English is not normal, says John McWhorter

  • Thread starter Thread starter Astronuc
  • Start date Start date
  • Tags Tags
    English Normal
AI Thread Summary
English is notably distinct from other languages, with no close relatives that allow for easy comprehension without prior training. Its evolution from Old English, heavily influenced by Celtic languages, has resulted in a complex linguistic landscape. The language has borrowed extensively from various languages, making it a linguistic melting pot with words from French, Latin, and many others. This borrowing is often seen as a form of linguistic theft, yet it enriches English rather than detracting from its integrity. The simplification of English grammar, particularly in comparison to languages like German, has made it more accessible, contributing to its status as a global lingua franca. Discussions also highlight the challenges of English spelling and pronunciation, which can be inconsistent and confusing. The topic of gender in language reveals that while English lacks grammatical gender for inanimate objects, it still assigns gender to certain nouns, such as ships. Overall, the unique characteristics of English stem from its historical invasions and cultural exchanges, leading to a language that is both complex and adaptable.
  • #51
geordief said:
We have gender assignment to inanimate objects in English.
The ship is always feminine and there must surely be other examples. (the car?)

We even say "careful as she goes " about any object we are manhandling ,don't we?
Yes. Besides ships and the earth though? Also it does not change an adjective or article describing them.

The earth, the cruel earth, gods green earth (GFRR) a beautiful ship, a ship, the ship, shipping?
 
Science news on Phys.org
  • #52
pinball1970 said:
Yes. Besides ships and the earth though? Also it does not change an adjective or article describing them.

The earth, the cruel earth, gods green earth (GFRR) a beautiful ship, a ship, the ship, shipping?
No ,I can't think of others really although you can of course refer to lots of inanimate objects as "she" or "he" if the mood takes you.

And no ,I can't think of a single adjective that is declined according to gender.(unless "alma mater " counts :smile: )

@Astronuc , what about Norwegian?I spoke a smattering (btw that word is derived from Norwegian,I'd say) of both Dutch and Norsk and found Norwegian to be like putting on an old slipper with all the common words (to English) and the simple way the grammar was used

So I definitely rated Norwegian as easier to learn than Dutch (which I didn't do too well with actually)
 
Reply
  • Like
Likes pinball1970
  • #53
geordief said:
@Astronuc , what about Norwegian?I spoke a smattering (btw that word is derived from Norwegian,I'd say) of both Dutch and Norsk and found Norwegian to be like putting on an old slipper with all the common words (to English) and the simple way the grammar was used

So I definitely rated Norwegian as easier to learn than Dutch (which I didn't do too well with actually)
I'm not familiar with Nordic grammar. I've studied Spanish and German, and from German, I've understood some Dutch, at least as far as reading. I'd have to study Norwegian vs Danish/Swedish to understand better the grammar. I did have a German teacher, about 50 years ago, who spoke Norwegian/Danish/Swedish, and he did give us some lessons comparing Norwegian/Danish/Swedish. He encouraged us to learn many other languages, and he was of the opinion that learning German was a good step to learning Nordic and Dutch languages. He was a very rare person.
 
  • #54
geordief said:
So I definitely rated Norwegian as easier to learn than Dutch (which I didn't do too well with actually)
The Nordics are where English got subject-verb-object grammar from, which Dutch does not have--and so the Nordic languages may indeed be easier to pick up than Dutch. And the Dutch have kept the German 'megaword' habit. 'Cellular telephone factory parking lot' could very well be a single word in Dutch--and that fries English-speaking brains. The longest work in English is 'antidisestablishmentarianism', but that is just a wee thing compared to hundreds of Dutch words (and while American dictionaries may not have that long word in them, yes it is a thing. Look up Bishop Strachan and Upper Canadian history from the 1830's) So the Nordic languages might be easier--but all those symbols above the letters!

But Fries.
Sample size of one, but still. My dad is from North Holland, came to Canada in 1953 and speaks very good English. His friends came from Friesland in 1962 and also speak very good English. And when they speak Fries, dad doesn't understand them at all. If Fries were so close to English, then knowing English and Dutch should make picking up Fries easier.
It doesn't.

