The English Language Doesn't Exist – It's Just French That's Badly Pronounced

I think that glitchy is not used meaningfully. A huddle of glitchy passengers, perhaps, if they are all androids.

https://translate.google.com/?sl=en&tl=fr&text=That%20jumbo%...

The Germanic core still generally gets used by all in high stress environments.

France is sort-of at the crossroads of Europe, so it's no surprise that there's a little bit of everything in the French language. This is particularly visible in place-names of Normandy [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indo-European_language...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_toponymy

FYI: The above sentence contains 7 words that come from old french/latin, and 7 that come from old english/german

English is more closely related to Frisian than German.

English adopted that position after WWII.

The commonly cited example of referring to ships as 'she' is simply an affectation, grammatically a ship is an it.

Or can you provide another example I may have overlooked?

Old English was a Germanic language, later heavily influenced by Norman/French vocabulary. French of course descended from Latin, and Latin and Germanic languages both belong to the Indo-European family of languages. (The "C" language of humanity, if you will.)

English decending from french you say! The nerve! (I assure you, my 6th grade english teacher would correct you thusly)

What is more accurate to say is that English and German descend from a common ancestor: Proto-Germanic. Saying English descended from German would be just as wrong as saying German descended from English.

The fact that "German" and "Germanic" sound similar does not mean that they are the same thing, nor that modern standard German is somehow the official representative of the Germanic languages.

I mean, you too can have an infinite vocabulary if you just leave out the spaces between words.

The article claims different proportions: "Half of all English vocabulary comes from those three Romance roots, compared to less than a third that comes from Germanic sources."

Still only half correct, but based of those proportions it is more correct than claiming English is a Germanic language.

It's not clear where the quite significant remaining proportion of the English language comes from. Colonial languages?

The real point of the essay discussed in the article is that the French origin of (part of) the English language is Norman French, which was distinctly different from Parisian French and has pretty much vanished from Normandy since. So the argument is that English might be as close to Norman French as French is. The influence of Norman French on the English language was downplayed for political reasons, argues the author.

Ultimately words of Germanic origins might be fewer but more frequently used. The grammar is also potentially closer to the Germanic origins than to the French ones? Let the linguists debate this forever I guess.

English has compound nouns too, you know: "Coffee table", "finance department", "wine cellar".

German dictionaries have very similar rules for including them as English dictionaries; they tend to include them when there's a common use that isn't immediately clear.

If it gets to the dictionary, English often has a corresponding word as well: "Handschuh" -> "glove", "Zahnarzt" -> "dentist", "Hausaufgabe" -> "homework", "Fussball" -> "football" (or soccer if you're American or Australian), "Sonnenbrille" -> "Sunglasses". Note that the last 3 have basically the same morphology as their corresponding English words.

In the end, the word count of the German dictionary isn't so different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries_by_number...

Most Frenchs are incredulous about this because they somehow think their lang is the best thing around.

The reason English is difficult to learn is many generation 2 languages words are no longer directly correlated with the original meanings. There were even writers that made fun of what English would sound like to an unbiased observer. Don't ask your LLM "is there a Seahorse emoji"... =3

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

> It is very frequent in English to use both the French word and the German word for the same thing in different situation.

It's kind of like in genetics: if a gene gets duplicated, it creates the opportunity for one copy to evolve to do something else. Likewise with language: having two words for the same thing allows their meanings to diverge without loss to cover more shades of meaning.

Their claim to the French throne was based on the rules of succession and an argument over them (arising from those intertwinned lineages).

An interesting fact is that King Richard I (Sean Connery in Robin Hood with Kevin Costner)'s mother was from South West France and he grew up there, and so he spoke French and Occitan but not really English.

[1]

The popularity of English has little or nothing to do with any facts about how its grammatical system works, and a lot to do with the geopolitical situation of the past few centuries where the UK and then the US were globally important powers.

There certainly is, in the case of French and other languages that have a central authority defining what is pure and correct.

Defining something as pure by fiat seems nonsensical, but the world is strange that way.

Especially if it applies outside the jurisdiction. Why should the Parisian government get to declare that Quebecois is impure?

"Authentic" ... I'm not opposed to the word, but I want to know the context / time period they're shooting for.

The range of possibilities with food and food evolution and influences can be very wide.

German was designed by a programmer.

This skews the numbers because there are thousands (probably tens of thousands) of scientific terms, names of species, etc., that probably shouldn't be counted here if you're looking at the origin of the language and that is because we continue to use Latin for new scientific terms or names of species today. In other words, they're not Latin words that have been absorbed into English, they're just Latin words period.

> 25% old Norse? That is almost certainly not correct.

IMO, a much better metric is frequency-weighted; that is, taking some corpus of real English and counting the words in it, rather than weighting "every English word" with the value 1.

If you do this frequency-weighted analysis, Old English is far ahead of French and Latin combined (especially in colloquial speech; they're closer in formal writing).

Still, I stand by my assessment: while it's clear that influences are there to some of the words, it's clearly more germanic. Just as we say today that French is a romanic language and English is germanic. I see no evidence here to counter this common classification.

The only thing that made French and English afterwards the lingua francas of the world was the commerce/trade and innovation offered by their speakers.

We could all be using Spanish or Chinese as the lingua Franca if either of them had more influence in the world.