Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "RobWords" channel.

  1. For all that a decent amount of French entered English with the Norman invasion, the vast bulk of it (and of the Latin you'll find there also, that part that hadn't already entered long since via the church, or Roman influence on the Germanic peoples) showed up in later centuries when French was the language of the nobility from one end of Europe to the other, and thus a 'prestige' language that people used to show off how fancy they were (as well as being quite useful if one was traveling). Likewise much of the Latin comes from scientific endevours, where a combination of the prominence of religious institutions in early scientific advancement and the need for a common language (and it's nature as a mostly 'dead' language offering quite a lot of advantages in this role) saw it become another prestige language, showing off one's education and (pretense to) intellect. I can't help but imagine that the result would be less the loss of long, complicated words that are clearly thought of as French or Latin in origin today, and more the loss of the simple, basic ones people don't think about much, such as 'beef' and the like.
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  2. As an extra bonus (assuming my recollection is correct), most kanji apparently have two readings, one based on what they were used to mean in chinese (that is, the Japanese word for the thing) when Japan adopted them, and one based on what they sounded like to Japanese speakers when introduced (which, of course, has a completely different meaning). In most cases the pronunciation of both has drifted over time (as it will in any language). Or something like that.
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  3. Honestly, English spelling would be vastly improved by the simple addition of a method of indicating the location of the primary stress in the word. A substantial chunk of the confusing nature of English spelling comes from the system assuming you somehow magically already know that, and thus only disambiguates vowel readings when the stress pattern actually permits more than one reading of that character in that position. It wouldn't solve all the issues, but it would be a huge improvement.
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  4.  @samuelthecamel  Interestingly enough, for much of its history, most of those imigrants were from various German speaking countries. Though it did absorb very large French and Spanish speaking populations by way of various wars and purchases leading to control of the land they'd settled on in the Americas (they weren't really immigrants, at that point). And, of course, in more recent times the immigrants have been form other places (mostly Asia (including the Middle East) and Mexico, to my understanding).
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  5. Well, when you account for the fact that quite a few of them are merely new Derivative Forms, rather than Entirely new words, nor new, contextually clear, usages for existing words, and then you realise that all of them are spread out over 40-ish works so the audience isn't running into them all at once... And then, yes, all the words where they're new in the sense that it's the first time they appear in texts that survived long enough for anyone to make record of them rather than the first time they were ever used at all mitigates the issue still further. Also, a large part of how incomprehensible so many people today find Shakespere (though certainly not the Entirity of it!) has more to do with their poor skills in Present Day English, even before getting into compensating for a couple of centuries of linguistic drift. ... That and the fact that it's all written in Script format, intended to be read aloud and Heard, not to mention written largely as poetry which further doubles down on that, so trying to understand it just from silently reading the text, rather than properly Performing it, is something of a struggle.
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  6.  @alfresco8442  interstingly, that q is actually a different sound from k... the difference is subtle and English doesn't actually Care (never actually Contrasting the two) but the way the 'k' sound is formed before a 'u' in most English dialects is actually... not a 'k', at least in IPA terms. it's formed further back in the mouth. So, qu isn't quite the same as kw, it's more like, well, qw, to be honest. Again, not actually Relevant in English, but interesting.
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  7. Not that much of an issue, we already have a bunch of other words that are randomly spelled differently in the US due to nationalist nonsense, or pronounced nonsensically in Brtiain because... reasons. And that's before you get into the Actual dialects (of which the USA has plenty but Britian has an absolute excess... and then there's the rest of the English speaking world). Just mark the spelling variant the same way you do for any other word affected by that split. More importantly, which syllable is stressed strongly influences the pronunciation of the entire rest of the word, and the stress pattern is often the only difference between two closely related words (generally a noun/verb, noun/adjective, etc. pair.)
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  8. And yet, it is also hard copy, in that it is a physical object, the text printed out on paper, rather than only existing as electronic data.
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  9. While that um/ium in English (and other modern languages) does just mean 'element', my understanding is that it comes from the number of elements whose original common name was '(metal/stone/substance) from (place)', where (place) was the town or city that was the most well known source of the substance at the time. This was then rendered in Latin (that being the 'common tongue' of the scientific community), if it wasn't Latin already, resulting in a rather massive portion of the elements on the periodic table having that ending, and thus it being used by analogy for most newly discovered elements, even when they Weren't named for places.
