Code 46
Thor: So I watched a DVD last night and one of the characters declared that he had great respect for the Normans. Why? Because "they created the English language from nothing except French." I thought "Yeah, it was quite an accomplishment to take French and build a real language on it." But even the Normans had to use a little bit of Latin to complete the task. It left me wondering if it were possible to construct a usable language from French alone. I doubt it, but it's an interesting philosophical question. If a two Frenchmen are speaking alone in a forest, is there any conversation?
English is a wonderful language. Our vocabulary is massive, containg words like "pentasyllabic" (a word which describes itself) and "sequipedalianism" (if you use this word then you've committed the sin it describes.) Many languages borrow words from other languages, but English doesn't just borrow words, it hunts them down in back alleys and beats them into submission. English even steals its own words, borrowing nouns to make verbs. As Calvin said "Verbing weirds language." In what other tongue could you say such a wonderful thing?
You can even make up nonsense words in English and have them make sense (as in Jabberwocky. Just what does "brillig" mean after all?)
Tyr: I bought a bottle of fairly decent tequila (Commemerativo) yesterday which is hard to do in Canada. But since it was Canada, half the language on the bottle had to be in French. So I found it pretty funny that on one side of the bottle about 2/3 of the printing was in Spanish and the other 1/3 in English. On the other side of the bottle both the English and Spanish were translated into French.
These Quebecers are so anal about their language, they rob themselves of the little cultural experiences, like trying to decipher the Spanish on a bottle of tequila. I wonder how one says "anejo" in French?
In summary: English is almost as good as God's original language: German.
Tyr and Thor
posted by The Calc Ninja | 1:37 PM
3 Comments:
As a matter of fact Modern English is sort of the bastard child of French and Old English, which was a Germanic language. The inhabitants of the British islands were a Germanic people who were conquered in 1066 by William the Bastard (later known as Wiliam the Conqueror). French became the language of the aristocracy, the courts, etc, while Germanic Old English remained the language of the common folks. Modern English is still distinctly Germanic, esp. "low" words which hardly evolved.
Your posts are hilarious--but I have to wonder if you actually believe english was "built from french"... because english is germanic we just happened to steal half of our vocabulary from french(and latin)...
I also have to question your labeling of Tyr and Thor as "war gods"... because although I suppose in a way you could label them as such; war was not in fact their "main thing"...
English is a good practical language in that you can pretty much describe anything, and whatever you can't you can make up a word to describe it. In a way though this is what's wrong with english. It is one of the least structured languages I know (Spanish, English, French, Italian, Portugese, German) and it has more exceptions than rules, not to mention the fact that there are no rules concerning the correct pronounciation of words and some words that are spelled the same are pronounced completely different which is very, very annoying. Personally I think Spanish is an excellent language because it is very well organized and phonetic but sometimes you have to use a lot of words to describe something.
P.S. It's spelled Sesquipedalianism
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