Benjamin Thorpe translated almost all Old English texts (2016)
thijsporck.com
thijsporck.com
I'll take the opportunity to plug a fantastic podcast on the history of English, creatively named "The History of English Podcast".
XVIII century French for instance, while probably being the peak of the language in term of sophistication and elegance, is hard to read without a lot of footnotes. So many words disappeared, changed meaning, or the grammar itself changed.
That is, Modern is also taken :-)
Also I doubt that there is a continuity between the mentioned Erasmus students and staff in the European-union for example. I would assume that's a later addition to the wikipedia article when the most likely subject of Euro english is about patterns of the use of english-language in the EU bureaucracy. Maybe a better title would be EU-administrative English or something of the like.
What's not so often talked about is of course that the pronunciation of english by non-native speakers is different and I do think there is tendency for some convergence among some aspects of pronunciation that I observe in meetings and zoom calls at work. Aspiration of consonants, clearer separation of individual words. The result is that native-speakers - while being more eloquent in English which puts them at some advantage - sometimes have a disadvantage because their advanced use of language is not understood well. IIRC MTV Europe realized that british hosts wouldn't be understood across europe, when english-speaking french/german/italian hosts would.
I think what's less clear is how consistent these convergences are. Certainly I have noticed colloquialisms and alterations to better fit romance and germanic languages that pop up again and again, but at what point does it get consistent enough to be its own 'thing' and not just a handy linguistic tool fashioned for the task at hand?
Traditionally, when it has its own army. (navy optional)
[several years ago I was told the peacekeeping operations in Kosovo were all organised in "bad english"]
While we are talking about language, there definitely are also those folks who move abroad and after a few years when they return they have picked up peculiarities of the language of their host country. The daughter of a neighbor moved to Paris for example and after a few years she started to sound more french. Still spoke perfect german but with an accent. Similarly a coworker who is a US expat in Germany told me he caught himself using some Denglish constructions.
In order for there to exist a dialect there must exist some kind of stable distinguishing features, and 'Euro English' has none. The errors that a French speaker makes in English are completely unlike the errors a Greek speaker makes in English, which in turn are completely unlike the errors Czech speakers make in English. What are the stable realisations of the usual English lexical set words (e.g. KIT, DRESS, TRAP etc.) in 'Euro English'? What is the internal grammatical system of 'Euro English'? What are its tenses? What is its syntax? No one has any answers for these questions, which should be trivial to answer for a living dialect.
The highest evidence that the Wiki article can point to is a few items of jargon in European bureaucracy, but this for a dialect does not make. Any random larger organisation is going to have its jargon, particularly a legal one. A staffer on the Hill might have good scuttlebutt about Tuesday's pen and pad, but that doesn't mean there's some kind of emerging dialect of English forming in the halls of US Congress.
It's fine to use 'Euro English' to refer to the few lexical items used in the European bureaucracy, but a few items of jargon are neither unusual, nor sufficient to constitute a dialect.
[0] It's worth noting the most frequently cited source on that Wiki page is a click-baity newspaper article from a British tabloid (Brexit could create a new ‘language’), and that, of the three (!) articles in the bibliography, one treats it solely as a legal jargon, and the other two (Mollin 2006 and Forche 2012) actually reject the idea that Euro English is a dialect. Someone's just on a bit of a frolic on Wikipedia.
This sounds niche, scattered and irrelevant as far as language making goes. Erasmus students and expatriates? EU staff?
It seems that you need some sort of concentration (virtual or geographical) to make a supposedly second-rate variation of some language. I don’t see how people from all across “continental” Europe which are also so scattered domestically (Erasmus students?) could make something cohesive enough to call it Euro English.
- A Spaniard might say “how you say” but would a Polish person do that?
- A Polish person might drop a lot of articles but would a Spaniard do that?
I’m from Scandinavia and a supposed mistake that people from the Nordic countries commit is to use “blue-eyed” to mean “naive”. And sure that’s a direct translation of the “naive” expression but I have never heard anyone from Scandinavia say that in English.
I see the footnotes for the opening paragraphs are The Independent, the Financial Times and a British linguist. I don’t know what the deal is with the British (similar to Americans but their distance from Europe excuses them IMO) and their insistence that Europe (really “Continental Europe” i.e. Europe which isn’t a bus drive under the English Channel away from the mainland) consists of this uniform blob of non-Anglos who drive scooters, eat baguettes and go to raves. And speak the same pidgin apparently.
> The divergence is presumably going to accelerate after Brexit, now that there's even fewer native speakers around to anchor it to British English.
That’s a laugh. Language isn’t spread by way of EU diplomats. Regular people are more likely to be “anchored” to American English.
One Czech guy I was talking to recently sounds like he moved to California at the age of nine.
American English is the best variant of English because we stole it. Nobody cares if somebody messes with it because, eh, it isn’t ours anyway. Let’s drive this language like a stolen car.
> this uniform blob of non-Anglos who drive scooters, eat baguettes and go to raves. And speak the same pidgin apparently.
Sounds awesome, maybe they are just envious!
Sure, if the educational system today collapses and we revert to pre-industrial state like around 500 AD, English will spontaneously develop into a family of mutually unintelligible languages.