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  10. I've occasionally run across users manuals for electrical product where it's been blatantly obvious that different people translated different sections, or possibly just the person doing the work was rushed for time at the end, so the first few pages are perfectly good English, or close enough, but the last few range from 'that took some effort to figure out' to 'utterly incomprehensible'. And at least 'for to opening the boot, be pressing the button' is fairly easy to figure out: to open the boot, press the button. There's the old classic of instructions that say 'do A' (turn page) 'but not before doing B'. A comedy sketch example (the pause while the page is turned sees the guy working on a car engine, I believe, do thing A... and promptly get a face full of oil or some such), but one does sometimes encounter such problems.
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  11. It is worth pointing out that, if you're not going to elaborate, you Should respond to negative questions in English in the same way: Yes for the speaker's statement being correct, and no for it being incorrect. Mind you, it is generally considered better to elaborate to avoid confusion, and when you do that the yes/no element behaves differently (I forget the explaination for what's actually going on there), and the rest of what you say is the acutal answer. Of course, if you're somewhat aware of the grammar and reasonably considerate of others you also avoid asking quesitons in the negative in the first place when speaking English, because most people are sufficiently ignnorant about such matters that they will not respond in line with the above, and you will be left with no idea what they actually meant and have to ask for further clarification, restating the question and getting them to restate the answer, causing further confusion and delay, so it's best avoided in general. Not that one is taught any of this, generally. In fact, in primary school we were actively taught to ask questions in the negative and other such tricks so as to force the other party to actually give more than single word answers or the like, the idea being that it facilitated conversation (a blunt 'yes' or 'no' will cause a conversation to stall out because it leaves the other party with nothing to respond to.) ... which is great when the idea is to keep a conversation going, not so much when you want useful and actionable information so you can get on with things.
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  12.  @thisismycoolnickname  if you mean in English, that issue would be largely because the English 'long' vowels are mostly nothing of the sort (not that english doesn't have vowels that are techically long, mind, but that's a whole other issue) , the lable is an artifact of history from before the great vowel shift, if I remember rightly.
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  13. I must unfortunately point out that the only reason they defy translation is because there is so little call for English speakers to actually use them on anything approaching a regular basis. If there were, both spelling and pronunciation would have long since changed as the word itself was aborbed into English proper (and shortly there-after you would start seeing English apply its various processes to them, verbing it, splitting it into several not-entirely-connected meanings, merging some of those with other words to cover different gramatical slots, etc.)
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  14. That's a badly designed form. Written by someone who does not know how English grammar works... I'd give better than even odds that they were a native speaker whose particular path of education and/or hobbies did not include the few disciplines that require one actually understand how English grammar actually works...
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  15.  @adamcetinkent  See, your problem there is your willingness or not to accept a thing which exists. It is an informal register of a specific dialect. Now, it may not be apropriate or sensible to use a given register and/or dialect in a given context (and those who insist that we should not teach children how to speak a standard dialect and formal register As Well As their local dialect, the informal register they use with their ingroups, and whatever technical dialect they end up picking up from their education and employment, are best ignored (for want of willingness to put in the effort of writing multiple extra paragraphs on the matter), but that's an entirely different matter from rejecting them as valid in the correct context. The issue isn't that people can, and do, use slang or various dialects among the appropriate ingroup. It's the people who are incapable of speaking in more standard and formal registers than needed (and those who would suppress attempts to impart this skill to them) as it makes it much more difficult for them to communicate with others, and thus to actually represent their interests when those Outside their ingroup get involved. (which is to say, refusing to actually teach proper standard dialect and formal register can be just as effective a tool at suppressing a group as actually supressing their langauge/dialect/whatever. Arguably more effective if you're willing to play the long game.)
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  16. Forget modern day German and Dutch, Latin had already influenced the Germanic tongues (of which English is one) before English was even a thing. And most of the borrowings are a lot more recent than the Norman invasion, and are due to French diplomatic dominance, and Latin being adopted as the common langauge of Science (largely Because it was a mostly dead language, but also because for a long time religious institutions were the only ones really engaging in scientific persuits in anything approaching an organised fashion in most of Europe), both centuries later.
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  17.  @Ithirahad  usually, at least in my experience, it's used with a meaning closer to 'X everywhere'... which can be good or bad depending on context.
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  18. Indeed. The spelling system/alphabet Does have room for improvement, but any attempt to make it more phonetic will promptly trip over the rather extreme variety of dialects which use it. Even just the USA has enough to cause issues, never mind Britain.
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  19. usually, to my understanding, there will be records of what was used prior to/at the point of contact, indicating different terms used, and then later records where the terms used have changed. At least when it comes to the Romans.
