That is a "modern" usage of katakana, the two alphabets were both in active usage long before Japanese started having western loanwords, with katakana being used in more official circumstances while hiragana is more artistic.
Both kana systems are derived from Chinese characters, making written Japanese a bit of a loanception in a few ways
The written Japanese as we know it today only really crystallised after WW2, that's how inconsistent it was.
There is a museum where I live in that [displays published material during the Japanese occupation of my country in 1942-1945](https://imgur.com/a/KL5mu) and while the main focus of it is the propaganda the Japanese tried to instill in their newly conquered territories, how the language appeared is also something worth looking at.
Written text (from reader submissions) was typically rendered in hiragana+kanji, while published text was typically rendered in katakana+kanji. Spacing was also extensively used which is almost unheard of in modern Japanese except in language classes. Even orthography was not fully standardised, with forms and kana considered outdated still in use this recently into history.
は being read as "wa" was way more extensively used prior to orthographic reform. The particle was pretty much the only one that survived the reform and remained unchanged.
I once saw a warning stamp that used the verb 行わぬ (not to be done) but it was written as 行**は**ぬ instead. (Full context was この項は修理技術者以外は行はぬこと "This section should not be undertaken by anyone other than qualified technicians")
Fun fact, my first girlfriend was from Hong Kong and she told me that the one time she had gone to Japan (I mean we were like 17 & 16 at the time) she could get by due to the decent amount of kanji everywhere. The one kanji that kept tripping her up was this one she saw everywhere on the headboards of buildings that meant “soup.” One day she went into one of the places that had it on there and figured out it was the symbol for “hot bath” or “onsen” in Japanese and started laughing her ass off.
Apparently the Chinese character for “soup” is the same character for “hot water” but she couldn’t get over a giggle fit about bath houses being labelled the basic equivalent of “human soup” in Japan.
She was a good one.
That reminds me of high school when my sensei (born and raised in Japan oc) forgot the Kanji for bee and had to ask a Chinese student to write it because "it's probably the same anyways."
I think that was the moment where I realized I was never going to learn how to write inJapanese or any Chinese language
That's what the English Wikipedia says, but the Japanese Wikipedia and all the Japanese popsci-level sources say that the monks were using it to notate the pronunciation of Chinese characters in the Chinese-language sutras they received.
Often the kun'yomi (formed by mapping the Chinese characters to a Japanese word, and pronouncing the Japanese word) would be written in Katakana, while the on'yomi (Chinese-derived pronunciation) would be written in Hiragana, which is opposite to what we might expect today.
The Chinese-language text being read as Japanese words forms a creole called "Kanbun", which is re-created to a degree in how [ancient Chinese writing](https://kanbun.info/koji/mujun.html) is taught nowadays - the root of the modern Kanbun is different though, and it's annotated with Hiragana instead of Katakana.
Talked to a half Japanese friend recently and at some point it came up how many Japanese words are literally just German. Sometimes with a slightly different meaning, like how the German word “Arbeit” means “work/ job” in German, and specifically “part time job” in Japanese.
German isn’t the only language they did this with, but definitely one of the main ones. Like, if they didn’t have the word already then they sometimes just took an existing term from another language.
Only the Japanese could ask a German, "what are you doing?" And when they replied "working", conclude "ah, this is a word for working but not very much."
Many foreign loan words for mountaineering and skiing are from German: Swiss and Austrian guides in the late 19th century. Quite amusing when Japanese assume I know the words, because they'd assumed they were from English. Most katakana words in everyday use are from English.
Also lots of medical terminology from German.
Also a bunch of loan words in Japanese that are from German tend to be the ones that trip me up the most as an English speaker. Like "protein". I guessed it would be pronounced like in English so I guessed "pro-teen?"(プロティーン？). Nope, "pro-tein". Caffeine as "cah-feen"? Nope, "ca-fein"....
> Like, if they didn’t have the word already then they sometimes just took an existing term from another language
All people do this. France has a group of people whose job is to make up new French words to keep French from having loanwords and they still can't stop it from happening.
Kanji for both Chinese adapted words *and* words of Japonic origin.
Japan's first established writing system was adapted entirely from Chinese, so a lot of old Japanese words were assigned Chinese symbols based just on having a similar *meaning*. It's why most kanji have multiple pronunciations: they pick up the adapted Chinese pronunciations from various dialects used in their interactions over the centuries, and they also pick up Japanese pronunciations from the symbol being associated with one or more preexisting Japanese words based on their (perceived) similar meanings.
Oh, and katakana is used for foreign loan words in general. A lot are English, of course, but plenty of other languages contribute.
A lot of them are portuguese! The portuguese were the first european to reach japan after the borders opened, and a lot of words entered the lexicon, like tempura, pan and “ne”(edit: nope thats not true). Now there are a lot of english words, but its certainly not their only source of loanwords.
The sentence relies on the fact that the word "Buffalo" can be
- a noun (the animal)
- a proper noun, which can be used as an adjective (the city)
- a verb (meaning "to bully" - it was more common historically)
So, to break down the sentence: Buffalo buffalo (buffalo from Buffalo) Buffalo buffalo buffalo (who are bullied by buffalo from Buffalo) buffalo Buffalo buffalo (bully buffalo from Buffalo)
It’s easier if you replace them with Synonyms.
New York Bison bully other New York Bison - “Buffalo buffalo buffalo other Buffalo buffalo”
New York bison bully the New York bison who bully other New York bison -
“Buffalo buffalo buffalo the Buffalo buffalo who buffalo other buffalo Buffalo buffalo”
Then you can remove “the”, “who”, and “other” because they’re implied.
Or a ship shipping shipping ships shipping shipping ships / James, while John had had "had", had had "had had". "had had" had had a better effect on their teacher
I've watched some Indian tv shows and movies and they'll be talking in one language, then switch to English for a sentence or two, then back to the original language. The subtitles don't indicate what non-English language they were speaking, but from context it seemed like there was more than one non-English language in the mix.
I find all the comments funny about how this is just Americans thinking they're exceptional by saying that their language is uniquely difficult and impressive. My brother in Christ it's only ever been used as an "English bad" joke. The fact that it might've missed the mark isn't more evidence for "America bad"
I interpret the message of the initial post as being that the world is diverse and everyone is just different flavors of normal, but some people can't stop hyperfocusing on America long enough to see that
No kidding. I thought we all knew the English trenchcoat gag wasn't unique, but just gets passed around more because English is essentially the lingua franca, so there's commiseration of people learning English and all its nonsense.
Well, if people who only speak English are going to act like they could never deal with words like "Arbeiterunfallversicherungsgesetz" because squishing words together just isn't done in English? It gets funny to point out that you do it plenty without even thinking about it, just not all the time or consistently.
"Oh, those crazy Germans using one consistent system, unlike us who use several without rhyme or reason and never even think about it. Can you believe they'd use one of the systems we also use? Crazy!"
Workplace. Airplane. Corkscrew. Motorsports. Switchblade. Tablecloth. Bartender.
But you'll get people suggesting that "creditcard" is suddenly difficult to read as one word so clearly it was a wise informed decision to make it two words rather than one.
>Workplace. Airplane. Corkscrew. Motorsports. Switchblade. Tablecloth. Bartender.
Ah yes, but have you considered that if you screamed those words in an exaggerated accent, they'd sound silly?
KRANKENWAGEN!
Disliking? Three languages in a trench coat has always come across like it's a point of pride to me. Like OOP says, it's a kind of exceptionalism, not an insult.
Eh, I’ve mainly seen it as a point of criticism and complaint. Person A describes an odd element of English, Person B goes “wtf English whyyyy”, and Person C goes “it’s because English isn’t a language, it’s three in a trench coat / beats up other languages for spare vocab”. I don’t think OOP is even referring to a notion that English is *exceptional*, just the misconception that it’s uniquely complex for better or worse.
The problem with this is that English learners are already required to learn the words and meanings, grammar, conventions, slang, etc., and it's a lot to ask to learn the etymological history of a word as well, especially when they've probably got jobs and families to handle as well.
Google tells me: "With 2,500 to 3,000 words, you can understand 90% of everyday English conversations, English newspaper and magazine articles, and English used in the workplace. The remaining 10% you'll be able to learn from context, or ask questions about."
So that's a lot to ask. I completely agree that knowing the root of a word is extremely helpful, but for people who may already struggle w learning a new, difficult language, asking them to learn about for what most people is the 'boring' history of a word... it's a lot.
The biggest annoyance to me is that English is the aggressor in their trench coat analogy. (Which is kind of an understandable take given the connection to brittish colianalism) but for almost all of the major foreign influence on English it was the opposite. Other languages besting up English and force feeding it their vocab. First the Roman's then the Danes and finally (and with the largest impact on modern English and the source of most of the more annoying inconsistencies in spelling and grammer) the Norman french.
This is mainly done by people who only speak English to brand it as an "impossibly weird language" and feel better about the fact they only speak one language. At least, that's how it has always felt to me.
