgrounds, ie different conceptions and behaviors.
So, that in such a mess some order was needed and we got this 'english' as a result. Some kind of natural esperanto, so to speak. Something not as ugly as a preconceived language, but not quite as a natural human language either.
And we all know how language reflects/inlfuences the culture and thought of those holding it.
english has the widest vocabulary of any language. English is what it is because of german (and latin/Greek), german because of Latin and other regional languages, and so on. t. Linguist
Jose Watson
Sounds stupid. American English has individual dialects much like British English and often those dialects are engrained in a population. A person who lives in Georgia no matter what race is going to speak with a Southern Drawl that isny found in someone from say Brooklyn in New York.
The reason English is such a fucking mess is because the Anglo-Saxons or, as we know of them today: Brits, were exposed to a lot of different people whom they both ruled over and had been ruled over by.
Wyatt Reed
>t. Linguist >forgets to mention the huge influence of French in English language >confuses German with Germanic
Sure English has nothing to do with German Its Germanic roots are much closer from Dutch and Norwegian than German
Hudson Long
typing fast and on my phone, Germanic auto'd to german. french doesn't have as large of an influence as german and, even then, latin is the root of french
Chase Wright
>French calling English simple and mongrelized >they still count in 20s and use arbitrary noun genders
James Brown
>english has the widest vocabulary of any language >french doesn't have as large of an influence as german >t. Linguist You are not a linguist. You have not formally studied it, you have no linguistic training, stop roleplaying.
I'm not trying to insult you (or anybody) but that's complete bunk. Yeah, a lot of different languages have influenced English, hence our very high proportion of foreign borrowings, but it's not a creole (well, according to most linguists -- there's a hypothesis that it might have started as one, but that's a minority belief). Creoles, incidentally, aren't necessarily any simpler than 'ordinary' languages, and certainly aren't any less 'natural' -- they're nothing at all like Esperanto.
>And we all know how language reflects/inlfuences the culture and thought of those holding it. I don't personally disagree, but that's a statement a lot of linguists would at least want to severely qualify.
Jacob Kelly
>look how cool I am I know that French influenced english And you did? Why would they put the full weight of their studies into a post on Veeky Forums?
Logan Butler
I can tell he's not a linguist because he made a couple of mistakes no actual linguist would. Actually, they're not even really mistakes -- "English has the widest vocabulary of any language" rises to the level of "not even wrong."
I realize I'm coming across as a dick here, but this shit bothers me -- you wouldn't call yourself a chemist after reading a handful of Wikipedia articles on chemistry, but for some reason people with no qualifications feel comfortable calling themselves linguists (historians have the same problem, I'm guessing). Which is really disrespectful to the field. I'm not even saying you need a degree necessarily, just know your shit first.
Jordan Perez
>french doesn't have as large of an influence as german[ic]
It does in vocabulary at least
Jace Morales
No celtic influence?
Kayden Lewis
>American English is not English Then why did you just call it English you cocksucking retard
Jason Green
I don't know, I don't really like americans but this sounds like shitty pretentious french banter >hon hon les americans 'av no reel language, zey arr so uncultured xddd
Levi Parker
That sounds like complete bullshit, and I seriously doubt any actual linguists would agree with it as an explanation.
Brits like to say that Americans speak simplified or "stupid" English, but the fact is that the two branches of the language diverged a long time ago and evolved separately. The English that was being spoken in the colonial era was not modern British English by any stretch of the imagination. Because of geographical separation, the two language just underwent different changes and ended up with a few different features. That's why the two dialects are different; there's no need for bullshit explanations about American English not actually being English. In fact, plenty of linguists have argued that the language underwent far more changes in Britain than it did in America since the dialects diverged.
Brody Young
>celtic Why would we have been influenced by an utterly dead language?
Jacob Watson
None of the Celtic languages had much influence on English vocabulary at all. Just a handful of loanwords. They did influence English grammar, though, possibly pretty heavily. There's a whole page about it here:
Most notably Celtic influence may be partially responsible for why modern English is so analytic (i.e. English words rarely change their forms depending on their place in the sentence; our verbs and nouns have way fewer conjugations/declensions than in most European languages, our adjectives rarely decline at all. Very unlike most other European languages.)
Gavin Rogers
>Thoughts? I think you should take your autism meds.
Jaxon Wilson
Because modern English is the product of hundreds of years of development? Thousands, really.
Josiah Torres
pls
Adam Hughes
Other than slang, how much the letter u shows up, and how to pronounce aluminum how different are American and British English anyway?
It seems like petty bullshit to act like they're super different.
T. Uneducated American
Michael Reed
Well, grammatical influence is arguably even more important than loanwords. I wish English remained more celtic, analytic languages rule and brythonic languages are the best sounding in the world imo. French and Germanic influence a shit. I thought celtic wasn't really analytic though (ie. llanfair..........gogoch)
Lincoln Sullivan
I hadn't actually heard of that place before today, and I'm certainly not an expert in Celtic/Welsh linguistics, but so far as I know languages in the Celtic family tend to be somewhat inflected, but less so than a lot of European languages -- a bit like the modern Romance languages in that regard. Way less inflected than e.g. Latin, modern Russian, German, or Old English for that matter, but way less analytic than e.g. Chinese.
I just googled it and apparently they came up with town name in the 1800s specifically so they could have the longest town name in the world, as a tourist attraction, which is kinda dickish but also pretty funny. I don't know nearly enough about Welsh grammar to break that name down, but so far as I know, in general Welsh words and names aren't particularly long and don't have a particularly high morpheme-to-word ratio, so I suspect they're kinda playing fast and loose with the grammar/orthography. I did stumble across this amazing sentence from wikitravel about it, though:
"There is a high drugs usage in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyllllantysiliogogogoch."
The wiki article I linked doesn't explain it very well, but if you track down the paper they cite from, they explain that it's not necessarily that Brittonic etc was *sooo analytic* (although it probably was more analytic than Old English), but that it specifically didn't have much in the way of inflectional *endings* (which OE had a lot of). So Brittonic speakers of OE tended to drop the noun case endings, and instead rely on word order, leading to English: an analytic language with a rigid word order. And then a bunch of Norsemen invaded and reinforced the trend, because their language didn't have much in the way of case endings by that point either.
Ian Jackson
Actually that last bit seems wrong too, because I'm pretty sure Old Norse had a shitload of case endings. They don't really specify, but it SOUNDS like they're trying to say that the Norse influence helped Old English to shed its case endings in sort of a creolization process (creoles usually lose a lot of the inflections of their parent languages), which frankly I'm not sure I'm buying, but whatever.
Joseph Bell
>American English is not English I bet you're one of those people who believe the ex-yugos all speak different languages.
Aaron Long
intredasting
Luke Ross
Spanish is a simpler language than English but nobody comments on it
Austin Baker
>T. Muh Celtic heritage autist
Imagine if English was more celtic
>oh man English is so gay dood I wish we had more Germanic and French influences, those would be cool