And Newfinese. I work with Newfoundlanders. Have for 20 years. We had an outporter work here once. The lad from St. John's couldn't understand him most of the time. I never understood a word he said. One of the lads from a bunch farther north than St. John's could make him out and translate, because otherwise, forget it.
 
  • #55
Astronuc said:
he was of the opinion that learning German was a good step to learning Nordic and Dutch languages
I also dabbled in learning languages.I learned a bit of Spanish from a book and quite soon after I went to Portugal where I worked on a Cooperativa ,a collective farm established when the Socialists came to power after the military government was booted out a little while after Franco in Spain.

Anyway I picked up quite a bit in those few months and ,when I left it took me about a week to travel back to the North of Europe through Spain

Annoyingly the proficiency I had acquired in Portuguese had the side effect of setting me back in the Spanish I had learned previously (because the languages were so similar) It probably damaged my Portuguese too but I haven't had the opportunity to use it at all since then and find out
 
  • #56
Mark44 said:
I can't think of any other words in English that truly qualify as examples where 'w' appears as a vowel.
It does appear as a diphong. The w in "crowd" is no more and no less a vowel than the u in "cloud".

Further categorization at your own risk.
 
Reply
  • Like
Likes dextercioby
  • #57
Vanadium 50 said:
It does appear as a diphong. The w in "crowd" is no more and no less a vowel as the u in "cloud".
OK, I give that example more credence than I do "awe" as an example.
 
  • #58
Vanadium 50 said:
own
I see what you did.

Now shown clown frown

drown brown cow sow

owl, bowl, trowel, towel (sometimes misspelled as towl), fowl

draw, raw, claw

newt, screw, jewel

Probably a Doctor Seuss story in there.

Vowel combinations, (vowel digraphs, r-controlled vowels, dipthongs), can be either a combination of two vowels as in 'oa', 'ea' or 'ai', or a combination of a vowel plus a consonant where the consonant does not make a distinct sound as in 'aw', 'oy' or 'ow'. It is important to recognize these combinations because they can not be sounded out from the composite letters.
https://bogglesworldesl.com/vowel_combinations.htm
 
  • #59
I wouldn't necessary include "jewel". "Toward" is also questionable - parts of the world do pronounce it as "tord".

The other pair I thought of is "foul" and "fowl".. That might be even better.
 
  • #60
And if you like...
1669861955854.png

and
1669861926913.png
 
  • #61
geordief said:
We have gender assignment to inanimate objects in English.
The ship is always feminine and there must surely be other examples. (the car?)

We even say "careful as she goes " about any object we are manhandling ,don't we?
True. But we still call a ship a ship or the ship, and there's no modifiers placed on ship to make it gendered. The only truly gendered words (in a grammatical sense) are typically related to things that actually have to do with gender, like father vs mother, male vs female, boy vs girl, etc.

But we do have gendered words in the sense that words like fireman or businessman or policeman (and their -woman counterparts for some) exists and are still a fairly common way of talking about people of those professions. Most examples of gendered nouns or pronouns also have a gender neutral form. For the above they are firefighter, business person, and police officer.

For more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_in_English
 
  • #62
Written Dutch is sometimes understandable to an English speaker, as for instance in "ik ben een goede wandelaar en spreker" (I am a good walker and speaker). Similarly with Norwegian.
 
  • #63
Written Schweizerdeutsch is intelligible to a ":German German" speaker. Spoken? Not always.
 
  • #64
  • #65
I think @vanadium50 was showing just a garbled (greta garbo-ed :-) ) way of speaking the name "Casablanca" as cat-sa-blanca (cats scratching white) and the guy who says "Round up the usual suspects."
 