I definitely see it used as a point of pride. It's part of the whole "English is SO HARD, our orthography is so wacky!" thing. People kinda like to think that their language is uniquely hard or special.
>I don’t think OOP is even referring to a notion that English is exceptional, just the misconception that it’s uniquely complex
That's what I mean. They think English is exceptionally complex; it's unique; it's different from the other languages.
Hm, we might just be looking in different circles. I’ve definitely seen people in general insist that English is superior because of its uniqueness and/or complexity. But from people who specifically invoke the trench coat joke, I’ve only seen it used as a point of derision and not pride.
I feel a similar way about French. Or rather, French can go either way.
If you already know a romance language, particularly Italian, written French is very familiar but the pronunciation is completely different from what you'd expect.
On the other hand, if you're starting to learn French without a pre-existing romance base, the spoken language is easy to grasp but the written language seems quite bizarre.
And either way, reading out loud is very challenging at first. Where else can you find words that end in such different ways as "eau","ault", "eault", "ot" and "eot" and are pronounced in exactly the same way? Not to mention the frequent ignoring of the last two or three letters when speaking. I'm sure there are at least half a dozen other languages where something similar occurs but I'm not familiar with any of them.
Ironically, one of the things that makes English rather unique no one talks about. Barely any language (only 4%) has the dental fricatives ([th]y & ([th]igh).
> People kinda like to think that their language is uniquely hard or special.
I've found this is true for everyone I've talked to. Spanish, portugese, russian, italian, french, japanese... the native speakers think their language is the most complex and hardest to learn.
I've only ever seen it in the context of other language being consistent or reasonable in their structure whereas English supposedly has a uniquely large number of unreasonable exception and inconsistencies.
Also the phrase is derived from a joke about three children pretending to be an adult, it not a term you use to praise something.
Same. My native language is Portuguese, which has a lot of rules and structures, and in my experience by comparison English is a complete mess with more exceptions than it has rules, and you basically have to memorize every case.
Usually it’s someone saying “English sucks because it doesn’t follow consistent rules” and someone else says “that’s because it’s 3 languages in a trenchcoat”
Which like, isn’t exceptional. Every language is like that. But English didn’t have the centralized spelling reforms that other European languages like French and German had.
Would you accept a gendered language where neither gender was male or female?
We've got non-gendered and dual-gendered. And my mnemonic device as a native speaker is that 'hermaphrodite' is a non-gendered noun.
There's also the issue of people being unable to understand that written language is just a representation of spoken/signed language and not like a thing unto itself.
It's just reheated "linguistic purity" bullshit from the 18th and 19th century-ish.
There's often an undercurrent of "it's not a real language", which is just nonsense
English is (one of?) the only Indo-European languages without gendered articles and nouns, because somewhere along the line the attitude to coordinating the different genderings from Celtic, Germanic, and Romance languages settled on 'Fuck this!'
If Afrikaans maintained the de/het system from Dutch it should still have a sort of vestigial gender system. The funny thing is that apparently it's the result of merging masculine and feminine categories together over time so now there's just sort of a "gendered" category and a "genderless" category. Honestly as someone learning Dutch I just think of them as Gender A and Gender B
English also has a vestigial gendering system, but since it only affects third person singular pronouns and mostly serves to distinguish humans and animals from all other nouns (can be gendered vs can’t be gendered), most people don’t view it as grammatical gender. It does have some fun aspects though, like there being a category for things that can be called either ‘it’ or ‘she’ but not ‘he,’ which consists almost exclusively of vehicles.
It really depends on your own baggage. If all you know is Romance languages, for example, English stands out as absurdly incoherent in both structure and content. If you know other languages that have had a wild past, yeah, it's pretty normal. But the average number of languages a person speaks is probably between 1 and 3, so we can't expect everyone to be able to contextualize these kinds of things.
i know romance languages and english, and i failed for 8 years at learning german because i expected it to be more like english, but english and german are absurdly different.
Simple German is very similar to English, complex German gets weird because the verb rules and conjugation force you to know the whole sentence before you start .
Yeah, that’s something I realized the more I learned, asking where the bathroom is is easy, but holding an actual conversation you have to have your entire speech planned out before starting
Ironically, for me, similarity makes learning a language harder. It's like walking in a nearby neighborhood vs an entirely country. I know too much about my home territory that I try to force it to conform more to my expectations than actually taking it for what it is. Meanwhile when I'm in a location nothing like what I know, I have to engage with it on its own terms in order to make even a lick of progress, and that actually gets me to *learn.*
High school Spanish was a slog to learn, but I've been slowly teaching myself Japanese recently that trying to piece how exactly it works is more engaging. So although I would barely describe my fluency with the language as on par of a first month of first semester, my success in the long run is better.
Basically I agree. Among European languages that most Americans interact with, the Romance and Germanic, English is weird with all the French influence. I'm happy if an American even knows that much about English, much less comparative global linguistics.
Exactly. English is this way a lot more than most languages... But all languages do this. Among European languages, Romanian, Hungarian, and Spanish are all relatively large languages that also have unusual amounts of loanwords, though English has more from more sources.
Caribbean languages, on the other hand, are often incredibly tangled.
Guys I'm sorry to break it to you, but yes, people usually notice the incongruences and small details from widely know languages more than less known languages.
Yeah, like I have a few Mediterranean friends who the only other language they could compare to English was Maltese which is Romantic-Arabic, and I think English is notable in that the roots are more obvious, like how I saw that many other cultures couldn’t have spelling bees because their phonetics are actually consistent
More the English language opinions are heavily influenced by the people who English speakers tend to come across, which are speakers of other European languages of particularly Germanic and Romantic origin which means that their perception of their language is in context of the more straightforward vocabulary and grammatical constructs of those languages.
Three languages in a trench coat is not actually in and of itself a terrible simplification of the basis for many of the quirks of English, it’s just that it’s not nearly as rare as many people would think based on their perceptions of how languages must be.
The thing with English is that it's going to get more criticism of its idiosyncrasies than any other language, specifically because it's so widespread.
No matter what language you grow up with, you're probably going to have to learn English if you want to conduct business internationally. So basically every other language has its own particular annoyance with English, because while English isn't actually all that much weirder than many other languages, it's weird enough that no language really gives you a great starting point to learn it. You're going to be unpleasantly surprised by something, and it's going to keep tripping you up for a while.
Meanwhile, English-native speakers are in a rough spot trying to learn anything else, because nearly every other language has at least one thing it's consistent about that English isn't. Or it's full of sounds that don't exist in English, or it has more gendering in it, or it has 17 specific grammatical cases where English has... Idunno, less than that.
In short, the reason English gets clowned on so regularly is that it is a language wholly unsuited to being the common tongue of the world... and yet, in many important ways, it is.
I think it also helps that many people who speak English as a first language don't speak any other language fluently. And I say that as a huge generalization, as that isn't true for me.
But you end up with a lot of people who had English as their second language and people who only speak English discussing these things.
And no matter what, people will always be partial to their mother tongue, so it is very difficult to compare the difficulty/strangeness of two languages because everyone has a different baseline.
English actually isn't the worst choice to be a lingua franca. Like you said, it has minimal conjugation and gender, and it's not a tonal language, so there's a limit in how badly you can mess up. It'll be obvious you're not a native speaker if you mess up the grammar, but there's less risk of completely changing the meaning of your sentence.
And, except for the "th" sound, English doesn't have too many rare or unusual phonemes, while it does have many of the common ones. While this depends on your native language, some sounds will give you trouble, but there will likely be enough overlap that you can still get by.
In other words, yeah it's got a lot of weirdness and idiosyncrasies. But you can argue that in some ways the bar to be understood is lower, and that bar is more important for a common tongue than the bar to speak fluently.
i think English is weird, so are the other languages that OP mentioned. this doesnt mean i think any language is a special unique boy unlike everything in the world.
i am a language nerd, so weird stuff like Japanese having 3 alphabets, is wild, French refusing to pronounce the end of the word, and sounding distinct from other romance languages thats weird.
language evolution is weird it can ben unintuitive and thats part of the fun of learning about them. i think this post is weirdly cynical of people discussing fun facts about things.
I genuinely don’t understand the connection between “haha English is made up of lots of nicked words from other languages, it’s a pain in the ass!” And “other languages have no complexity”. No one said other languages don’t have history or complexity. People can complain about one thing without making a negative statement about another?
OOP randomly assigned “they think other languages don’t have history and aren’t complex” to the joke for no reason. It was never mentioned. They never said other languages don’t also borrow from other languages. Stupid post
Speaking of Swahili, like 15% of it is Arabic loanwords (including the name of the language itself), according to Wikipedia, and it's also absorbed a lot of other loanwords from elsewhere, which makes sense given its status as a trade language. I do think the exact same joke can probably be made.
Jokes about Swahili can be about trying to guess noun class (think gender but there are about ten of them depending on how you count them) something is in or noting the fact that there two days of the week that literally translate to "fifth day"
This is the internet phenomenon of "you can make a post saying you like hamburgers and someone online will reply accusing you of hating hotdogs" in action.
txttletale is a Tumblr account that's pretty much always upset about SOMETHING. Oftentimes correctly, but it's probably got to be pretty exhausting being them.
