As a fellow French speaker, I think these are strengths other languages could gain from. Couriel or email (or e-mail)? Speaker’s choice. Same for possession. (Particularly for a culture with a tradition of individual liberty like France.)
As a fellow French speaker, I think these are strengths other languages could gain from. Couriel or email (or e-mail)? Speaker’s choice. Same for possession. (Particularly for a culture with a tradition of individual liberty like France.)
[1]https://www.barrons.com/amp/news/english-just-badly-pronounc...
Oh totally, my American accent sounds just like, "quand je vais au barbecue le quatre juillet, je vais manger un hot dog avec ketchup."
> But it would be better than having 1,000s of badly pronounced French words in the language.
They're loanwords that changed over time, they're not "badly" pronounced at all. French is filled with many loanwords as well that are pronounced nothing like their language of origin
No, English is a Germanic language whose conjugation rules have severely atrophied, with (mostly specialized!) terminology liberally adopted from Latin, Greek, and other roots. In things like tense and aspect structure, I believe that English hews a lot closer to German than French.
Amusingly, using the French words is a signal to being upper class. Such as "purchase" (pourchacier) instead of "buy" (byan).
It's a pretty common thing worldwide, though. French played a similar role as upper class marker in many other countries that were influenced by it when France was at the peak of its global dominance. For Slavic languages, German also played this role at one point, and IIRC there is something similar historically with Chinese in areas in its cultural dominance.
I was taught that this is because the Normans pushed the Germanics out and up north. French dominated the royal court.
Those crazy Masoretic Jews trying to pollute sacred texts with vowels... You're just supposed to know them!
Punctuation was probably introduced by leaky quills dripping until someone put a positive spin on it.
What twist of fate gave us ampersands? Lets keep Ye Olde English pure! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)#Modern_English
Then, under French influence probably, the plural, you, started being used as a polite form as well (in French, like most romance languages, formal/polite language uses the plural form of pronouns and verbs when addressing a single person). Thou, my friend VS You, sir; similar to "toi, mon ami" vs "vous, monsieur".
Then, this polite form using singular you became so widely used that thou was almost entirely dropped, especially since English also had little distinction between singular and plural in verbs in general. You, my friend, you, my friends.
Then, as thou became more foreign to regular speakers, it briefly started being used as a polite form, essentially reversing the original meanings. You, my friend VS Thou, sir.
This didn't last very long, so finally we ended up with the current state, where there is no polite form and you is the only second person pronoun. Except of course some speakers have started using y'all for a plural form, but that doesn't seem to be gaining any popularity outside a few areas.
1. You can’t take things language related from France at face value - they probably have a bias. They have a strong cultural pride and protection over their language. They also have a strong history of political agendas pushing their language as the “international” language. I say this as a non-French speaker of the French language, and I mean no disrespect to the French people. It’s just a cultural element formed over hundreds of years of government policy.
2. The origins of English is not French, but there are many words in English derived from French. But today they’re English words, with a French history. There are many more words that are not French in origin, so it’s quite disingenuous to call English an “incorrect” or “mispronounced” French. Why is it not an “evolved” or “improved” French? (See point 1).
3. English is conjugated, it’s just different than French. “I am, you are, he is”. “I look, you look, he looks”. Or more obviously “I jump, I jumped, I am jumping”. Most of the French-origin words are also probably not verbs but nouns. That said, I have no data to back that up.
Anyway, yeah, I love this sort of mixing of languages and I’m glad a lot of cultures are more open about mixing in English.
I suppose languages evolve around the way their corresponding population brains work. People can still learn other languages, or be native to other languages, but there is a language way that is the best fit to some people which is related to biology.
However, natural languages evolve naturally, which means that they don't just suddenly randomly change, and that change is very gradual. So things tend to get stuck in historically-motivated local maximums that can be very different for different languages because of their different histories.
There are some plausible theories around biologically motivated language features, but this tends to be about the environment - e.g. some sounds seem to be more common in languages spoken in high-altitude areas.