  • #66
jedishrfu said:
I think @vanadium50 was showing just a garbled (greta garbo-ed :-) ) way of speaking the name "Casablanca" as cat-sa-blanca (cats scratching white) and the guy who says "Round up the usual suspects."
Close, with the reference to the Casablanca police chief, but no cigar...

pinball1970 said:
I need to know what this means.
Cats Claws and the French guy from Casablanca?
First picture -- "clawed". Second picture -- "Claude Rains" of Casablanca fame.
 
Reply
  • Haha
  • Like
Likes pinball1970 and jedishrfu
  • #67
pinball1970 said:
I need to know what this means.
Cats Claws and the French guy from Casablanca?
Clawed.
Claude.
 
Reply
  • Informative
Likes pinball1970
  • #68
Vanadium 50 said:
Clawed.
Claude.
I did not get that. Ok.
When you hear a French person say "Claude," it is very different to how an English person says it. All sorts of intonation and sounds happens with the French.
English IS normal in some respects. I know some of the spelling is tricky and I'm not say our way right now is the best way.

I don't have a conclusion but the Lingua franca must have kicked in for a reason?
 
Last edited by a moderator:
  • #69
There was a comedian online who said her parents pronounced her name as Arielle but her friends pronounced it as Ariel and when they moved to Kentucky folks pronounced it as Earl.

I guess I read too deeply into the joke. Oh well Ian.
 
  • #70
I didn't get it either,although I did look up the cast of Casablanca for clues.

Not so much "round up" as giving me the "runaround" :wink:
 
  • #71
pinball1970 said:
I did not get that. Ok

geordief said:
I didn't get it either,although I did look up the cast of Casablanca for clues.
You have to be 1) of a certain age, and 2) a fan of old movies to get the play on words that V50 posted.
 
  • #72
Mark44 said:
You have to be 1) of a certain age, and 2) a fan of old movies to get the play on words that V50 posted.
Ticks both boxes but you forgot to add "adequately quick on the uptake"
 
  • #73
Frisian born and raised reports for duty.

"Deale, ik sil ris dat krease famke skylje om te freegjen at se ek nog ris mei my yn petear gean wol oer de heteroatische snaartheorie."

"Darn, I'm going to call that cute girl to ask if she'd like to have a conversation with me some time about heterotic string theory."
 
  • #74
And it's "bûter, brea en griene tsiis", not the other way around. Cooked indeed.
 
  • #75
Looking at the title, it would probably be correct to say, English (or any language) is a different normal.

How about Sanskrit grammar rules?!

A Sanskrit grammatical problem which has perplexed scholars since the 5th Century BC has been solved by a University of Cambridge PhD student.

Rishi Rajpopat, 27, decoded a rule taught by Panini, a master of the ancient Sanskrit language who lived around 2,500 years ago.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cg3gw9v7jnvo
Panini's grammar, known as the Astadhyayi, relied on a system that functioned like an algorithm to turn the base and suffix of a word into grammatically correct words and sentences.

However, two or more of Panini's rules often apply simultaneously, resulting in conflicts.

Panini taught a "metarule", which is traditionally interpreted by scholars as meaning "in the event of a conflict between two rules of equal strength, the rule that comes later in the grammar's serial order wins".

However, this often led to grammatically incorrect results.

Mr Rajpopat rejected the traditional interpretation of the metarule. Instead, he argued that Panini meant that between rules applicable to the left and right sides of a word respectively, Panini wanted us to choose the rule applicable to the right side.

Employing this interpretation, he found the Panini's "language machine" produced grammatically correct words with almost no exceptions.
Mr Rajpopat said he had "a eureka moment in Cambridge" after spending nine months "getting nowhere".
I want that kind of job. I think my management would have an issue of not accomplishing anything for 9 months. I have to continually produce something (some result).
 
  • #76
It's Xmas and they play the usual films and this is one of my favourites.
This song hits a few points in the thread but I noticed a mistake by master of pronunciation Henry Higgins.
'Why can't the English?'

 
  • #77
pinball1970 said:
I noticed a mistake by master of pronunciation Henry Higgins.
And what would that be? The only questionable point I can recall was using "Scotch" for what would now be "Scots" or "Scottish", but that's probably in keeping with the relevant times.
 