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  20. it also facilitates 'autumnal' rather than 'fall like'. Sometimes it's less a latin obsession and more a desire to find a word that'll actually fit the meter etc. in a poem or song or play.
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  21. I believe we ended up with 'knowledge' and 'wisdom', but neither retains the full set of possible forms if that is the case.
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  22. English does, in fact, have rules, at least as much as any language does. Unfortunately, we Also have many decades, possibly even centuries, of tradition of teaching utter nonsense instead of the actual rules of the actual language. A few decades back people who actually knew what they were talking about realised this and, having gathered enough evidence to prove it, convinced the educational systems in much of the English speaking world to basically toss the lot, keeping only a very few provable useful basics while they spent several more decades nailing down the Actual rules and, with much more difficulty, the best way to go about teaching them. From what I hear, many American schools kept right on teaching what amounted to half remembered fragments of style guides which weren't great at their intended role (One of the most popular of which is infamous for violating its own rules in the text describing them, or in text used as an example of how to correctly follow a different rule) of allowing one to pretend that one could pass for a member of the upper classes when they were published many decades before, nevermind teach children basic langauge skills in the class room. I'm not sure on the current state of the project to create an actually Useful ciriculum teaching English as it actually works, though to my understanding there has been progress made. I have a book from the time when such things came with a second copy of the same work on CD (to facilitate the use of a search engine and other useful tools) that's almost a thousand pages long that is an actual structured and accurate reference guide to, well, basically English Grammar, based on how people actually speak (at least when speaking the more standard dialects).
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  23.  @Myrtlecrack  Noah Webster's entire Thing was "Not British"... It was nationalist propaganda, in essence. The British following along would have defeated the point. The real problem is arguably that even in American english his reforms only partially stuck, and not in any consistent manner, so rather than bringing the spelling more into line with the pronunciation (of a certain dialect that it would have then drifted away from again by now), and thus easier, all it acctually did was make it Less Consistent, and thus more difficult.
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  24.  @alephnull7007  oddly, William and his lot introduced a lot less French into English than most people think... most of it comes a Lot later when French was the dominant langauge of and diplomacy in Europe. And, of course, Normandy (or whatever it was called before the Normans set up there) was Right There across the channel, so a lot of French words slipped in over time as a result of trade. Not to say that they weren't responsible for Any of it, of course. Definitely some there.
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  25.  @berryesseen  ... For reference, the V and W sounds are so imediately and obviously different to speakers of most English dialects that the inability to make the distinction was traditionally seen as a speech imediment (or an overly pretentious affectation, depending on what was going on in the upper classes at the time), if less so than people who were unable to distinguish R from W. For added bonus points, W is decidedly non-standard in how one forms the sound. Phonetically it doesn't actually even fit on the consonant table properly, because the table has 'how is the airflow obstructed' on one axis and 'how far back, forward in the mouth is the airflow obstructed' on the other... and W (and a very small subset of globally MUCH rarer other sounds) is formed by obstructing the airflow in two places at once. Neither of which are the same point at which it is obstructed to form a V. V is the voiced form of F. F and W sounds have nothing in common, and the only thing that V and W have in common (voicing, that is, vibrating the vocal cords) they also share with B,D,G,Z,J, and several others.
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  26.  @leslieaustin151  The fun part is that if you go back far enough, 'let' meant... I forget if it was prevent or forbid, but the opposite of 'permit or allow', anyway!
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  27.  @Scrimp22  Well, for one thing, somehow 'Let's Goooo!' has come to mean something more like 'do well' or 'you did it!' depending on context <_<
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  28.  @KrintalSrim  I believe so. Some combination of the gnawing and being a pest to farmers, I suspect.
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  29.  @mahamatmahamatabdoulaye893  The actual rules do have logic and are explainable. They're also over a thousand pages long if you stick to just the most common standard dialects. The problem is that what a lot of people were taught in school had no relation to said rules, but were instead a collection of fragments of old (not very good) style guides and declarations by rich and powerful twits from centuries past who had no idea what they were talking about when it came to English but were absolutely convinced that everything that made it Not Latin was somehow a flaw (well, at least if it showed up in some other dialect but not the one they grew up speaking).
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  30. Unfortunately, English requires basically twice as many characters as it has, mostly vowels, if you want it's spelling to be both consistent and not horribly complex. Though a couple of accent markers (indicating primary stress and disambiguating digraphs vs syllable break between two monogaphs) would go a long way towards sorting out a lot of it. There's no saving the '-ough' cluster though.
