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this post was submitted on 01 Feb 2024
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Today I Learned
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I think by that logic almost all words in every language predate the language they are part of. Like saying that our noses aren't really human because noses predate humans.
What do you mean by this?
As island-based languages go English is probably the least isolated in history. It's Germanic relatives are all nearby. Britain has had extensive links to the continent for the entire history of English and well before. It's an international language and has been for hundreds of years.
English also isn't that weird just because it got a large infusion of (pretty closely related) Norman words after 1066. Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese all have over half their lexical items from Chinese, an unrelated language.
The majority of the English language, it was only spoken by commoners with no formal education.
Literally never went to school or learned how to read or write.
Which is why it's one of the hardest languages to learn, there wasn't even a noble population who were helping rules be set logically, it's a slang language.
Which is why it's almost impossible to credit the English language with any words except for things invented by English speakers.
Other languages weren't as bad at it
And it's not a huge deal...
Until someone claims an English word has existed for 8,000 years unchanged.
Then it's worth pointing out how ridiculous that claim is.
You're describing every language for the overwhelming majority of the last 150,000+ years. English is not unique in that.
It's not. English has a lot of irregularity to remember, but not the most. How difficult you find a language depends on your native language. English lacks things like elaborate case structures or grammatical gender which can be hard unless your native language has something similar. The 'th' sound is rare, but there are no clicks or tones. SVO is not the most common word order, but it's not the rarest.
Huh? That's not how having a nobility works. Or what slang is. The rich aren't more logical, and they aren't concerned with making language easier. If anything nobles want more arcane language that takes longer to learn to better differentiate themselves from those with less free time.
It sounds like you're thinking of the prescriptive grammar movement where from the 1700s or so rich English speakers decided if it's not possible in Latin then it's uncouth in English, and started making up nonsense rules like no split infinitives or ending sentences with a preposition. They couched it in terms of being logical and correct but it was in reality a novel way of marking social class. And ~700 years after the English peasant/Norman aristocrat divide.
Name a single language that didn't have an aristocracy that knew how to read and write and learned formalized Grammer for the majority of that languages history.
I didn't read anything else you didn't understand after that first bit tho.
I can help a little, but I'm not teaching an etymology class over here.
You do realize more than half of the world's ~7,000 languages still have no writing system, right?
😂 I'm going to be generous and assume you're just trolling now and don't seriously believe this.
Cool...
I'm going to continue to not use emojis and take a quick step to make sure I never try to help you understand something again.
Everyone wins!
Which languages had nobles changing the rules of the language to be logical, and beat the peasantry until they repeated their absurd shibboleths?
Proscriptivists have existed in many languages, English included. They've basically always been tilting at windmills.
Governments tend to be most effective at killing languages wholesale, rather than systemically changing grammar. And it's something that's been far more effective in the past couple hundred years as part of nation- building projects. E.g. the efforts of France, Italy and Spain to squash minority languages like Occitan, Galician or Neapolitan.
Is that what people aren't understanding?
When a language had nobles that knew the rules for the language, those rules were documented and maintained, even tho commoners didn't use it.
Later, when education caught on, the commoners were taught correct grammar, spelling, and usage. Not what earlier generations of commoners used.
It's not that they enforced grammar at the time, it's that we know about those languages is primarily from nobles writing shit down in that language.
No one was writing English for centuries
Ah, yes, that's why the French still speak perfect Latin.
Yes, old grammar textbooks have been an incredibly important resource for linguists, particularly for reconstructing ancient pronunciations. They're useful for teaching historians etc. Old French or whatever.
But we generally haven't been terribly successful at beating students into using obsolete grammar rules and to stop using modern grammatical innovations.