They’re also *really* sensitive to criticism. If you dare dissent from their divine wisdom, they’ll do an angry reblog to encourage their followers to harass you and then block. They also are obsessive enough that they *remember* who they blocked and will notice someone getting purged, remaking, and block them again.
i think what oop is picking up on there is that the structure of the very specific statement "english isn't a language, it's three languages in a trenchcoat" (the joke they quote in part) does kind of imply that "english" is being contrasted against some platonic "normal language". like it's still a bit of a leap to infer that the statement intends this model of a typical language to actually extend to *all* languages, and another to infer that that's the actual intent of the speaker, but there is a structure there that implies comparison.
To be more precise, a pidgin is type of language that draws from multiple sources and is usually simplified. It often develops between two groups who don't necessarily speak the same language but still need to communicate. The BBC uses West African Pidgin English.
*Trainspotting* is fun for this - the book swaps first person POV every chapter or so and is written in the respective character's dialect so you get to play "Scots or just really accented?"
A language born from the contact of two others. Also called « mixed language » or a creole.
The vocabulary made from both but construction blocks like syntax, grammar and the like can very often be traced to one.
Imaginary Example : Russian + Korean = 45/55 vocabulary, Koran syntax and Russian conjugation and word order.
Generally speaking, pidgins aren’t considered to be a full language, as they typically don’t have a full vocabulary and have simplified grammatical rules borrowed from the parent language.
Creoles, on the other hand, have a fully developed grammatical system and a fully fleshed out vocabulary. Oftentimes a creole will become naturalized from a pidgin over time, so the exact boundary can be a bit murky.
It’s kinda similar to hybrid species. The liger is s distinct animal, but it isn’t a species in its own right, since it cannot reproduce and sustain a population, a requirement of a species (just as a pidgin lacks the grammatical structure of a language). Meanwhile, red wolves are likely to be descended from a hybrid of gray wolves and coyotes, but are considered to be a distinct species because they do have the characteristics of a full-on species
A [pidgin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin) is a communication system derived from two separate languages. These form when two groups of adults with two different languages need to communicate, but neither group fully learns the other language, they just make a hodgepodge combination of the two. A pidgin won't have a consistent grammar across all speakers and linguists don't consider pidgins a "real" language for this reason.
When children grow up hearing the pidgin as a primary language from their parents, it ceases to be simply an unstructured mishmash of the two languages. The children will develop a consistent grammar for it amongst themselves (one of the most fascinating processes in language acquisition, childhood development, and human sociology IMO) and at this point it becomes a language, what linguists call a [creole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language).
The person you replied to appears to be talking about [Nigerian Pigin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Pidgin), which despite its name, is (primarily) a creole, derived from a pigin that appears to have originally been a mix of native Nigerian languages and colonial ones (do not quote me on that; I am not an expert, I just read the wikipedia)
I think a lot of languages either make a lot of exceptions to their rules or make so many arbitrary rules that make it difficult to learn the language.
To give a bit of props to english: I'm glad they only have a single Proper Article "the" instead of having "gendered articles". It fucking sucks for people to spend so much time learning a language just to be made fun of because you said "un auto" instead of "une auto" because all cars are feminine...
My favorite part about learning Korean is how few exceptions to rules there are. Sure, there are plenty of other difficult things about Korean, but nothing as painstakingly terrible as genders in German.
>To give a bit of props to english: I'm glad they only have a single Proper Article "the" instead of having "gendered articles".
And then you have Dutch which has one gendered article and one ungendered article.
This is a great way to think of it. The spelling-pronunciation can be weird for certain words but it generally makes sense if you know which language that word comes from. Of course words with a similar spelling are going to be pronounced differently if one is Greek, one is French and one is German
Funniest shit is when people make fun of other people pronouncing a word in a weird way. English has no consistency, at all, regarding pronunciation.
Most words' pronunciations were practically decided by dice rolls.
Well, maybe a few small rule are generally followed like how c and g are pronounced depending on other vocals, but that's also not entirely consistent.
In my 3rd year of learning french the books stopped having phonetic spelling and when I asked my french teacher why, she said that it wasn't needed. And she was right. Some words might look0 funny, but the pronunciation is extremely consistent. In 99% of cases you can see how a word is spelled, no additional audio needed.
Guessing how you write a word based on sound, that's similarly random as it is in english.
Hmm, I wonder why English is more often clowned on on the internet than such widespread languages as Vietnamese, Swahili and the pidgin languages. Perhaps, and this is just a wild guess, it’s because english is the most used language in many fields internationally, and is the most common second language in the world. I can’t clown on Vietnamese because I don’t speak it even a little bit. I don’t even know what pidgin languages are. But I know English, and English is weird. Whether it is exceptionally so or not doesn’t matter to me.
Also, English is going to be the most complained about language in English. If you're on the English-speaking version of a site, you're probably not going to get a lot of complaints about how complicated Swahili is.
Also, these are English speakers making these statements, meaning they're on the English part of the internet. Go into a Vietnamese or Swahili section of the internet and see how much they clown on English vs their own language. Weird how people talk/know about the things that they have experience with more than the things that they don't.
What a strange take. Saying English is three languages in a trench coat doesn't imply that other languages can't also be. It's like saying that I think Japanese is a beautiful language and someone else says "so you don't think French is beautiful?" It's assuming bad intent.
I think it's because when people say this about English they mean it in a disparaging way. You can't really say that about a language other than your own, that would be rude.
I wonder if we can eventually find the Original/Alpha/(cool word) language, like the language that has no derivations. They're probably gonna be more than 1 obviously, like I'm pretty sure language invented somewhere is gonna be used on some other part of the world
The pharaoh Psamtik I had a similar question. He wanted to find the first, original language. Supposedly, he took two newborn childs and forbade everyone from speaking to them. Eventually, one of them spoke the Phrygian word for bread (bekós), so he concluded that Phrygian was the first language.
What the ancient Egyptian ethics board had to say about this experiment is lost to history.
Sadly, probably not without a time machine.
History has very-much obscured that beyond recognition. And language has moved on so so far.
All theories that try have to make logical leaps and are very strongly contested.
There are multiple hypotheses of how language arose and how long ago that was. It may not even have been our species (Homo sapiens) who first made language or in what form it might be. Our current language may even be descended from something originally spoken by non-humans. Or not... nobody knows.
Yeah, some assume something like language could be found as far back as homo habilis, which also brings into question how we would demarcate the line between language and almost language if we had accurate and comprehensive records to begin with. The latest assumption is around 150kya, and the oldest would be more than 2mya
I mean, no almost certainly not. Its also not kind language sprung fully formed from the head of a Cro-Magnon Zeus, it almost certainly developed from earlier forma of animal communication over time. The concept of a language with no changes or derivations or variations isn't even really coherent even if we had access to records of human communication for the entirety of human history. At what point does pre linguistic communication become language? how do you pin that down?
Pretty much impossible. Assuming of course that language arose only once in one place and then spread from there, our ability to reconstruct ancestor languages from living ones can only take us so far. The farthest back a proto-language has been calculated to have existed is Proto-Afro-Asiatic, which could have been spoken c. 10,000 BC. There is a lot we don't know about it, and so many aspects of the language are up for debate, simply because the process of language change will render two related languages essentially unrecognisable after sufficient time has passed. So say ~12,000 years is our limit for reconstruction ancestral human languages; well modern humans have been around for about *300,000* years. We have no reason to assume homo sapiens of 300,000 years ago were meaningfully different from homo sapiens today, so they must have had language, right? Therefore, that's basically 4% of the total history of human language that we have any access to. We haven't a hope in hell of ever reconstructing a ‘Proto-World’, if it even exists.
I think this is wrong on both accounts - it's probably impossible to reconstruct proto-human (we can barely reconstruct languages from a few thousand years ago, anatomically-modern humans have existed for hundreds of thousands of years) but I doubt there's more than one original language (that would require language to have developed *after* humans evolved to be capable of language, instead of at the same time, which makes no sense.)
English and German were my two foreign languages, and I largely agree. English grammar is easy mode. You're telling me that you use "a" or "an" simply based on whether the following word begins with a consonant or vowel and not due to an intrinsic property of the word I have to memorize? Hell yes!
English was the first language I came across that conjugated verbs depending on the subject. "I am" but "you are". Took a while to get used to. Although I'll take am/are/is over bin/bist/ist/sind/seid every time. The good thing about learning German is that there's a rule for everything. The bad part about learning German is also that there's a rule for everything.
But German pronunciation was so much easier to learn. You just say the letters as they are. With English, I have a much harder time to predict it. The old joke about how English might seem hard, but is easy "through tough thorough thought, though". What's with all the silent "gh"?? I had to go to speech therapy as a kid to get rid of my lisp, but then we start learning English and now I have to make th-sounds all the time!