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  31.  @mymo_in_Bb  Scrapping C entirely is a bad idea indeed, yes. But there's a solid argument for using it only where we currently use ch, and then actually writing z rather than s where z is meant and s rather than c when s is meant. Whether it's actually worth the effort or not is a different story, of course. As for G... well, it's worse and more easily solved, as half the time it's g as it shoudl be, and the other half it is j... though I'm sure this would then occasionally cause ambiguity with j, given it is sometimes read as y... quite a bit less though (mostly in foreign words that have resisted anglicisation for lack of common use). Q is an interesting one. It actually makes a different sound from k... but that there is no k/q minimal pair in English (save for foreign proper nouns). English speakers mostly can't actually pronounce a k sound in the places where we write q... but also can't pronunce a q sound in the places where we write k (again, mostly)... but also mostly can't tell the difference between the two sounds (which have different IPA characters, mind you), and don't enounciate the distinction particularly well. Which is to say there's a perfectly reasonable argument regarding why Q is there... but also an argument at least as solid that it's existence is pointless and we should get rid of it. As always, the main issue is less the change itself, and more that the prople proposing it don't know about and/or understand the knock on effects and have thus put no effort into handling the consequences there-of. (sort of like the various ideologically corrupted twits who keep insisting on trying to force changes to how others speak in the (incorrect) belief that it will somehow advance the cause of their ideology... but can't be arsed to understand how the language actually works Before their change and consequently just cause problems for everyone that mostly serve to create opposition to their goals where none previously existed).
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  32.  @idraote  also, to my understanding, it didn't refer to any one european language, but something of a hybrid used by medeterainian merchants, sailors, dock workers, and the like to communicate among themselves as a common trade language.
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  33. Here's a fun bonus: Written English IS standardized... across it's rather excessive number of dialects, and also across rather large spans of time. The standardization isn't perfect (there are two base standards with slight regional variations, and it does drift over time, just very slowly (usually)). That standardization is a Feature. I mean, yeah, the standard as it is definitely has problems, but they're Heavily outweighed by the fact that it IS a standard.
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  34. English orthography is pretty far up the list when it comes to difficult writing systems to learn, fairly close to Japanese, though beaten out by a few languages in southern Asia that are somehow substantially worse.
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  35.  @nolongerlistless  English only actually has one pair of words where the difference between voiced and unvoiced th makes any difference: "thigh and thy". And the latter of the two is an archaic second person possessive pronoun that no one actually uses except for humour value or to sound 'fancy' (which tends to backfire as it's almost never used correctly) or when quoting the bible or Shakespere... and even then only certain, old, translations of the bible. And at this point Shakespere is basically incomprehensible to most people without translation anyway, far too many of the words have long since fallen out of use, just to start with. In all other contexts, while using the wrong reading of TH will make you sound odd, it's still perfectly comprehensible and causes no confusion... Exactly the same as L, which English also actually has two sounds for (which way you pronunce it is dictated by where it is in the word), but it doesn't even have an equivalent to the thy/thigh contrast, so no one ever considers that relevant... except speakers of other langues that either only use one L sound consistently or actually DO contrast the two sounds, to whom that particular quirk showing up when someone is speaking their langauge is a pretty big sign that the speaker's native langauge is English.
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  36. Oddly enough, the Most frequently used words are actually the most Resistant to pronunciation change, followed by those that get barely any use at all.
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  37.  @Knappa22  Indeed. Though place names certainly stuck around, and various bits of latin get into the germanic languages well before English became a thing, and then some more make their way in via the christian monastries (before the vikings looted and burned basically all of the major ones). England was actually a major centre of literature and the like, as such things went, before that).
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  38. Because the netherlands was part of 'the germanies' who all spoke various types of 'deutsch' (or however you want to spell that), rendered in English as 'dutch' (and English usually uses the same word for both a people and their language)... and the Netherlands were the ones right next to England who the English interacted with All the Time, so when they split off it was Everyone Else who got renamed, so now the people of 'the germanies' (and then the German Empire, and then just Germany) were germans who spoke german, and the people of the netherlands were the dutch, who spoke dutch. And then you get the Pensilvania Dutch in the USA who are/were... ... German.
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  39.  @nicholassinnett2958  Frenchness becomeing a sign of being cultured wasn't so much a post-1066 thing as a 'several centuries later when French became the dominante langauge of the aristocracy and diplomacy throughout Europe' thing. You'll find far more French vocabulary in English tracing it's origin back to that than to the norman conquest.