I sincerely hope that this won't happen, though, because 95 per cent of humanity would die. We cannot feed 8 billion people with pre-modern technology.
edit: If we're not killed by corruption, the assumption is that people will be enjoying films made in the 1920's and 30's in the 2220's and the 2230's. That's completely unprecedented, and has to pin a language to a certain extent.
Imagine if during the Great Vowel Shift, everybody could listen (and did listen, for entertainment) to people speaking at length from before. It would have ended up a fashion where maybe a couple of features stuck.
In 2230, there will be 300 years of film to watch. The past will overwhelm the present.
1. Ever wondered why English spelling is so stupid? It's because it's based on an older version of language, but we never decided to update the spelling, so we just roll with it. How is that supposed to change in the future if it hasn't changed so far?
2. At first, text used to be a representation of spoken language. Nowadays communication is mostly via text, so it's more like "speech is acoustic representation of written language" and written language, as per example of Modern English, is not likely to naturally evolve once it's rules have been set, at least not as likely as spoken language, which can strongly vary from generation to generation.
3. Smaller languages, which potentially could be a source of new words and grammar, are quickly dying out due to popularity of English. Icelandic didn't evolve much through last thousand of years because its speakers had little contact with speakers of other languages. English will do the same by simply eliminating other languages.
I don't think we're there yet, but at some point in the future English will reach its "final form" and from there on, only minor changes here and there will happen. Just like the entire world has almost collectively decided to use arabic numerals, or the metric system, and we don't expect any revolutionary changes there anymore.
(Brit here) Multicultural London English [0] and others like it suggest that language continues to evolve rapidly. I can't even do an MLE accent in the way that I could yorkshire, scouse, etc.
> written language, as per example of Modern English, is not likely to naturally evolve once it's rules have been set
Look at the rapid emergence of txt speak, emojis, etc, creating written forms that again rapidly evolve and may be unintelligible to an older generation
> English will do the same by simply eliminating other languages.
Look at the variety of English used in India. This continues to evolve independently of, say, British English and US English.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multicultural_London_English
(I can't think of a good example for the latter at the moment, for the former I mean things like 'I myself have noticed this' or 'it's common in Indian English only'.)
It also provides one of my favourite words/concepts (which isn't quite an example of the second point as I meant it): timepass. Something you do to pass the time, or a (not exactly positive, nor negative) review of something that served that purpose.
There are things like that idea though. I hear "different different" from Indian coworkers pretty regularly, which is apparently a direct translation of a common Hindi expression.
(And to be honest, my own if I'm talking to people I attempt to speak Hindi (or Hinglish) with - once you're aware of it it seems pretty natural and effective, all of these things do, which is what I find so fascinating really. I've grown up speaking BrE completely without it, but then you hear it and it makes sense. Even head movements other than nodding-yes and shaking-no: couldn't reproduce them, but somehow they immediately make sense, and are so much more expressive than I know how to be with words, certainly to be so succinct anyway.)
Borg hivemind convergence is a bog-standard HN opinion. Although still controversial enough to elicit replies. ;)
> Smaller languages, which potentially could be a source of new words and grammar, are quickly dying out due to popularity of English. Icelandic didn't evolve much through last thousand of years because its speakers had little contact with speakers of other languages. English will do the same by simply eliminating other languages.
Mainland Scandinavian languages have plenty of foreign borrowed words from decades ago, long before most people had a reason to know English (or Latin or French or). Today though English in particular should have penetrated Iceland as much as mainland Scandinavia, but Icelandic (according to Icelanders) has plenty of neologisms instead of loanwoards (apparently eschewing lame polysyllabic words like “helicopter”).
Other Scandinavian languages (language communities) could have chosen the same route as they become more influenced by English than even somewhat mutually intelligible neighboring language communities. But they don’t. Proving that language communities can choose to take different routes even in an American Western World Order.
And here I am, in my late 30s, thinking that my productive age is far behind me
The point is that usrnm shouldn't compare their own productivity if their circumstances are different.
He was then granted a ‘civil list pension’ - basically a government annual grant in recognition of his valuable but unpaid work
It's really hard to justify the financial loss required to (full time) pursue novel ideas when you're middle aged. It's much easier to just put in the 8 hours per day and collect the paycheck.
I personally have gone uninsured for a few years at a time and there was no instant calamity, just an elevation of risk.
And thus, by extension: Those who cannot live without health insurance needn't remain alive.
But looking at this another way: some societies effectively transfer needs into wants by making them contingent on other factors. In the United States, healthcare coverage remains difficult to obtain even if you have significantly above-average wealth or income, unless you have access to an employer's coverage. This has improved somewhat under the ACA, but there's a significant variance on a state-by-state basis.
More generally, though "if money wasn't such a limiting factor" and "Money is rarely a limiting factor as much as the desire for more money" both suggest that it's the pursuit of wealth itself that ZaoLahma and dr_dshiv meant. And there are certainly people, particularly amongst the ultra-wealthy, who seem motivated in this way, with wealth at which access to healthcare simply isn't an issue: they could hire their own doctors, pay out of pocket, or travel to where healthcare access isn't an insane torture device of its own.
It's wants that drive the dynamic originally commented on. It's the confusion of wants with needs that's being distinguished. E.g., many people do in fact have their needs met to a degree that would afford freedom, it's their wants which inhibit them.
Thats the point I was hoping to make.
The age of mental peak is also generally the age of most obligations accrued.
Posted by someone whose apparently always had enough.