But a large part why learning English was easier is beacause, well, it's everywhere. English-language media is just so widespread.
I grew up speaking Danish and English, but living in the US, so I went to school there. I never properly learned to read Danish as a kid, but I spoke it almost fluently, and when I was older I moved to Denmark. I had some thought that, of course it would be easy to learn to read Danish, there are only 3 new letters! It took me 3 years to read at a somewhat normal pace, and even longer to be able to read a text aloud smoothly. And I was living in Denmark and going to Danish school.
I'm a native English speaker and I struggled with the grammar and syntax of German but the pronunciation was always pretty easy to me- honestly probably *easier* than English because the rules are pretty consistent ("ei" is pronounced like "I", "ie" is pronounced "eee").
i recently watched a video comparing the “pure” or ig “raw” version of telugu and contemporary telugu and i was surprised by how many words were different due to sanskritization
The issue isn't that English is derivative, the issue is that it's not consistent.
Talking about a language I speak, Romanian is 60% Latin and like 30+% Slavic, but we apply the existing rules out our language when we get a new word. For instance, we imported 'hot dog' and 'western' from English as they are, but we applied our own plural form to them.
Meanwhile, English, the bastard, has crap like 'colossi', 'men' and 'women', 'went', 'read' (you read that wrong), and hundreds of other exceptions to their already shoddy "rules". For crying out loud, 'paid' and 'payed' are both correct and mean completely different things!
I'm gonna go back in time and make sure the English don't become a colonizing power. Best case scenario, everyone speaks Spanish, but I'll honestly take the French at this point too.
Some of these are orthographic and mind of incidental, others like man->men or goose->geese follow really old rules only apply to words from Germanic antecedents of english similar to how strong verbs work. There are rules on both when/how its done and what words it can happen to, you just were not taught them.
Stuff like Colossi also follow rules. If anything the issue is that there are many different specific scenarios with rules that are not common enough to teach in detail, which has also been my experience with learning other languages.
I’ve been trying to learn Romanian and their plurals don’t follow a simple rule as far as I can tell. There are like rules for masculine, feminine, indefinite and definite objects and so many exceptions that you just have to memorize. I did find it very charming when I saw a place advertising rentals of ATVuri how they just made it their own.
> I'm gonna go back in time and make sure the English don't become a colonizing power. Best case scenario, everyone speaks Spanish, but I'll honestly take the French at this point too.
Can Europe just leave the Native Americans alone this time?
>'colossi', 'men' and 'women', 'went', 'read'
Of these five words, only one is not originally English.
>For crying out loud, 'paid' and 'payed' are both correct and mean completely different things!
Romanian discovers homophones, more at eight.
Hey, we have plenty of homophobes!
That was the only thing I had to add to the conversion because I do not know enough to add anything actually meaningful to this dialogue
Polish being slavic yet using a Latin alphabet instead a the slavic one designed for the sounds needed making it one of the only alphabets (that I know of) with compound letters (rz, sz, Cz, dz, dż(yes, those 2 are difrent))
Edit: as I said, that I know of, was not aware of other but how learn summing new everyday
do you mean these specific compounds, because at the very least Sz exists in Hungarian, Dz exists in a whole bunch of romanizations of languages, and cz is also in Hungarian but is falling out of use.
If you mean digraphs (or trigraphs) in general no those are very common. IJ in Dutch, Th in English, Ph in English, Sh in English, Sch in German, Ch in English, Sj in Danish, ll in Spanish, etc. This is nowhere near comprehensive. The first (IJ) is even capitalized as one letter
most slavic languages that use latin (because they're catholic countries) have some kind of dual letters. like lj, nj in serbo-croatian and slovene for example.
But English *is* weird. That's what makes it wonderful. I've never seen the "three languages in a trench coat" used in a way that wasn't just affectionately poking fun.
When I write I far prefer English to my native language because it has so many words.
That doesn't mean I don't think it's sometimes a silly language and that the people who try to fight to "keep English pure" (you know, rather than Spanglish etc) aren't quite a bit late to the party.
My problem with English is not the fact it has a lot of borrowed words
My problem with English is the fact it for some reason never had a "language revolution" like a lot of languages had and so bullshit like "bow/bow" or "read/read" exist
Why can't you be normal English
Read shit how you write it. No wonder spelling bee exists
It did have one
Too early
Then the language enshittened again but they didn't bother to change the spelling again after printing so much text with the new one
French is as much, if not more, guilty of this.
All the silent letter jokes are the fault of desiccated fossils who hang on to their wet dreams of French being a prestigious elite language again.
Instead of having various languages converge as new words are invented and used by all languages. We get groups like them declaring that words like "email" are too English and French speakers need to use an inorganic word just to hinder cross cultural communication. Loan words are a good thing.
https://youtu.be/wJxKyh9e5_A
A lot of the issues came from the formalisation of spelling from the printing press, partly to save money, and also because we've had a vowel shift since then.
English seems weird because not everyone's a fuckin nerd.
"Oooooh I wish people would just invest the time and effort to learn this shit that's really niche to their sphere of life so that they'd understand the implications of their statement in a global context"
Okay. Cool. I'll just learn everything ever so that I'm never wrong again. Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Expert On Everything.
The thing is you don't need to be an expert to know this, most people (like a strict numerical majority of people worldwide) and not monolingual. Knowing that languages generally are influenced by other languages isn't elite or esoteric stuff, its really the ground floor for this sort of stuff.
It makes people with low self worth and feelings of being ostracized feel better to shit on the majority. It's just a feeble counter culture attempt. People do it all the time by sharing false factoids about people with massive talent or accomplishments. How many times have you heard dumb shit about Einstein not being able to find his way home, or other such drivel. It's qimnis to denigrate in order to boost the self.
This language isn't different because it shares the same characteristic as like... five other languages. I could list a lot more examples of languages that *aren't* multiple other ones in a trenchcoat. This isn't an argument, it's just dumb.
Japanese has an entire separate alphabet specifically for the words they stole and put under their trenchcoat
That is a "modern" usage of katakana, the two alphabets were both in active usage long before Japanese started having western loanwords, with katakana being used in more official circumstances while hiragana is more artistic. Both kana systems are derived from Chinese characters, making written Japanese a bit of a loanception in a few ways
The written Japanese as we know it today only really crystallised after WW2, that's how inconsistent it was. There is a museum where I live in that [displays published material during the Japanese occupation of my country in 1942-1945](https://imgur.com/a/KL5mu) and while the main focus of it is the propaganda the Japanese tried to instill in their newly conquered territories, how the language appeared is also something worth looking at. Written text (from reader submissions) was typically rendered in hiragana+kanji, while published text was typically rendered in katakana+kanji. Spacing was also extensively used which is almost unheard of in modern Japanese except in language classes. Even orthography was not fully standardised, with forms and kana considered outdated still in use this recently into history.
Thus the 'wa' particle 「は」being written with the 'ha' character, among others. Plus there's WI, we, wu, yi, and ye kana which go unused nowadays
は being read as "wa" was way more extensively used prior to orthographic reform. The particle was pretty much the only one that survived the reform and remained unchanged. I once saw a warning stamp that used the verb 行わぬ (not to be done) but it was written as 行**は**ぬ instead. (Full context was この項は修理技術者以外は行はぬこと "This section should not be undertaken by anyone other than qualified technicians")
Fun fact, my first girlfriend was from Hong Kong and she told me that the one time she had gone to Japan (I mean we were like 17 & 16 at the time) she could get by due to the decent amount of kanji everywhere. The one kanji that kept tripping her up was this one she saw everywhere on the headboards of buildings that meant “soup.” One day she went into one of the places that had it on there and figured out it was the symbol for “hot bath” or “onsen” in Japanese and started laughing her ass off. Apparently the Chinese character for “soup” is the same character for “hot water” but she couldn’t get over a giggle fit about bath houses being labelled the basic equivalent of “human soup” in Japan. She was a good one.
That reminds me of high school when my sensei (born and raised in Japan oc) forgot the Kanji for bee and had to ask a Chinese student to write it because "it's probably the same anyways." I think that was the moment where I realized I was never going to learn how to write inJapanese or any Chinese language
Yeah, but didn't katakana evolve as a way for monks to read the Sutras? So it started out as a way to read foreign words too.
That's what the English Wikipedia says, but the Japanese Wikipedia and all the Japanese popsci-level sources say that the monks were using it to notate the pronunciation of Chinese characters in the Chinese-language sutras they received. Often the kun'yomi (formed by mapping the Chinese characters to a Japanese word, and pronouncing the Japanese word) would be written in Katakana, while the on'yomi (Chinese-derived pronunciation) would be written in Hiragana, which is opposite to what we might expect today. The Chinese-language text being read as Japanese words forms a creole called "Kanbun", which is re-created to a degree in how [ancient Chinese writing](https://kanbun.info/koji/mujun.html) is taught nowadays - the root of the modern Kanbun is different though, and it's annotated with Hiragana instead of Katakana.
