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this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2024
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English is the language that beats up other languages in dark alleys then rifles through their pockets for loose phrases and spare grammar.
That sounds suspiciously like Pratchett ;)
Perhaps other people have said it but this is the quote I'm familiar with:
"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 Nicoll
Cheery! Stop playing with your lipstick and go down to Cable Street. Igor's potatoes have escaped again and Washpot can't find Fred and Nobby.
Ok, I'll pick up some Dwarven Battle Bread in case we need it!
Right. Good ma-, er, dwarf
Don't forget that there once was a time when smart people just added letters to words that don't do anything - like the b in debt, which was called det before. Or when America got rid of Britains U after O because newspapers charged per letter.
British newspapers were only able to subsidize the use of the letter 'u' through taxes levied on the colonies, which led to the revolution. So who's so smart after all?
Nah, seriously, the Normans added the 'u' to French-derived words after they invaded. English orthography wasn't standardized, though. Johnson kept the 'u' out of a sense of tradition when compiling his British dictionary, and Webster elided it in his American dictionary because we don't pronounce it. Neither spelling, -or or -our, derives from the other.
I don't know about "debt", I always pronounce a very subtle b when I say it and saying det just sounds like the "det" in "detrimental"
Seriously, other languages at least adapt loanwords to their own grammar, orthography, and whatnot... English just grabs them as they are and runs away without looking back.
That's why you end up with the plural of radius being radii, or stuff like fiancé or façade (seriously, how are people who only speak English and have never seen a ç before in their lives supposed to know how to pronounce that‽)...
Of course it all comes from English being really three or four languages — (Anglo-)Saxon, Normand(/old French), and Norse — badly put together, so sprinkling bits of other languages on top didn't make much of a difference, when there were already about five different ways to pronounce, for instance, oo, and the whole vowel shift debacle didn't exactly help with this mess... but while other languages which may have had similar (if maybe less spectacular) growing pains eventually developed normative bodies, mostly from the eighteenth century onwards, that define and maintain a standard form of the language, English seems to have ignored all that and left grammar and orthography as a stylistic choice on the writers' part, and pronunciation as an exercise for the readers...
+1 for the interrobang
Yep I'm learning Japanese and hate how they spell "maccha" as "matcha" in English because the English one doesn't sound correct to me and annoys the fuck out of me
The one with the t has a subtle t sound to it while maccha sounds correct