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Comment by kafkaesq | Hacker News Reader

Overdrawn. Nearly every language has certain features (or annoyances) that very few other languages have (except for closely related ones).

There's a "fat tail" of these weird-isms, basically, and English is just another dot on that fat tail. Yes it's a creole (and creoles are kind of weird), but it's not like it's unique that category either.

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> it's a creole

…is it? It's an example of heavy language contact in a few places, but “creole” seems hyperbolic at best.

I'm not going to get into the fine-grained (and for the purpose of this discussion, basically persnickety) nuances of where English sits on the creole/pidgin/hybrid spectrum (especially since none of these terms have formal† definitions anyway).

Being as the basic facts of its lineage (a near head-on collision of German and French -- not just "contact in a few places"), and the fact that many of its annoyances (particular in regard to spelling and pronunciation) result directly from a watering-down of these two systems, are generally understood.

† Yes, there are widely accepted definitions for these terms, but they are more like conventions ("thought to arise from interactions between parents and children") rather than formal definitions, like e.g. SVO.

Creole is a scientific term, not a casual one. Creoles evolve from pidgins. English was never a pidgin, and it has a very clear history. No useful interpretation of the word "creole", formally defined or not, is broad enough to actually consider English to be a creole, and no good linguist will call it one. Whoever or whatever taught you that it can be considered one, it's wrong. The people who take the Middle English creole hypothesis seriously are crackpots.

I don't think you're precisely correct in all of what you're saying, above. But that's precisely the point I was trying to get across: for the purpose of this discussion, such distinctions are basically persnickety. And in terms of relevance to the original article under discussion, basically neither here nor there.

In terms of morphological complexity, at least, it falls closer to creoles than any other major European language: http://www.lingref.com/cpp/wccfl/26/paper1657.pdf (see page 74).

Well, there's quite a bit of German and Latin together. Doesn't that qualify?

The better case for modern English as a creole is through Middle English, when Old English met Norman French following the Norman conquest of England.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothes...

No, it's still Germanic. It just got a lot of loan words.

A very high proportion of loan words, along with significant differences in grammar, phonetics and orthography. That's why people think of it as more of creole (or hybrid) language.

None of these are reasons one should consider it a creole language. It may have been influenced by other languages, but that doesn't make it a creole.

You can go find a linguist to debate this if you want. My basic points are simply: (1) the author of the original article wasn't making much of a point, and (2) in regard to what you were saying, where exactly English sits on the spectrum of hybrid languages is a multi-faceted issue -- rather more complex issue than simply the proportion of loan words.

That was certainly the position of my linguistics department at TU Berlin, influenced largely by Professor C.J. Bailey.

Very much an out-of-the-box thinker, but ("but?") very smart and usually (always?) right.

English is one of the rare languages that have heteronyms, and that's extremely weird for anyone coming from a language without them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(linguistics)

Note the article only exists in five languages.

Lots of languages have them but their wikipedias don't have that article: French, Swedish, Arabic, Dutch, Turkish, Czech, Latin, Italian, Spanish. Surprisingly even languages with orthographic depth of 1 have them

https://forum.wordreference.com/threads/heteronym-homograph....

To be a little more exact: Have large amounts of heteronyms to have them be common and not strange exceptions.

English spelling is horrible, but I feel that the number of English heteronyms is not notably high, especially considering the state of the spelling system.

I think heteronyms are bound to arise in most languages with Latin-based orthography, because they tend to borrow words from other Latin-alphabet-based languages without changing spelling. Some words are bound to collide with an existing word with the same spelling.

seeing as most Semitic languages are written without vowels, I would assume that almost all of them have heteronyms

It's not a creole: it's a creolised language. There is a difference: a creole is a language descended from a pidgin (and thus has increased in complexity), whereas a creolised language is one that has drastically simplified/regularised due to contact. These are two different phenomena.

I'm ESL and learning Spanish as the third language, also studied some French in school. Spanish grammar is extremely logical compared to English, French or Russian.

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