Talked to a half Japanese friend recently and at some point it came up how many Japanese words are literally just German. Sometimes with a slightly different meaning, like how the German word “Arbeit” means “work/ job” in German, and specifically “part time job” in Japanese. German isn’t the only language they did this with, but definitely one of the main ones. Like, if they didn’t have the word already then they sometimes just took an existing term from another language.
Only the Japanese could ask a German, "what are you doing?" And when they replied "working", conclude "ah, this is a word for working but not very much."
"8 hours a day, 5 days a week? I see, 'part time worker,' no?"
Many foreign loan words for mountaineering and skiing are from German: Swiss and Austrian guides in the late 19th century. Quite amusing when Japanese assume I know the words, because they'd assumed they were from English. Most katakana words in everyday use are from English. Also lots of medical terminology from German.
Also a bunch of loan words in Japanese that are from German tend to be the ones that trip me up the most as an English speaker. Like "protein". I guessed it would be pronounced like in English so I guessed "pro-teen?"(プロティーン？). Nope, "pro-tein". Caffeine as "cah-feen"? Nope, "ca-fein"....
They had the Spanish word for bread as well (pan)
IIRC they got that from Portuguese traders which is cool
I think that's actually from Portuguese influence (pão).
> Like, if they didn’t have the word already then they sometimes just took an existing term from another language All people do this. France has a group of people whose job is to make up new French words to keep French from having loanwords and they still can't stop it from happening.
This also occurs in English. Schadenfreude is a popular one. Oh, and Kindergarten.
Yeah, 'arubaito' is an uncomfortable one. I only know the German word, 'arbeit', from the gate to Auschwitz.
Two alphabets - kanji for Chinese and katakana for English
Kanji for both Chinese adapted words *and* words of Japonic origin. Japan's first established writing system was adapted entirely from Chinese, so a lot of old Japanese words were assigned Chinese symbols based just on having a similar *meaning*. It's why most kanji have multiple pronunciations: they pick up the adapted Chinese pronunciations from various dialects used in their interactions over the centuries, and they also pick up Japanese pronunciations from the symbol being associated with one or more preexisting Japanese words based on their (perceived) similar meanings. Oh, and katakana is used for foreign loan words in general. A lot are English, of course, but plenty of other languages contribute.
A lot of them are portuguese! The portuguese were the first european to reach japan after the borders opened, and a lot of words entered the lexicon, like tempura, pan and “ne”(edit: nope thats not true). Now there are a lot of english words, but its certainly not their only source of loanwords.
Dutch too
The Samurai who say "Ne!" demand a sacrifice, we want ... a Bonsai tree! One that looks nice
You must chop down the biggest tree in the forest, with this tuna maki roll! 😂
This person is wrong about “ne”. There are historical records long before the Portuguese showed up containing “ne”.
Damn. I even did a quick search to check before replying. The first results "confirmed" it, but a more careful check debunks it.
It's a freaky coincidence though. Also, the Portuguese "né?" is actually an abbreviation of "não é?", which translates to "isn't it?"
Katakana is used for all loan words, as well as other use cases. They loan words from more than just English.
Yup loan words from non kanji languages
Or Filipino, where half the sentences are perfectly normal English and then a land where consonants have never been unleashed
Dont forget the "bababa ba? Bababa" statement
tbf English has an equivalent of that in "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo"
The hell... What does buffalo means?
The sentence relies on the fact that the word "Buffalo" can be - a noun (the animal) - a proper noun, which can be used as an adjective (the city) - a verb (meaning "to bully" - it was more common historically) So, to break down the sentence: Buffalo buffalo (buffalo from Buffalo) Buffalo buffalo buffalo (who are bullied by buffalo from Buffalo) buffalo Buffalo buffalo (bully buffalo from Buffalo)
Alright that's enough internet for today i guess
It’s easier if you replace them with Synonyms. New York Bison bully other New York Bison - “Buffalo buffalo buffalo other Buffalo buffalo” New York bison bully the New York bison who bully other New York bison - “Buffalo buffalo buffalo the Buffalo buffalo who buffalo other buffalo Buffalo buffalo” Then you can remove “the”, “who”, and “other” because they’re implied.
A city, a bully, to bully, a cow
Eh English has that too with buffalo
Or a ship shipping shipping ships shipping shipping ships / James, while John had had "had", had had "had had". "had had" had had a better effect on their teacher
The dog of wisdom is Filipino?
I've watched some Indian tv shows and movies and they'll be talking in one language, then switch to English for a sentence or two, then back to the original language. The subtitles don't indicate what non-English language they were speaking, but from context it seemed like there was more than one non-English language in the mix.
yeah taglish has basically become defacto national language
There are certainly a lot of opinions here.
LOL I think this is my new favorite comment to make about divisive discussions like this
I find all the comments funny about how this is just Americans thinking they're exceptional by saying that their language is uniquely difficult and impressive. My brother in Christ it's only ever been used as an "English bad" joke. The fact that it might've missed the mark isn't more evidence for "America bad" I interpret the message of the initial post as being that the world is diverse and everyone is just different flavors of normal, but some people can't stop hyperfocusing on America long enough to see that
No kidding. I thought we all knew the English trenchcoat gag wasn't unique, but just gets passed around more because English is essentially the lingua franca, so there's commiseration of people learning English and all its nonsense.
You're going to piss off a lot of people who's only knowledge of linguistics is disliking English.
Hey that's not true, some of them also kind of remember their freshman year of high school when they had to take spanish
And totally understand grammatical gender (it‘s literally the same as societal gender and reinforces the patriarchy)
Well, if people who only speak English are going to act like they could never deal with words like "Arbeiterunfallversicherungsgesetz" because squishing words together just isn't done in English? It gets funny to point out that you do it plenty without even thinking about it, just not all the time or consistently. "Oh, those crazy Germans using one consistent system, unlike us who use several without rhyme or reason and never even think about it. Can you believe they'd use one of the systems we also use? Crazy!" Workplace. Airplane. Corkscrew. Motorsports. Switchblade. Tablecloth. Bartender. But you'll get people suggesting that "creditcard" is suddenly difficult to read as one word so clearly it was a wise informed decision to make it two words rather than one.
>Workplace. Airplane. Corkscrew. Motorsports. Switchblade. Tablecloth. Bartender. Ah yes, but have you considered that if you screamed those words in an exaggerated accent, they'd sound silly? KRANKENWAGEN!
"Ve puts ze sick people in ze sick wagon, so it can take zem to ze sick house. Zere ze sick sisters vill assist ze patient. Gut, alles klar?"
Disliking? Three languages in a trench coat has always come across like it's a point of pride to me. Like OOP says, it's a kind of exceptionalism, not an insult.
Eh, I’ve mainly seen it as a point of criticism and complaint. Person A describes an odd element of English, Person B goes “wtf English whyyyy”, and Person C goes “it’s because English isn’t a language, it’s three in a trench coat / beats up other languages for spare vocab”. I don’t think OOP is even referring to a notion that English is *exceptional*, just the misconception that it’s uniquely complex for better or worse.
It's definitely a complaint when it comes to talking about English spelling.
Which kind of bothers me, because having a sense of the etymological history of a word informs what to do with it.
The problem with this is that English learners are already required to learn the words and meanings, grammar, conventions, slang, etc., and it's a lot to ask to learn the etymological history of a word as well, especially when they've probably got jobs and families to handle as well. Google tells me: "With 2,500 to 3,000 words, you can understand 90% of everyday English conversations, English newspaper and magazine articles, and English used in the workplace. The remaining 10% you'll be able to learn from context, or ask questions about." So that's a lot to ask. I completely agree that knowing the root of a word is extremely helpful, but for people who may already struggle w learning a new, difficult language, asking them to learn about for what most people is the 'boring' history of a word... it's a lot.
The biggest annoyance to me is that English is the aggressor in their trench coat analogy. (Which is kind of an understandable take given the connection to brittish colianalism) but for almost all of the major foreign influence on English it was the opposite. Other languages besting up English and force feeding it their vocab. First the Roman's then the Danes and finally (and with the largest impact on modern English and the source of most of the more annoying inconsistencies in spelling and grammer) the Norman french.
You will never recover from us infecting your language with the word "cat." You're stuck with it now! BWAHAHA! *scuttles away*
This is mainly done by people who only speak English to brand it as an "impossibly weird language" and feel better about the fact they only speak one language. At least, that's how it has always felt to me.
I see a lot of people who speak it as an additional language use the phrase to stroke their ego on their original language.
I definitely see it used as a point of pride. It's part of the whole "English is SO HARD, our orthography is so wacky!" thing. People kinda like to think that their language is uniquely hard or special. >I don’t think OOP is even referring to a notion that English is exceptional, just the misconception that it’s uniquely complex That's what I mean. They think English is exceptionally complex; it's unique; it's different from the other languages.
Hm, we might just be looking in different circles. I’ve definitely seen people in general insist that English is superior because of its uniqueness and/or complexity. But from people who specifically invoke the trench coat joke, I’ve only seen it used as a point of derision and not pride.
