Every American Is Bilingual | Hacker News Reader

Every American Is Bilingual

justevilenough.com

15 pointsDocSavage35 comments

“Latinate” vs “Saxon” is a word-origin story, not two languages. etymology doesn’t equal meaning. His pairs aren’t true synonyms anyway: “terminate a contract” vs “end a movie,” “encounter errors” vs “meet a friend,” “manufacture cars” vs “make dinner.” That’s normal register, not a second tongue. And lots of everyday English doesn’t fit cleanly in either bucket, so the two-bucket premise falls apart.

Linguists would call this "register variation" or "diglossia" rather than bilingualism - a phenomenon found in virtually all languages where speakers shift vocabulary and syntax based on social context.

It's just a clever title. The article immediately walks the thesis back, and then relates some trivia about English. Five minute read, three stars.

> It's just a clever title.

Also known as clickbaits

Yeah, well, I was trying to be generous.

> If you read this post, you probably won’t look at the world the same way ever again.

I immediately wanted to close the tab. But I decided to not judge an article by the first sentence.

So I read on and it's just talking about how English has words with similar meanings but different etymological origins, plus some English grammar trivia.

Title:

> Every American is bilingual.

is completely unjustified. In the same vein every Japanese is bilingual or more. But the author is selling a book about marketing & copywriting so that's it.

(By the way, in the AI example the article shows, Claude thinks "ever again" can be replaced with "perpetually subsequently." Whether it's a joke is left to the reader.)

> > Every American is bilingual. > is completely unjustified. In the same vein every Japanese is bilingual or more.

Or just as stupidly, so many of us are just mono-lingual, we just speak proto-Indo-European.

Isn't it just the difference between daily speak and higher speak and educated higher speak, or kinds of? I mean, may be I'm not proliferate enough to understand why a synonym is put as "a new language" and find it not surprisingbto see "two ways of saying the same thing".

We have synonyms for, sure, each word in most/all of the spoken languages (except the functional, deterministic and immutable one's lol) - I just think of Chinese "就" (jiu) which has rndabt 90 different meanings or the twenty-what-so-ever different ways of saying I love you. Can a Chinese speaker now say he/she/it is a polyglot and me 20-languaged??

What about Russian which is (heavily) relying on imported or lend words? So many words used in Russian can be linked back to French, German and other languages. Example: saray in Turkish, saray in Russian. One translates to a (king's) palace, the other to an wooden stall for animals. Kindergarten in English/German.. "cosmos" in English, Russian, German, ...

The other thing is.. English is accounted to be the language with the most words of round about 900k. This much words is the result of different ethnic influences that are being taken over into English. It's a mix of a lot of languages today. Like Russian, German too. I'm sure this is true for every still spoken language. But no one sayed bilingual until now.. ;)

If this sort of thing interests you, I highly recommend the book Latin Alive, which traces the transformation of Latin over a thousand years into Spanish, French, and Italian, as well as its impact on modern English.

This blog post claims to make you never see things the same way again, but for me that book actually did accomplish that lofty claim. Mainly because I'll never really look at "mistakes" the same way again. Mistakes in language are just signs of change.

Example: It's slowly become standard to drop the -g off gerund tense verbs in English. It's still a mistake in writing, but if you say "I've been runnin' around all day," literally nobody would ever say "excuse me I think you mean RUNNING, with a G" - because it isn't considered a mistake anymore orally, even if it wouldn't be _written_ that way in formal writing. But in text messages you might spell it that way - casual writing. And change always starts orally and casually before eventually becoming the correct way to say something. In another 500 years, runnin might be the correct way to say it in whatever English is called by then, and running might sound the same way runneth sounds to us today.

Or, another possibility is the ending G will remain in writing, and it will just become fully silent, such that pronouncing it aloud at all sounds bizarre. That's how we got modern French! All those silent consonants used to be pronounced a long long time ago, but the written system remained the same even as the spoken version evolved.

It's a bit surprising for me to see you describe final -g as such, because a lot of English speakers while they have lost the final plosive, still frequently pronounce the final nasal at the back of the mouth, hence analyzing -ng as a digraph representing that sound. Writing it as -n explicitly signifies the other more innovative pronunciation that just uses the usual nasal at the front of the mouth instead, that some but not all speakers use. Few speakers pronounce the plosive. I also wonder if assimilation may occur, e.g. a speaker may simultaneously prefer nuthin', and also lugging.

anthropology (of man), or morphogenesis (how shapes form.)

