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

It isn't a real word, and an English speaker who came across it for the first time would likely pronounce it something more like "goatee" than like "fish."

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Jesus was a liberal hippie

The vocabulary and phonology is not as Germanic as it could be, but English prosody is still very much Germanic, as are the remaining few conjugations (past tense, for example) and inflections (-s plural, etc.).Jon

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Check out No webpage found at provided URL: Apollo's Temple!
Ignorance is temporary; you should be able to overcome it. - nwr

nwr (and everyone else who responded to the ghoti question),I know "ghoti" is just a funny example of the quirky pronunciation rules of the English language.On a side note, now that we're on the subject of pronouncing the "gh" combination, I'd like to use this stage to tell every English-speaker how to pronounce the name Van Gogh. It's not, as a lot of you seem to think, "van goff", with "van" pronounced like the word used to denote a small bus-like vehicle, and "goff" ending in an f-sound. The name literally means "from [the German town of] Gogh".The Dutch word "van" in this context translates as "from". "Van" is pronounced with an a-sound roughly like that in the British pronunciation of "dance", but a little shorter."Gogh" is pronounced, in Dutch at least, as if you have almost ingested an insect which is now clinging tightly to your epiglottis and which you are desperately trying to expel from your vocal apparatus. Both g's have a distinctly guttural quality to them, and the h plays no role worth mentioning.If this didn't make things clear, it has at least in all probability cleared some throats.

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"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.

Northern English 'dance' or southern English 'dance'?
(I think it is northern style.)

I have never heard that pronunciation before. For me, and everyone I've known, Van Gogh in English is pronounced (roughly) [vn 'go]. The [f] seems to be a British thing. According to Wikimedia, the pronunciation you are talking about seems to be: : [faŋˈxɔx]. Interestingly, they give an entirely different pronunciation for it in English than what I had mentioned above. I am doubtful on the English pronunciation they give, however, since English doesn't have /x/. This might be a 'cultured' pronunciation, but the average native English speaker would never make it.Jon

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Check out No webpage found at provided URL: Apollo's Temple!
Ignorance is temporary; you should be able to overcome it. - nwr

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

The goal, if there was some goal beyond trying to satisfy a whim of da moose, was to try to illustrate some of the problems non english speakers might have with what we so jokingly call our language. Read aloud, the paragraph in the OP is almost correct and grammatical. As written it is giberish; word salad.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

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.

I'm not going to say it like I'm Dutch, so I'm just gonna stick with "Van Goh."

So question.Unlike many languages, is English a classic example of Evolution, whatever is good enough to just get by, as opposed to Design, languages created to meet a given standard?

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

"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."Most languages have the same problem of borrowed words for instance slovenian has NO truly profane word, we borrowed them all from those south of us. And as for new words like pizza at first it is written the same way but now pizza is written in our way pica. And for some words we invent our own the term Cd-Rom was used for a long time then they invented zgočenka roughly translated back "condensed one" lol

A way to answer this is to look at the difference between 'designed' languages and languages without 'designing'. For example, the Spanish language and French language have academies; German has gone through spelling reforms (e.g., No webpage found at provided URL: 1996 German Spelling Reform).The evidence seems to suggest that languages with designing are different from languages without designing in particularly the way you've mentioned: the latter are just good enough to get along; the former go much beyond this with focuses on form, tradition, etc. In this, I'd say that English (at least the orthography) is a fine example of Evolution, unlike some other languages which are examples of Design.JonEdited by Jon, : ... spelling...Edited by Jon, : No reason given.

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Check out No webpage found at provided URL: Apollo's Temple!
Ignorance is temporary; you should be able to overcome it. - nwr

I am not sure what the 'natural selection' aspect of your analogy would be.
Bullies at school 'picking on' someone for using 'long' words maybe?I would also suggest the 'artifical selection' is rampant in the evolution of English.
I am sure that 'tmesis' would have faded away if the likes of Steven Fry, et al. didn't keep reminding people of it.

Natural Selection is pretty obvious, many words and terms simply disappear, do not survive, or get new uses.

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Anyone so limited that they can only spell a word one way is severely handicapped!

I don't know, but I have heard Van Goh, Van Goff & Van Gokh.Edited by bluescat48, : qs goof or is that gof

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There is no better love between 2 people than mutual respect for each other WT Young, 2002Who gave anyone the authority to call me an authority on anything. WT Young, 1969Since Evolution is only ~90% correct it should be thrown out and replaced by Creation which has even a lower % of correctness. W T Young, 2008