A bit off topic but I have always wondered about a couple of odd English
language characteristics (01)
1) When and how did it lose genders for nouns? (02)
2) When and how did all the verbs except "to be" and "to have" get
simplified?
The requirement for an "s" at the end of the verb in the third person
singular is another oddity. (03)
These are major departures from the root languages. (04)
They make the language a lot easier to learn.
This is countered a bit by the "anything goes" rule for making up the
plural forms for common nouns and past tenses for verbs. (05)
Ron (06)
On 13/12/2013 11:32 PM, John F Sowa wrote:
> Ed,
>
> All languages evolve. But they have different structures, which may
> make certain kinds of expressions shorter and simpler than others.
>
>> What you think is significant about English right now was true
>> of French 300 years ago and may be true of Chinese in 2050.
>> It is all about language evolution, which is the central theme.
> The fact that English happens to be the dominant language now and
> French was dominant a few centuries ago is definitely *not* what
> I was trying to explain.
>
> For parallels, look at Japanese and Chinese. Japanese scribes
> learned Chinese characters with their pronunciation in a dialect
> of Chinese. When they used them to write Japanese, they pronounced
> them in Japanese -- except in compounds. The character for 'new' is
> pronounced in Japanese as /atarashi/ when used as an adjective
> by itself. But in compounds, it's pronounced in Chinese as /shin/.
> The area of Tokyo named Shinjuku has three Chinese words and characters
> for 'new hotel district'. Nobody pronounces those three characters
> with the native Japanese pronunciation.
>
> This is an example of the way a clash of languages changed Japanese.
> It caused Japanese to adopt the Chinese paradigm for coining new words,
> and weakened the native Japanese paradigms. However, Japanese does
> have various grammatical morphemes. So they developed the syllabic
> hiragana and katakana to express those forms.
>
> When the Japanese opened up to the wider world, they started to borrow
> many new words from western languages, which they spelled in katakana.
> The character for ju (a kind of hotel) in Shinjuku is pronounced
> /yadoya/ in native Japanese. When they began to build western-style
> hotels, they borrowed the western word, which is pronounced /hoteru/.
>
> For the word 'taxi', the Japanese use syllabic katakana to spell
> /takushi/. For 'bus', they say /basu/. For taxi, the Chinese
> themselves say chu-zu-qi-che (for-hire-energy-vehicle). For bus,
> they say gong-gong-qi-che (public-use-energy-vehicle). But in
> context, they rarely use those compounds. Instead, they'll say
> "Call me a che" -- i.e., taxi. Or they'll say "I'm waiting for
> the che" -- i.e., bus.
>
> This is the point I was trying to make: the changes to Japanese
> caused by its clash with Chinese weakened its native methods
> for coining new words. That also made it more receptive to
> borrowing words from other languages. But Chinese uses its
> own resources to coin new compounds.
>
> EJB
>> An-ge-stell-t-er is literally 'in-stall-d-er' -- a person who is
>> 'put in a place' in an organization. The French origin of em-ploy-ee
>> could be translated in-use-d, or in-place-d, a participial adjective
>> taken as a noun.
> I agree. But note three points: (1) the clash with Danish caused
> the Anglo-Saxon paradigms to be weakened; (2) the clash with
> French introduced a completely different paradigm; and (3) the
> university system, which taught Latin (and some Greek) to anyone
> who did any significant amount of writing.
>
> As a result of these clashes, Anglo-Saxon compounds such as
> the equivalent of 'heaven-candle' were lost. Anyone who wrote
> anything more than sales receipts used their university training
> to write 'celestial spheres'.
>
>> And we have coined similar terms, like 'installer' and 'mortgagee'.
>>
>> As we can see, rather than losing this technique for vocabulary
>> extension to the French influence, English simply gained the mechanisms
>> of the second language as well.
> No. When there are multiple paradigms for word formation, they tend
> to become moribund or drastically simplified. English retained a few,
> but most of them are not as productive as they were in their original
> languages. The Germanic -er is still fairly productive in English,
> but -ee is rarely used except for words borrowed from French.
>
> The issues that cause one language or another to become dominant
> are very different from those that make it easy for a language to
> borrow new terms.
>
> John
>
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> (07)
--
Ron Wheeler
President
Artifact Software Inc
email: rwheeler@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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phone: 866-970-2435, ext 102 (08)
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