Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007 Status: offline
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quote:
ORIGINAL: FullCircle The point I was making in all this is that these languages are all derived from Latin. I hope you mean the Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, etc.). Because English, while borrowing about half a million words, is not derived from Latin. quote:
Some have been controlled whilst others have been added to and changed radically. Controlled is putting a very nice face on it. See, for instance, the great vowel shift, which is a clusterfuck of unimaginable dimensions. quote:
If we all follow the rules no new words came about because we reject them as being wrong. Well, sort of correct, though there is something to be said for lexicographical correctness. Although I kind of like that Icelandic calls computers "number oracles" or somesuch. quote:
Am I to say to an American that Jewellery isn’t spelt Jewelry, colour isn’t spelt color, centre isn’t spelt center and programme isn’t spelt program. Obviously, my good Sir, as we all know there is no such thing as American English. Those ignorant brutes will one day learn the glory that is the Queen's English, at which point they will spontaneously convert to received pronounciation, hand back our colonies on the American Continent, and join us in a merry chorus of Rule Brittania! quote:
At some point changes occurred and we must accept that changes will occur again. Clearly, or we would all still be speaking some proto-something-or-other language. If not sticking to outright grunting and onomatapoeia. For instance, the SVO ordering currently used in English tells us that it will probably have a VSO ordering instead somewhere along the line, as the SVO order is merely transitional between VSO and SOV, and Old English was SOV ordered. One of the missing pieces is a question particle, and that is on its way with people (predominantly women) using "no?" or "neh?" at the end of phrases, which will eventually be adopted more widely (probably, at least), and then there is no need to maintain a distinct word order for questions, leaving the transition free to complete.
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"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind. From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way. We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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