It does not at all lack the ability to distinguish between any of those things, it just doesn’t do so in single words
Comment on The Projected Truth
Skullgrid@lemmy.world 1 week agoEnglish is a dogshit creole that also lacks distinction between libre and gratis and “cultural artist” and “visual artist” (Turkish : sanatkar v ressam)
Amnesigenic@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
lvxferre@mander.xyz 1 week ago
English is not a creole language.
To keep it simple, a creole language originates from children learning a pidgin (a contact “language” with barely any grammar), and “gluing” the lexicon with features on the spot. To the point its grammar doesn’t resemble any of the parent languages over the course of, like, a single generation.
In the meantime English is simply a West Germanic language that got a bunch of borrowings from Old Norse and then Norman+French. Those borrowings don’t change affiliation.
Regarding the distinction between “libre” and “gratis”: it’s simply that “free” displaced “costless”. That sort of semantic shift happens, it’s most of the time internal (i.e. not caused by interference of other languages).