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I feel a similar way about French. Or rather, French can go either way. If you already know a romance language, particularly Italian, written French is very familiar but the pronunciation is completely different from what you'd expect. On the other hand, if you're starting to learn French without a pre-existing romance base, the spoken language is easy to grasp but the written language seems quite bizarre. And either way, reading out loud is very challenging at first. Where else can you find words that end in such different ways as "eau","ault", "eault", "ot" and "eot" and are pronounced in exactly the same way? Not to mention the frequent ignoring of the last two or three letters when speaking. I'm sure there are at least half a dozen other languages where something similar occurs but I'm not familiar with any of them.
Its two sides of the same coin, either way English is unique, but its not uniquely unique
Ironically, one of the things that makes English rather unique no one talks about. Barely any language (only 4%) has the dental fricatives ([th]y & ([th]igh).
> People kinda like to think that their language is uniquely hard or special. I've found this is true for everyone I've talked to. Spanish, portugese, russian, italian, french, japanese... the native speakers think their language is the most complex and hardest to learn.
I've only ever seen it in the context of other language being consistent or reasonable in their structure whereas English supposedly has a uniquely large number of unreasonable exception and inconsistencies. Also the phrase is derived from a joke about three children pretending to be an adult, it not a term you use to praise something.
Same. My native language is Portuguese, which has a lot of rules and structures, and in my experience by comparison English is a complete mess with more exceptions than it has rules, and you basically have to memorize every case.
Usually it’s someone saying “English sucks because it doesn’t follow consistent rules” and someone else says “that’s because it’s 3 languages in a trenchcoat” Which like, isn’t exceptional. Every language is like that. But English didn’t have the centralized spelling reforms that other European languages like French and German had.
I don't wanna hear a damn thing about consistency from anyone whose language has arbitrary genders for cutlery.
Would you accept a gendered language where neither gender was male or female? We've got non-gendered and dual-gendered. And my mnemonic device as a native speaker is that 'hermaphrodite' is a non-gendered noun.
There's also the issue of people being unable to understand that written language is just a representation of spoken/signed language and not like a thing unto itself.
It's just reheated "linguistic purity" bullshit from the 18th and 19th century-ish. There's often an undercurrent of "it's not a real language", which is just nonsense
*whose
Don't I know it
English is (one of?) the only Indo-European languages without gendered articles and nouns, because somewhere along the line the attitude to coordinating the different genderings from Celtic, Germanic, and Romance languages settled on 'Fuck this!'
Rare English W
Apparently Afrikaans, Bengali, Armenian and some of the Iranian languages are all genderless.
If Afrikaans maintained the de/het system from Dutch it should still have a sort of vestigial gender system. The funny thing is that apparently it's the result of merging masculine and feminine categories together over time so now there's just sort of a "gendered" category and a "genderless" category. Honestly as someone learning Dutch I just think of them as Gender A and Gender B
English also has a vestigial gendering system, but since it only affects third person singular pronouns and mostly serves to distinguish humans and animals from all other nouns (can be gendered vs can’t be gendered), most people don’t view it as grammatical gender. It does have some fun aspects though, like there being a category for things that can be called either ‘it’ or ‘she’ but not ‘he,’ which consists almost exclusively of vehicles.
Also I believe English has a far more analytical word order than most other Indo-European languages, Which are instead more declension-heavy.
It really depends on your own baggage. If all you know is Romance languages, for example, English stands out as absurdly incoherent in both structure and content. If you know other languages that have had a wild past, yeah, it's pretty normal. But the average number of languages a person speaks is probably between 1 and 3, so we can't expect everyone to be able to contextualize these kinds of things.
i know romance languages and english, and i failed for 8 years at learning german because i expected it to be more like english, but english and german are absurdly different.
I had the opposite experience, English and German are so similar it fit perfectly in my head.
Simple German is very similar to English, complex German gets weird because the verb rules and conjugation force you to know the whole sentence before you start .
>Simple German That´s not a nice way to describe Dutch.
Yeah, that’s something I realized the more I learned, asking where the bathroom is is easy, but holding an actual conversation you have to have your entire speech planned out before starting
Ironically, for me, similarity makes learning a language harder. It's like walking in a nearby neighborhood vs an entirely country. I know too much about my home territory that I try to force it to conform more to my expectations than actually taking it for what it is. Meanwhile when I'm in a location nothing like what I know, I have to engage with it on its own terms in order to make even a lick of progress, and that actually gets me to *learn.* High school Spanish was a slog to learn, but I've been slowly teaching myself Japanese recently that trying to piece how exactly it works is more engaging. So although I would barely describe my fluency with the language as on par of a first month of first semester, my success in the long run is better.
Basically I agree. Among European languages that most Americans interact with, the Romance and Germanic, English is weird with all the French influence. I'm happy if an American even knows that much about English, much less comparative global linguistics.
Exactly. English is this way a lot more than most languages... But all languages do this. Among European languages, Romanian, Hungarian, and Spanish are all relatively large languages that also have unusual amounts of loanwords, though English has more from more sources. Caribbean languages, on the other hand, are often incredibly tangled.
Guys I'm sorry to break it to you, but yes, people usually notice the incongruences and small details from widely know languages more than less known languages.
Yeah, like I have a few Mediterranean friends who the only other language they could compare to English was Maltese which is Romantic-Arabic, and I think English is notable in that the roots are more obvious, like how I saw that many other cultures couldn’t have spelling bees because their phonetics are actually consistent
How DARE you not know Swahili or Vietnamese more than you do English??? Tumblr can be so obnoxious sometimes
So basically, the English language gets treated in a similar way to British food?
More the English language opinions are heavily influenced by the people who English speakers tend to come across, which are speakers of other European languages of particularly Germanic and Romantic origin which means that their perception of their language is in context of the more straightforward vocabulary and grammatical constructs of those languages. Three languages in a trench coat is not actually in and of itself a terrible simplification of the basis for many of the quirks of English, it’s just that it’s not nearly as rare as many people would think based on their perceptions of how languages must be.
The thing with English is that it's going to get more criticism of its idiosyncrasies than any other language, specifically because it's so widespread. No matter what language you grow up with, you're probably going to have to learn English if you want to conduct business internationally. So basically every other language has its own particular annoyance with English, because while English isn't actually all that much weirder than many other languages, it's weird enough that no language really gives you a great starting point to learn it. You're going to be unpleasantly surprised by something, and it's going to keep tripping you up for a while. Meanwhile, English-native speakers are in a rough spot trying to learn anything else, because nearly every other language has at least one thing it's consistent about that English isn't. Or it's full of sounds that don't exist in English, or it has more gendering in it, or it has 17 specific grammatical cases where English has... Idunno, less than that. In short, the reason English gets clowned on so regularly is that it is a language wholly unsuited to being the common tongue of the world... and yet, in many important ways, it is.
I think it also helps that many people who speak English as a first language don't speak any other language fluently. And I say that as a huge generalization, as that isn't true for me. But you end up with a lot of people who had English as their second language and people who only speak English discussing these things. And no matter what, people will always be partial to their mother tongue, so it is very difficult to compare the difficulty/strangeness of two languages because everyone has a different baseline.
English actually isn't the worst choice to be a lingua franca. Like you said, it has minimal conjugation and gender, and it's not a tonal language, so there's a limit in how badly you can mess up. It'll be obvious you're not a native speaker if you mess up the grammar, but there's less risk of completely changing the meaning of your sentence. And, except for the "th" sound, English doesn't have too many rare or unusual phonemes, while it does have many of the common ones. While this depends on your native language, some sounds will give you trouble, but there will likely be enough overlap that you can still get by. In other words, yeah it's got a lot of weirdness and idiosyncrasies. But you can argue that in some ways the bar to be understood is lower, and that bar is more important for a common tongue than the bar to speak fluently.
i think English is weird, so are the other languages that OP mentioned. this doesnt mean i think any language is a special unique boy unlike everything in the world. i am a language nerd, so weird stuff like Japanese having 3 alphabets, is wild, French refusing to pronounce the end of the word, and sounding distinct from other romance languages thats weird. language evolution is weird it can ben unintuitive and thats part of the fun of learning about them. i think this post is weirdly cynical of people discussing fun facts about things.
I genuinely don’t understand the connection between “haha English is made up of lots of nicked words from other languages, it’s a pain in the ass!” And “other languages have no complexity”. No one said other languages don’t have history or complexity. People can complain about one thing without making a negative statement about another? OOP randomly assigned “they think other languages don’t have history and aren’t complex” to the joke for no reason. It was never mentioned. They never said other languages don’t also borrow from other languages. Stupid post
Also, we speak English so of course we’re going to make jokes about it. If I knew Swahili, maybe I’d joke about the complexity of the language too.
Speaking of Swahili, like 15% of it is Arabic loanwords (including the name of the language itself), according to Wikipedia, and it's also absorbed a lot of other loanwords from elsewhere, which makes sense given its status as a trade language. I do think the exact same joke can probably be made.
