I still don’t understand though why Europe so many languages, a good chunk of it was in the Roman empire so you would have thought that they would all have a single unified language as a result of that but even in the Mediterranean there’s different languages.
Comment on Can't wait.
Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Posts like this are so ignorant because they’re based on the false premise that English was made to be the global language, when it’s not. It was made as a result of the mixing of Germans, Scandinavians, Celts, and French people on a gloomy isolated island in the corner of Europe for thousands of years. It’s a language that was evolved by those people, and thus it contains a lot of their linguistic quirks coming together.
Every single language has quirks like this. For example, I also speak Arabic, and people are always shocked when I tell them that an Arabic speaker from Iraq and an Arab speaker from Morocco cannot understand each other because Arabic dialects are basically different languages. THey’re only unified by standard Arabic, which most Arabic speakers don’t use in their day to day lives. It’s basically a language that’s only used to communicate with other Arabs.
English only got to where it is because of a unique situation in history where the language was used by not one, but two global hegemons. Not only that but those hegemons happened to be the most of the powerful in history, and they ruled back to back. That’s what spread and cemented English into the global language it is today.
echodot@feddit.uk 1 day ago
Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I mean all the romance languages descend from Latin. The reason why that language splintered into a bunch of other languages is isolation. When Christianity came to Europe, the empire splintered into a bunch of smaller empires and kingdoms and stayed that way for centuries. That led to a lot local variations that eventually turned into full blown languages.
ByteJunk@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You didn’t address a single thing from the original post.
It was highlighting how English is a very quirky language. You can explain it, obviously there are reasons why, but it doesn’t change the factual observation that English is a uniquely inconsistent language.
Most languages have some sort of academic body that dictates the correct usage of the language, and occasionally push for adjustments that resolve these inconsistencies. English does not, it’s a crowd sourced effort with the results being what we see today.
Many countries and languages share similar backgrounds to English - invasion by foreign peoples, large migrations, etc - yet they’ve settled most of their background into a consistent ruleset - there’s always exceptions and irregularities, but not to the level of English.
One of the largest sources of inconsistencies was the “Great Vowel Shift”, along with the invention of the printing press at roughly the same time, which standardized a spelling that didn’t reflect the massive ongoing changes in pronunciation.
This is a fascinating topic, but accusing others of ignorance for pointing out something that is a fact, is in itself ignorance.
Gorilladrums@lemmy.world 1 day ago
This is complete nonsense. All languages are organic and evolve naturally. There’s no academic body that controls any langauge, that’s not how languages work. What exists is institutional bodies that try to break down and explain languages into rules and patterns, they don’t actually dictate the direction of the language. English also has such institutions by the way. This idea that English is uniquely inconsistent or uncontrolled is not true. Arabic, for example, is just as quirky, inconsistent, and uncontrolled. That’s just human speech.
ByteJunk@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You’re just elaborating and expanding on a part of what I said, while being an abrasive jerk, and ignoring everything else that didn’t suit your argument.
To the point in question, I never said academies invent the future of a language, only that they gatekeep the rules, which can include pushback against popular usage (the french academy is notorious for being very against english neologisms).
There have been cases where the changes are very substantial, like the Portuguese and French changes that happened (coincidentally) in 1990, for example, that push the languages in certain directions.
Take a cup of tea and relax a bit, and try not to argue the voices in your head.