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  40.  @pharmesq  I believe even Hobbits only have two breakfasts in the normal course of events... Though, arguably, if you're not snacking in between, any meal could rightly be called breakfast..
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  41. And it's a terrible style that makes an absolute hash out of whatever meaning you might be trying to impart, because that's just not how English works anyway. Mind you, English 'prepositions' are more 'adpositions', falling into the preposition or postposition slot as necessary for whatever you might be doing at the time. You actually Can't end a sentence with an actual preposition unless you horribly mangle it (or get interupted).
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  42.  @britcom1  that would be rhotic vs non-rhotic speach, where what is written as an r character in the coda (that is, the part after the vowel) in rhotic speach produces an r sound, but in non-rhotic speach instead acts as a modifier to the vowel. For reference, rhotic is more common the USA, non-rhotic is more common in commonwealth dialects, but there are still quite a number of non-rhotic American, and rhotic commonwealth, dialects kicking around.
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  43. I mostly agree. Though I think we could do with readopting a few of the more useful/practical anglo-saxon terms here and there.
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  44. By every meaningful trait that is used to identify what family a language belongs to, English is Germanic. You're hard pressed to find anything about how English works that isn't either Germanic or functionally unique to English (in that if it shows up elsewhere at all it's in a Completely unrelated language for unrelated reasons). Every language borrows words and phrases and the like from it's neighbours and such. English is only unusual in quite How Much it's done so. Celtic's the only one that Might have a claim to influencing what language family English belongs in, and even then it's highly debatable if it's even a thing (and if it is, if it's enough to matter). You can rip all the non-germanic languages out of English and still have a functional langauge. But if you remove the germanic parts and try to use only the non-germanic parts it falls apart entirely. You don't just have to come up with new words (and often enough just use germanic roots rather than romance roots and form them from exactly the same parts), but completely rebuild the entire grammar from the ground up.
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  45. Indeed. Still better than 'proper' cursive writing though.
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  46. it is termmed 'borrowed' largely because the original language hasn't exactly been deprived of them by the acquisition. And yes, there are other words that fit, but I"m sure you'll quickly find there are reasons why those weren't chosen, given that we're talking about a technical term rather than common speech.
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  47. English's Spelling is acutally right next to Japanese (and thus very close to the top, but not quite as close as you might think due to some less well known writting systems that are arguably just straight up abominations against man and god... I'm mostly joking, but only mostly) in terms of being overly complicated and something of a nightmare to learn. English Grammar? English Pronunciation? no worse than any other language. Every langauge has it's straight forward bits and it's complicated bits, and how difficult they are to learn depends on how much they diverge from what you already know. But English spelling (or, more technically, orthography)? It's got about half as many characters as it needs, is missing two rather critical diacritics it really should have (one of which it DID have prior to typewriters becoming common), and is really just generally a mess. Most of the problems being vowel related.
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  48. Yeah, English doesn't really care, given that it's making a new word for English, and will happily mash in prefixes and suffixes from English that have nothing to do with latin or greek to begin with as well if need be. Basically: so long as the parts have the desired meaning and the transition between them isn't awkward, who cares?
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  49. That'd be because Church Latin has the same relation to Classical Latin as all the other romance langauges do: They're all daughter langauges of Vulgar Latin (that is, the Latin spoken by the common people, rather than well educated schollars and the upper class (which tended to influence each other)).
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  50. The answer is that Japanese doesn't have an L, and has a very different R from English's R... Japanese R is formed in a manner very close to (but not the same as) English D (it doesn't sound like one, exactly, but it also doesn't sound like an English R, really)... It is Not the same sound as English R, but it IS the closest sound Japanese has to an English L. It's a bit of a mess but basically? Japanese has an R, it doesn't have an L. Most Japanese speakers struggle to hear the difference between English L and English R. So depending on what they're doing, they'll either write 'r' regardless (if its intended for other Japanese speakers to be able to easily read and say it), more make a best attempt at the correct one (if actually trying to speak English) with highly mixed results if they know which one it's supposed to be... or if they Don't know which one it's supposed to be (having not seen the word written down and, remember, quite possibly not being able to hear the distinction), just flat out Guessing. (for reference, there are a lot of native English speakers who, for various reasons, just flat out can't hear the difference between 'th' and 'f' (or the Other 'th' and 'v'). Sometimes due to hearing problems, sometimes just because they grew up in an area where the distinction Doesn't Exist and so never learned to hear the distinction (you'd think television would help on that front, but apparently not?). You get quite similar results. Likewise English speakers trying to learn languages with meaningful tone distinctions.)
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