Comments by "Laurence Fraser" (@laurencefraser) on "Are these words "untranslatable" into English?" video.

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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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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@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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In English, in dialects where such terms haven't died out, we'd say "morning tea" or "afternoon tea". Note how 'afternoon' is a compound there already. Note that this applies even if you're not actually drinking any tea at all. (likewise, there's also just 'tea', which is an evening meal... but that's a whole other mess of linguistic and cultural drift over time and between different parts of the old British Empire).
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@Flobyby Honestly, English 'accountability' has suffered the same fate as responsable.
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@kaibroeking The fun part about English grammar. You can turn anything into a verb by just... sticking it in the verb slot in the sentence, and the grammar will generally work. ... now, whether your intended meaning is coherent or not might require a little more caution, but it will be a gramatically correct sentence!
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@artemis.nnnnnbbbbb Of course, one can be 'intimately aquainted' with some person, place, or subject, just to confuse matters.
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Simple rule of thumb in English is that if you want a yes/no answer, you do not ask a negative question. When I was a kid we were specifically taught to use negative questions to force the other person to elaborate and engage with the conversation rather than just bring it to a halt with one word answers.
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The interesting thing about that 30%, is that in at least some cases it's the same word borrowed on multiple occasions over the centuries, but with different (if usually related) meanings.
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What I was taught (not in a single lesson, but over all given the way Other things were taught) as a child, and it supprises me that so few people seem to grasp this, is that if you just want a simple yes or no answer and then to go about your day/task/whatever, your question Must be formed as a positive statement. On the other hand, the entire point and purpose of using a Negative statement is to force the other party to actually elaborate and engage in conversation... in fact in school we were explicitly taught to do this for just that reason.
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Honestly, the habbit of talking about 'first name' and 'last name' rather than 'personal name' and 'family name' (with additional terms as necessary) needs to be put out of everyone's misery. It just makes talking about Actual people's actual names (including most native English speakers named in the usual English Speaking Fashion) far more awkward and confusing than it should be.
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"yes" in response to the statement "You still haven't subscribed to my channel" can only mean "you are correct, I have not". No is a bit more ambiguous (it could be 'no, I haven't, you're right' or 'no, I have, you're wrong'), but in isolation 'yes' can only mean that you are Correct. Right up until you turn that statement into a question. Then it gets messy. The way you're Supposed to deal with this in English is to just Not Ask Questions In The Negative... not if you are expecting a one word answer without elaboration, anyway. In fact, asking negative questions like that is a trick that one learns/is taught specifically to Force the other person to actually engage with and continue the conversation rather than just giving a single word answer that kills it dead, because they Must elaborate in order to not be misunderstood.
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@JeroenJA It was probably perfectly phonetic... in the dialect of the person who codified the spelling, at the time when they did so. Too bad about the many hundereds of other dialects, or everything drifting over time, and the need to not render texts from other times and places unintelligible to the reader (well, shifts in vocabulary still do so, but that only requires an appropriate dictionary, not relearning the entire skill set that is reading). English spelling is actually a lot more logical and consistent than people give it credit for (though not perfectly so). The problem is that it's also a lot more complex than most people, including those Teaching it, tend to give it credit for as well. And is rather let down by a couple of rather significant flaws English straight up needs a diactiric to indicate where the primary stress in a word is (it would eliminate so many of the problems with the vowels, as it is for some insane reason assumed that you already know the stress pattern, and thus that only ambiguity regarding the reading of a given vowel that is not already resolved by way of it's position in that pattern needs to be clarified via the spelling), as well as bringing back the one that indicates when a two vowel character string is Not a digraph (because there's a syllable break in the middle)... and applying it to consonants in the same situation would probably also help.
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I'd really rather we skipped the whole formal/informal thing, honestly. But bringing back the singular/plural distinction would be useful.
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