On the evolution of English as a written or spoken language.

Which leads us to a classic I Love Lucy episode. Pregnant Lucy wants them, especially including Ricky, to take English lessons so that the baby will learn proper English. So to convince him of the necessity, she has him read a children's book as a bedtime story. It is filled with -ough words and each one is pronounced differently than the previous one and Ricky tries to pronounce each new one as the previous one.Hans Conried is the English tutor:
Hans: There are two words I never want to hear. One is "swell", the other is "lousy."
Lucy: Swell. What's the lousy one?
And they reiterate that once or twice more.Hans recites the English vowel sounds and has each recite them back. It comes to Ricky:
Ricky (en puro espaol cubano): A, e, i, o, u.
Hans: Wherever did you learn that?
Ricky (otra vez en puro espaol cubano): Havana, Cuba. What's your excuse?Having formerly been Mexican by marriage, ... .

The big problem with English is that there are so many homonyms (the loose definition of having the same sound but different spellings). Many "grammar" lessons revolve around distinguishing between such words as "there", "their", and "they're", or "your" and "you're", etc, which have very different meanings and yet the same sound. That's not really grammar (relating to the structure of the language), but rather word choice.I don't know the history of reading education. All I know is that I hear about how phonetics had destroyed spelling, and yet I read in words, not in sounds. So a lot of posts I read by native English speakers I find to be very difficult to understand, because they constantly choose the wrong words. For example, on a programming forum, someone had a question about C code to implement a Barber poll. OK, I thought, must be a statistical polling method I hadn't heard of, so I asked for more info. Oh, it's that twirly thing hanging in front of a barber shop. Made me seriously want to reach through those wires to slap that fool up the side of the head!I'll have more tomorrow when I'm on a different system. Win7 refuses to support my Palm Pilot. Apparently some new definition of "progress" that I hadn't heard before.

Now that I can get to my Palm Desktop ...Back around 2000 when I would be returning home from San Diego at the end of a drill weekend, I would listen to a philology program on KPBS, hosted by two men (self-professed "verbivores"), at least one of whom was a professor at one of the universities down there.The thing about English is that it is effectively the combining of two languages, Anglo-Saxon ("Old English") and Norman French (the French learned by the Vikings who had conquered that region and then were themselves assimilated). As a result, we have a rather definitely Germanic grammar (especially comes out in the verb system and the remnents of a case system) but with a predominantly French vocabulary. Indeed, we have at least two very different terms for most things, one low-class "Anglo Saxon" and the other a much fancier "$2 word".I have studied both German and French (and a half-dozen other languages). I learned more about English grammar in two years of high-school German than I ever could have in 12 years of English classes. French grammar is somewhat different from English grammar (and is very similar to Spanish, again especially in the verb systems). But when I was still practiced in French, I found that it helped my English spelling considerable, since those two classes of suffixes, -*ble and -*nce, whose pronounciations are indistinguishable in English, are pronounced differently in French, such that you could hear the difference between -ence and -ance and between -ible and -able. So when writing in English, I had but to think of how the word sounded in French and, since it was usually spelled exactly the same, I had the English spelling. Surprisingly, it wasn't until many years later that it suddenly hit me that German vocabulary is so much more foreign to English speakers than French vocabulary is.Anyway, the effect of this merging of two languages is that English has an appreciably larger vocabulary than most other languages. One Sunday, host and verbivore Richard Lederer read the following list of vocabulary sizes and some related trivia:

quote:

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Vocabulary Sizes:
English 616,000
German 185,000
Russian 130,000
French 100,000

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English adds about 5000 new words per annum
about 25% of English vocab comes from "Anglish" (Anglo-Saxon)

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And now a few quotes, some of which I think I had picked up on this forum:"English is the results of the efforts of Norman men-at-arms to make dates with Saxon barmaids in the 9th century"
(H. Beam Piper, from "Fuzzy Sapiens")"English doesn't borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar."
(unknown)"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
James D. Nicoll

Sounds like Michael Dorn's recommendation to always have a handkerchief ready when practicing tlhIngan Hol ("Klingon").In a German linguistics class, we had a mixture of mostly Americans, a few Germans, and a couple Dutch. The professor was covering a few of the theories of the origin of human language and mentioned the idea that it came from animal sounds. One of the Germans then joked, "Well, you only have to hear Dutch to know that is right."All meant in good fun, both then and now.BTW, in the early 1970's I heard some Dutch being spoken and, noticing that I could follow some of it from German, decided to look into it. I could not find a single book on Dutch, except for a Dutch grammar in Spanish. I was informed that Dutch was going through a language reform at the time.