Not to nitpick but those are Greek, not Latin

But it made me discover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Latin

Having different registers, the "everyday language", and the "more formal, fancy sounding register", is far from unique to English, and I'd dare-say the majority of broadly used languages have some form of this.

In fact, English has it less than a lot of languages. In Japanese, you not only use different words when in a more formal register, you also conjugate verbs differently and use different honorific suffixes to refer to people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorific_speech_in_Japanese

I guess people who speak japanese can speak 4 languages (casual speech, normal polite desu/masu speech, humble speech, and keigo). They all have different word-choices and conjugations, and there's also similarly a dual-origin story of "some words came from ancient chinese, some from ancient japanese".

Not an American, but a Spaniard and I noticed that because we have many common Latin words between English and Spanish, some people from Spain prefer to use the Latinate versions of the words when speaking in English, even if they do not feel the same. But it's easier for us to remember.

It would be interesting to see if the English spoken in Europe as an international secondary language uses more Germanic or Latinate words.

The assumption might be that they tend toward shorter, simpler Germanic words, but, I wonder if the location where it’s spoken has an effect on this. For example do English speakers in Romance countries use more Latin-origin words in English, even though they are “more difficult”?

The answer is very easy. Latinate words (mostly of French origin for the matter), first because of the number of people speaking romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian and Portuguese) is the largest in Europe, second, because most European languages have also borrowed a lot from Latin, Greek and French during the last centuries, which means that latinate words are usually the subset which is shared across most languages. Furthermore, English and other Germanic languages have started evolving quite early one from the others (around the 6 century) and cognates might be quite difficult to recognize: through/durch, for instance.

I looked into this a bit since posting and it’s not such a simple answer.

From the research I browsed, a few things seem to be true: speakers tend to choose words that resemble cognates in their native language; Germanic speakers seem to prefer Germanic words; the educational method and exposure to English has an effect, in the sense that Northern Europeans often have more informal exposure (and thus Germanic preference) whereas Southern Europeans have more exposure to English in an academic, Latin-preferred context.

> Latinate is the language of expertise. One might even say the language of the elite.

Shoutout to those who survived Ovid through the Aeneid in HS Latin I-IV.

Angish is a fun project that imagines English if it never took on all the Latin/French/Greek/etc. loan words

Uncleftish Beholding [1] is a famous example which explains basic atomic theory.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding

From the link:

The title phrase uncleftish beholding calques "atomic theory."

To illustrate, the text begins:

> For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.

It goes on to define firststuffs (chemical elements), such as waterstuff (hydrogen), sourstuff (oxygen), and ymirstuff (uranium), as well as bulkbits (molecules), bindings (compounds), and several other terms important to uncleftish worldken (atomic science). Wasserstoff and Sauerstoff are the modern German words for hydrogen and oxygen, and in Dutch the modern equivalents are waterstof and zuurstof. Sunstuff refers to helium, which derives from λιος, the Ancient Greek word for 'sun'. Ymirstuff references Ymir, a giant in Norse mythology similar to Uranus in Greek mythology.

That's a wonderful example, thank you. Especially considering I misspelled Anglish

American is in the title, but really, it's saying every English-speaker is at least bilingual.

If you're already n-lingual with English as one of them, you can bump it to n+1 :)

We all only speak two languages: English and bad English

Ok, now let me see what is an English standard? A Britton from Sheffield pub or girl from local Waffle House in Atlanta?

This is elitist. Language is descriptive not prescriptive

It's a throw-away line in a movie. I wouldn't take it too seriously.

And yet we have multiple languages. So, at some point English must stop being English.

But must we apply judgment to such boundaries? If it ceases to be English is it ‘good’ again?

Must judgement be applied when categorizing? Yes, because categorization is judgement.

Does the author think that English is spoken only in the US? Could English have perhaps originated in a country with a somewhat similar name?

I'm not aware of a country with a similar name to US where English might perhaps have originated in ;)

still count as one (language)

I agree if you have rubber tire and metal disc, you indeed have only one wheel, not two.

There is this joke in Europe...

What do you call a person that speaks 2 languages? A bilingual.

What do you call a person that speaks 3 languages? A trilingual.

What do you call a person that speaks 1 language? An American.

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