Fandom Gruff ┬─┬ノ( º _ ºノ) UNFLIPPED THREAD

[MrBehemoth]

Oooo ooo language chat! I need to catch up...

---

If You aren't and He isn't, why isn't I amn't?

Amn't is more common than you probably realise. It turns up quite a lot in lowland Scots. (Sounds like "ammunt".)

Spoiler below!

Regional accents and dialects of British English are actually quite variable in terms of grammar and pronunciation. For example, take Wooderson, Paddy and me (to name two other people who I think are British but who I guess might have strong regional accents). We probably all speak quite differently, at least to our ears, but in writing we use the same grammar. Regional vocabulary tends to be spoken rather than written. Most people around the world who learn English as a second language learn International English or American English, but if you learn British English, you'll probably learn the standard dialect, RP (Received Pronunication, sometimes called "the Queen's English" or "BBC English"), and so you probably don't come across this sort of slang very often.

---

An example of why English is weird.
Guess what word: Ghoti

Another example: The water he had had had had no effect on his thirst.

---

English is a lazy language. Pretty much all of its words come from Latin, Greek, Roman or extensive jargon usage. The rest come from international languages, such as spaghetti coming from Italian language.

I'll have to disagree there, Rom. First of all, there really aren't many languages, other than Italian, which have their own word for spaghetti. At least not indo-european languages.

A lot of English words, if not most of them, are native, i.e., Anglo-Saxon (A.K.A Old English). Here's an incomplete list.

Spoiler below!

Many of the older borrowed words also have an Anglo-Saxon counter part. This is from the time of the Norman invasion, when the Norman overloads would use Old French and the Anglo-Saxon peasants would use Old English ("anglish"). For example that's why farmers raise cows, but then diners eat beef. Most of our lovely swear-words are very old Anglo-Saxon words.

---

Yep, easier to pick and change the word pronouncaeable if needed, than invent a whole new one.
English has the largest vocalubary of all, although it loans it words from elsewhere.

I think this is one of the good things about it - English grammar and lexicon is descriptive, rather than prescriptive.

Spoiler below!

Some languages, French for example, are quite protective of their grammar and lexicon. New words hardly ever make it into the official French dictionary. As long as everyone can understand what you mean, anything goes in English.

I once had a conversation (read: argument) with a French colleague who insisted that I was pronouncing "French" words incorrectly, but most of the words in question had been in use in English for hundreds of years.

Some words get passed backwards and forwards between English and other languages, especially French, and the meaning shifts, e.g., hotel, hostel, hospital etc..

---

Easy to learn, hard to master.

This is indeed true of native speakers as much as anyone else. In the UK, language education in schools is shocking. It's amazing how many people don't know the difference between there, their and they're (in writing), or don't know how to use an apostrophe or colon, for example.

---

French is hard to pronounce correctly, and the written language looks completely different in paper than the spoken language does. That is what I know for sure about that. Otherwise, I've heard people saying its grammar is still relatively easy, if you have a germanic or even better, romance language as your mother tongue.

I think French grammar is relatively easy because they have strict rules, compared to English, that is. In English the rules are rarely rules at all.

Spoiler below!

We have lots of rules that we learn in school that are just wrong. For example, when we learn spelling we're always taught "i before e, except after c", e.g., receive vs. reprieve... but there are actually more cases where that rule doesn't work.

Others are:

• Never split infinitives (e.g. to go + boldly = to go boldly, not to boldly go).
  
• Never end a sentence with a preposition (to which Winston Churchill is quoted to have replied, "That's the sort of pedantry up with which I will not put" because "...that I will not put up with," is supposedly incorrect).
  
• And never start a sentence with a conjunction.

The real thing that makes everything hard, is called language unrelation: for instance, if you ever come to even considering to learn Finnish, Estonian or Hungarian, think twice... They belong to their own tree of Finno-Ugric. This is the difficulty behind them, they're unqiue, alien.

Less widespread languages within the UK: I think Welsh is in Finno-Ugric. And I heard that Gaelic (Scots or Irish) is related to an old Eqyptian language.

---

Lastly, one thing English has that (apparently) no other language has. Most languages have prefixes and suffixes and they're used to make new words, e.g. re + write. But English also has infixes, which is when you make a new word by shoving an existing word in the middle of another word. It's almost exlusively used for sarcasm and swearing.

Spoiler below!

Fanfuckingtasic!

---

tl;dr I like talking about English.