It is not an English word. According to No webpage found at provided URL: Wikipedia's Klingon Language article, it is the tlhIngan word for "fish":

quote:

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There are also many in-jokes built into the language. For example, the word for "pair" is chang'eng, a reference to the twins Chang and Eng, and the word for "fish" is ghotI'.

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And following the ghoti link there, we also find the word "Ghoughpteighbteau", pronounced "potato".

And ironically, in language the words and constructs most used are also the ones subject to the most change.I first came across that observation with the subjunctive mood in German. In contrast to the indicative mood, which we use the most and with which we make statements about actual events, conditions, etc, the subjunctive is basically used for imaginary and contrary-to-fact things. We rarely use it in English anymore, having relegated it to stock phrases (eg, "If I were ...", "Be that as it may.", "Long live the king!"). In Spanish and French, it is much more widely used to also express doubt and uncertainty, etc. German is part-way between, using it more than English for its basic functionality, but also for indirectly quoting somebody (eg, "Er sagte, das hier liege." ("He said that that is hier.") -- sorry, my German is pre-reform).Anyone who has ever studied a foreign language has encountered irregular verbs. Most verbs are regular, meaning that they follow the regular rules of conjugation. But there's always a handful of verbs, usually numbering around a 100 or so, depending on the language, that are irregular, meaning that they don't follow the regular rules but rather have unexpected changes in them -- well, many of the changes do tend to follow certain patterns that you learn as a student. The problem for the student is that those irregular verbs are also the most commonly used verbs, so the student must not only learn all of them, but he also must learn them very early in his study of that language. There's just no way around it, because most the things that he would most commonly want to express require irregular verbs.Now, when we were learning to conjugate German verbs in the subjunctive (die Mglichkeitsform -- my high school and JC German teachers were old-school and taught us German grammatical terms, rather than the Latin terms that the Germans use nowadays), we found that there were no irregular forms for any of the verbs except for one and only one, "sein" ("to be"). The most frequently used verb in the language is also the most irregular verb in the language.

In German linguistics class we encountered older forms of German from just a little more than 1000 years ago and could only begin to decipher a few words, but only after learning what they were; it was an entirely different language. The same thing in my one-semester seminar in Old English, though my German helped me a lot there -- and it helped clear up in my mind where some of the conjugations of "to be" came from. Those examples demonstrate how incredibly much a spoken language can change in just a half-dozen centuries.But then, after two semesters of ancient Greek -- Koin, actually -- I picked up a modern Greek book out of curiosity and was amazed to find that the language had hardly changed at all in more than 2000 years. Yes, the verb system and case system had changed as well as pronounciation (perhaps the greatest amount of change), but most of the words were still highly recognizable from their ancient forms.What was different? Writing! Greek was a written language with, I would assume, a sizeable literate population, whereas older Germanic languages were verbal. In the more purely verbal form, a language is freer to change, but when the language has a written literature then that literature can be used as a guide for the spoken language and thus slow down the rate at which the language changes.Similarly, there's the effect of writing causing the formation of a new language. Martin Luther is credited with creating modern German with his translation of the Bible, which then became a standard for writing and even speaking. There were German translations before him, but when those earlier translaters encountered Latin words that did not exist in German, then they would simply keep the Latin words and not try to translate them. What Martin Luther did was to borrow the Latin practice of building new words out of roots and affixes and create new German words by taking the Latin words apart and replacing those parts with their German equivalents; eg: express --> ausdrucken (to press out).A common English example is the dictionary. Whereas before people would write down words based on how they sounded, which led to great lack of uniformity, even in the same individual's writing. With the compilation and printing of dictionaries, people now had standards to follow in spelling words. Which has slowed the rate at which English changes, in particular regarding word spellings.

Possible. I was a foreign language major (German, before I majored in non-human languages like FORTRAN, PL/I, Pascal) so our exposure to linguistics was more introductory and as a survey of the subject, especially as it pertained to foreign language instruction. Add to that the observations made by a foreign language student of what he was finding.Perhaps related to those regularizing processes is what my Greek prof described to us. She would often point out where sound changes over time, such as the absorption of a consonant sound into an accompanying vowel sound had resulted in the form that we find. In one case, she showed where two different form had come from and that, since the one had changed into a form similar to the second more common form, that first form then got changed by analogy into that unrelated form. IOW, the speaker saw a spelling that looked like it should have been something else and "corrected the obvious error." It would be like someone seeing the English principle parts ring, rang, rung, and sing, sang, sung, and assuming that the principle parts of ding should be ding, dang, dung.

Eric Idle as an Aussie: American beer is like making love in a canoe. F**king close to water!