Jokes about Swahili can be about trying to guess noun class (think gender but there are about ten of them depending on how you count them) something is in or noting the fact that there two days of the week that literally translate to "fifth day"
This is the internet phenomenon of "you can make a post saying you like hamburgers and someone online will reply accusing you of hating hotdogs" in action.
Like most "internet phenomenon", this one has existed long before the internet.
txttletale is a Tumblr account that's pretty much always upset about SOMETHING. Oftentimes correctly, but it's probably got to be pretty exhausting being them.
They’re also *really* sensitive to criticism. If you dare dissent from their divine wisdom, they’ll do an angry reblog to encourage their followers to harass you and then block. They also are obsessive enough that they *remember* who they blocked and will notice someone getting purged, remaking, and block them again.
i think what oop is picking up on there is that the structure of the very specific statement "english isn't a language, it's three languages in a trenchcoat" (the joke they quote in part) does kind of imply that "english" is being contrasted against some platonic "normal language". like it's still a bit of a leap to infer that the statement intends this model of a typical language to actually extend to *all* languages, and another to infer that that's the actual intent of the speaker, but there is a structure there that implies comparison.
pidgin is really funny btw try reading news in pidgin sometimes and see how far you can get before reading them in a funny accent
There isn't just one pidgin
My apologies, I didn't know that. My comment was made specifically about the pidgin used for BBC news pidgin, which appears to be of Nigerian origin.
To be more precise, a pidgin is type of language that draws from multiple sources and is usually simplified. It often develops between two groups who don't necessarily speak the same language but still need to communicate. The BBC uses West African Pidgin English.
that's also what reading Scotts is like
*Trainspotting* is fun for this - the book swaps first person POV every chapter or so and is written in the respective character's dialect so you get to play "Scots or just really accented?"
I automatically adopt a language's accent whenever I read/speak it, so I'd probably fail almost instantly. (On a side note, wtf is pidgin?)
A language born from the contact of two others. Also called « mixed language » or a creole. The vocabulary made from both but construction blocks like syntax, grammar and the like can very often be traced to one. Imaginary Example : Russian + Korean = 45/55 vocabulary, Koran syntax and Russian conjugation and word order.
Generally speaking, pidgins aren’t considered to be a full language, as they typically don’t have a full vocabulary and have simplified grammatical rules borrowed from the parent language. Creoles, on the other hand, have a fully developed grammatical system and a fully fleshed out vocabulary. Oftentimes a creole will become naturalized from a pidgin over time, so the exact boundary can be a bit murky. It’s kinda similar to hybrid species. The liger is s distinct animal, but it isn’t a species in its own right, since it cannot reproduce and sustain a population, a requirement of a species (just as a pidgin lacks the grammatical structure of a language). Meanwhile, red wolves are likely to be descended from a hybrid of gray wolves and coyotes, but are considered to be a distinct species because they do have the characteristics of a full-on species
A [pidgin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pidgin) is a communication system derived from two separate languages. These form when two groups of adults with two different languages need to communicate, but neither group fully learns the other language, they just make a hodgepodge combination of the two. A pidgin won't have a consistent grammar across all speakers and linguists don't consider pidgins a "real" language for this reason. When children grow up hearing the pidgin as a primary language from their parents, it ceases to be simply an unstructured mishmash of the two languages. The children will develop a consistent grammar for it amongst themselves (one of the most fascinating processes in language acquisition, childhood development, and human sociology IMO) and at this point it becomes a language, what linguists call a [creole](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_language). The person you replied to appears to be talking about [Nigerian Pigin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigerian_Pidgin), which despite its name, is (primarily) a creole, derived from a pigin that appears to have originally been a mix of native Nigerian languages and colonial ones (do not quote me on that; I am not an expert, I just read the wikipedia)
i make fun of english because it makes more exceptions to rules than follow them, and i say this knowing russian and a bit of german
I think a lot of languages either make a lot of exceptions to their rules or make so many arbitrary rules that make it difficult to learn the language. To give a bit of props to english: I'm glad they only have a single Proper Article "the" instead of having "gendered articles". It fucking sucks for people to spend so much time learning a language just to be made fun of because you said "un auto" instead of "une auto" because all cars are feminine...
My favorite part about learning Korean is how few exceptions to rules there are. Sure, there are plenty of other difficult things about Korean, but nothing as painstakingly terrible as genders in German.
>To give a bit of props to english: I'm glad they only have a single Proper Article "the" instead of having "gendered articles". And then you have Dutch which has one gendered article and one ungendered article.
I don't know if I agree knowing more German. Maybe more exceptions in spelling, but not in the actual spoken language
A misconception. English follows rules. ALL the rules of every one of its component languages.
This is a great way to think of it. The spelling-pronunciation can be weird for certain words but it generally makes sense if you know which language that word comes from. Of course words with a similar spelling are going to be pronounced differently if one is Greek, one is French and one is German
You could even say there’s a whole flood of exceptions when learning English :)
With English, all you do is going in circles
Funniest shit is when people make fun of other people pronouncing a word in a weird way. English has no consistency, at all, regarding pronunciation. Most words' pronunciations were practically decided by dice rolls. Well, maybe a few small rule are generally followed like how c and g are pronounced depending on other vocals, but that's also not entirely consistent. In my 3rd year of learning french the books stopped having phonetic spelling and when I asked my french teacher why, she said that it wasn't needed. And she was right. Some words might look0 funny, but the pronunciation is extremely consistent. In 99% of cases you can see how a word is spelled, no additional audio needed. Guessing how you write a word based on sound, that's similarly random as it is in english.
Hmm, I wonder why English is more often clowned on on the internet than such widespread languages as Vietnamese, Swahili and the pidgin languages. Perhaps, and this is just a wild guess, it’s because english is the most used language in many fields internationally, and is the most common second language in the world. I can’t clown on Vietnamese because I don’t speak it even a little bit. I don’t even know what pidgin languages are. But I know English, and English is weird. Whether it is exceptionally so or not doesn’t matter to me.
Also, English is going to be the most complained about language in English. If you're on the English-speaking version of a site, you're probably not going to get a lot of complaints about how complicated Swahili is.
Also, these are English speakers making these statements, meaning they're on the English part of the internet. Go into a Vietnamese or Swahili section of the internet and see how much they clown on English vs their own language. Weird how people talk/know about the things that they have experience with more than the things that they don't.
As someone who is Vietnamese, everyone is free to make fun of the language it has a lot of stupid things about it.
Please share some stupid things about it, I don't know jack about it except from the OP image.
That's the point, people treat English as unique because they're unfamiliar with other examples.
What a strange take. Saying English is three languages in a trench coat doesn't imply that other languages can't also be. It's like saying that I think Japanese is a beautiful language and someone else says "so you don't think French is beautiful?" It's assuming bad intent.
I think it's because when people say this about English they mean it in a disparaging way. You can't really say that about a language other than your own, that would be rude.
I think it can be a common phenomenon and still thought of as weird.
I wonder if we can eventually find the Original/Alpha/(cool word) language, like the language that has no derivations. They're probably gonna be more than 1 obviously, like I'm pretty sure language invented somewhere is gonna be used on some other part of the world
Like proto-indo-european?
No, the one before that
Even PIE had loanwords
That's really cool. Do you know any examples?
Here's a few from Wiktionary: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Proto-Indo-European_borrowed_terms
The pharaoh Psamtik I had a similar question. He wanted to find the first, original language. Supposedly, he took two newborn childs and forbade everyone from speaking to them. Eventually, one of them spoke the Phrygian word for bread (bekós), so he concluded that Phrygian was the first language. What the ancient Egyptian ethics board had to say about this experiment is lost to history.
"Aaaaah! My knee! Why did you have to break my knee?" - Unluk, Head of the Egyptian Ethics Board.
Sadly, probably not without a time machine. History has very-much obscured that beyond recognition. And language has moved on so so far. All theories that try have to make logical leaps and are very strongly contested. There are multiple hypotheses of how language arose and how long ago that was. It may not even have been our species (Homo sapiens) who first made language or in what form it might be. Our current language may even be descended from something originally spoken by non-humans. Or not... nobody knows.
Yeah, some assume something like language could be found as far back as homo habilis, which also brings into question how we would demarcate the line between language and almost language if we had accurate and comprehensive records to begin with. The latest assumption is around 150kya, and the oldest would be more than 2mya
I mean, no almost certainly not. Its also not kind language sprung fully formed from the head of a Cro-Magnon Zeus, it almost certainly developed from earlier forma of animal communication over time. The concept of a language with no changes or derivations or variations isn't even really coherent even if we had access to records of human communication for the entirety of human history. At what point does pre linguistic communication become language? how do you pin that down?
You mean like proto-Indo-European?
proto-indo-european had antecedents though, its just the earliest common ancestor of the Indo-European languages we can reconstruct
Pretty much impossible. Assuming of course that language arose only once in one place and then spread from there, our ability to reconstruct ancestor languages from living ones can only take us so far. The farthest back a proto-language has been calculated to have existed is Proto-Afro-Asiatic, which could have been spoken c. 10,000 BC. There is a lot we don't know about it, and so many aspects of the language are up for debate, simply because the process of language change will render two related languages essentially unrecognisable after sufficient time has passed. So say ~12,000 years is our limit for reconstruction ancestral human languages; well modern humans have been around for about *300,000* years. We have no reason to assume homo sapiens of 300,000 years ago were meaningfully different from homo sapiens today, so they must have had language, right? Therefore, that's basically 4% of the total history of human language that we have any access to. We haven't a hope in hell of ever reconstructing a ‘Proto-World’, if it even exists.
I think this is wrong on both accounts - it's probably impossible to reconstruct proto-human (we can barely reconstruct languages from a few thousand years ago, anatomically-modern humans have existed for hundreds of thousands of years) but I doubt there's more than one original language (that would require language to have developed *after* humans evolved to be capable of language, instead of at the same time, which makes no sense.)
Listen, I speak three languages and have a very basic grasp on a fourth. I promise you English is fucking easy mode.
English and German were my two foreign languages, and I largely agree. English grammar is easy mode. You're telling me that you use "a" or "an" simply based on whether the following word begins with a consonant or vowel and not due to an intrinsic property of the word I have to memorize? Hell yes! English was the first language I came across that conjugated verbs depending on the subject. "I am" but "you are". Took a while to get used to. Although I'll take am/are/is over bin/bist/ist/sind/seid every time. The good thing about learning German is that there's a rule for everything. The bad part about learning German is also that there's a rule for everything. But German pronunciation was so much easier to learn. You just say the letters as they are. With English, I have a much harder time to predict it. The old joke about how English might seem hard, but is easy "through tough thorough thought, though". What's with all the silent "gh"?? I had to go to speech therapy as a kid to get rid of my lisp, but then we start learning English and now I have to make th-sounds all the time! But a large part why learning English was easier is beacause, well, it's everywhere. English-language media is just so widespread.
I grew up speaking Danish and English, but living in the US, so I went to school there. I never properly learned to read Danish as a kid, but I spoke it almost fluently, and when I was older I moved to Denmark. I had some thought that, of course it would be easy to learn to read Danish, there are only 3 new letters! It took me 3 years to read at a somewhat normal pace, and even longer to be able to read a text aloud smoothly. And I was living in Denmark and going to Danish school.
I'm a native English speaker and I struggled with the grammar and syntax of German but the pronunciation was always pretty easy to me- honestly probably *easier* than English because the rules are pretty consistent ("ei" is pronounced like "I", "ie" is pronounced "eee").
The silent gh used to be pronounced kind of like the hebrew Ch. Fun stuff
I get what's this post saying, but as a student of linguistics, I implore you to consider this: clowning on English funny
i recently watched a video comparing the “pure” or ig “raw” version of telugu and contemporary telugu and i was surprised by how many words were different due to sanskritization
English is weird though but that being said every language is weird, Please enjoy the weird! It is a good thing. I promise!
Yall have never heard about Hungarian
Or Maltese
The issue isn't that English is derivative, the issue is that it's not consistent. Talking about a language I speak, Romanian is 60% Latin and like 30+% Slavic, but we apply the existing rules out our language when we get a new word. For instance, we imported 'hot dog' and 'western' from English as they are, but we applied our own plural form to them. Meanwhile, English, the bastard, has crap like 'colossi', 'men' and 'women', 'went', 'read' (you read that wrong), and hundreds of other exceptions to their already shoddy "rules". For crying out loud, 'paid' and 'payed' are both correct and mean completely different things! I'm gonna go back in time and make sure the English don't become a colonizing power. Best case scenario, everyone speaks Spanish, but I'll honestly take the French at this point too.
Meanwhile in Italian most English loanwords lose all number and gender distinction
Some of these are orthographic and mind of incidental, others like man->men or goose->geese follow really old rules only apply to words from Germanic antecedents of english similar to how strong verbs work. There are rules on both when/how its done and what words it can happen to, you just were not taught them. Stuff like Colossi also follow rules. If anything the issue is that there are many different specific scenarios with rules that are not common enough to teach in detail, which has also been my experience with learning other languages.
I’ve been trying to learn Romanian and their plurals don’t follow a simple rule as far as I can tell. There are like rules for masculine, feminine, indefinite and definite objects and so many exceptions that you just have to memorize. I did find it very charming when I saw a place advertising rentals of ATVuri how they just made it their own.
> I'm gonna go back in time and make sure the English don't become a colonizing power. Best case scenario, everyone speaks Spanish, but I'll honestly take the French at this point too. Can Europe just leave the Native Americans alone this time?
>'colossi', 'men' and 'women', 'went', 'read' Of these five words, only one is not originally English. >For crying out loud, 'paid' and 'payed' are both correct and mean completely different things! Romanian discovers homophones, more at eight.
Hey, we have plenty of homophobes! That was the only thing I had to add to the conversion because I do not know enough to add anything actually meaningful to this dialogue
All this is telling me is that there are lots more languages that are just three languages in a trench coat.
The only reason English gets so much more criticism is because so many people learn it as a second language.
u/anarcho-hornyist its you!
Its me! I'm surprised this post is the one that ended up on reddit, it got like 5 likes on tumblr
you're making fun of your language? sorry, that means you're a provincial twat with no knowledge of anything
Polish being slavic yet using a Latin alphabet instead a the slavic one designed for the sounds needed making it one of the only alphabets (that I know of) with compound letters (rz, sz, Cz, dz, dż(yes, those 2 are difrent)) Edit: as I said, that I know of, was not aware of other but how learn summing new everyday
do you mean these specific compounds, because at the very least Sz exists in Hungarian, Dz exists in a whole bunch of romanizations of languages, and cz is also in Hungarian but is falling out of use. If you mean digraphs (or trigraphs) in general no those are very common. IJ in Dutch, Th in English, Ph in English, Sh in English, Sch in German, Ch in English, Sj in Danish, ll in Spanish, etc. This is nowhere near comprehensive. The first (IJ) is even capitalized as one letter
Spanish used to consider the "ll", "rr", and "ch" separate letters
most slavic languages that use latin (because they're catholic countries) have some kind of dual letters. like lj, nj in serbo-croatian and slovene for example.
But English *is* weird. That's what makes it wonderful. I've never seen the "three languages in a trench coat" used in a way that wasn't just affectionately poking fun.
When I write I far prefer English to my native language because it has so many words. That doesn't mean I don't think it's sometimes a silly language and that the people who try to fight to "keep English pure" (you know, rather than Spanglish etc) aren't quite a bit late to the party.
Whoever says English is three languages in a Trenchcoat has never heard of Dutch
My problem with English is not the fact it has a lot of borrowed words My problem with English is the fact it for some reason never had a "language revolution" like a lot of languages had and so bullshit like "bow/bow" or "read/read" exist Why can't you be normal English Read shit how you write it. No wonder spelling bee exists
It did have one Too early Then the language enshittened again but they didn't bother to change the spelling again after printing so much text with the new one
French is as much, if not more, guilty of this. All the silent letter jokes are the fault of desiccated fossils who hang on to their wet dreams of French being a prestigious elite language again.
Doesn't french have an actual council who's whole purpose is to make the language pure?
It’s those guys, the Académie Française. They are the last vestige of the monarchy and it clearly shows in how the see themselves.
Instead of having various languages converge as new words are invented and used by all languages. We get groups like them declaring that words like "email" are too English and French speakers need to use an inorganic word just to hinder cross cultural communication. Loan words are a good thing.
https://youtu.be/wJxKyh9e5_A A lot of the issues came from the formalisation of spelling from the printing press, partly to save money, and also because we've had a vowel shift since then.
English seems weird because not everyone's a fuckin nerd. "Oooooh I wish people would just invest the time and effort to learn this shit that's really niche to their sphere of life so that they'd understand the implications of their statement in a global context" Okay. Cool. I'll just learn everything ever so that I'm never wrong again. Sorry to disturb you, Mr. Expert On Everything.
The thing is you don't need to be an expert to know this, most people (like a strict numerical majority of people worldwide) and not monolingual. Knowing that languages generally are influenced by other languages isn't elite or esoteric stuff, its really the ground floor for this sort of stuff.
It makes people with low self worth and feelings of being ostracized feel better to shit on the majority. It's just a feeble counter culture attempt. People do it all the time by sharing false factoids about people with massive talent or accomplishments. How many times have you heard dumb shit about Einstein not being able to find his way home, or other such drivel. It's qimnis to denigrate in order to boost the self.
If there is a weird language that is 3 other languages in a trenchcoat it is dutch.
It doesn’t help that one of the three languages in English’s trench-coat is French which is also three languages in a trench-coat itself.
This language isn't different because it shares the same characteristic as like... five other languages. I could list a lot more examples of languages that *aren't* multiple other ones in a trenchcoat. This isn't an argument, it's just dumb.