  • #78
Jonathan Scott said:
And what would that be? The only questionable point I can recall was using "Scotch" for what would now be "Scots" or "Scottish", but that's probably in keeping with the relevant times.
That's the one. I was reprimanded by a Scottish neighbour in the 1980s who explained what the difference was.
'Scotch' was an acceptable term to refer to a Scot in the 60s?
 
  • #79
pinball1970 said:
'Scotch' was an acceptable term to refer to a Scot in the 60s?
Probably not, but the English took some time to learn that, and apart from that it's set in 1912. I see that some sources for the lyrics have changed it to "Scots".
 
  • #80
Jonathan Scott said:
Probably not, but the English took some time to learn that, and apart from that it's set in 1912. I see that some sources for the lyrics have changed it to "Scots".
I posted a link but it did not work.
'Scotch' and 'Scots' is actually more complicated than I thought. Did Lerner writing in the US in the 1950s know about this?
I think it is unlikely.
Was Rex Harrison aware? The 1937 play 'Storm in a tea cup' has a coincidental connection.
The English are mischievous as well as not normal possibly?
 
  • #81
PeroK said:
My understanding is that English was simplified for the masses during a time when French was the language of the English Court. The genders, articles, adjectives and verb forms were all simplified
English largely lost gender before the Norman invasions as a result of shifts in pronunciation. These changes in pronunciation caused the word endings that carried gender to become indistinct and thus both gender and case were lost.
Don Ringe's volumes on the history of English go into huge detail on this. A briefer account is in Fortson's "Indo-European Langauge and Culture: An Introduction".
 
Reply
  • Like
  • Informative
Likes Bandersnatch, Drakkith, berkeman and 1 other person
  • #82
256bits said:
so he is the kin of Tol, son perhaps. Or belongs to the Tol family from way back when nobody had last names.
Since he is from S. Africa, rather born there, it could be the name comes from the boer ( Dutch )
Are there many Tolkien's in England, and would they all be related in some fashion?

By memory of a biography I read 'Tol' is related to 'dull' but originally meant something like mad, and 'kien' related to 'keen', altogether something like 'Rashbold'.
 
  • #83
Astronuc said:
Roman influence/interference perhaps
Much more common, majority of Indo-European languages have grammatical genders.
 
Last edited:
  • #85
Pronunciation of Tartaraghan - a location in County Armagh, Ireland. I was wondering about the pronunciation, so I looked up examples of pronunciation, and I found at least 6 different pronunciations, but I didn't find one from Armagh, Ireland. Not even 'English' speakers agree on pronunciation.
 
Reply
  • Like
Likes pinball1970
  • #86
Astronuc said:
Pronunciation of Tartaraghan - a location in County Armagh, Ireland. I was wondering about the pronunciation, so I looked up examples of pronunciation, and I found at least 6 different pronunciations, but I didn't find one from Armagh, Ireland. Not even 'English' speakers agree on pronunciation.
Yep, absolutely no idea. Place names will be among the trickiest just because they are very old in the UK. Throw in some Celt and I need a resident to give me the correct pronunciation.
 
  • #87
Vanadium 50 said:
The other pair I thought of is "foul" and "fowl".. That might be even better.
And speaking of foul, "awful" and "offal".
 
  • #88
Please write after me that right makes wright.
 
  • #89
Can we simply say that English is just an inherently 'Acquisitive' language ?? Something to do with sundry invasions, then ocean-spanning shipping and Empire...

FWIW, English English is my 'native' language but, as a kiddy, I read enough Victorian (Strand Magazine & Kipling ) and US ( Cousins' pulp-SciFi ) to become 'sorta-mid-Atlantic'. I had a reading speed that astonished and a lexicon that exasperated my Eng-Lang/Lit teachers. Meeting Latin, 'so logical' yet, in truth, an inverted pyramid teetering upon an apex of 'exceptions', gave me a life-long loathing for what we'd now call 'Reverse Polish' notation. Later, translating classic chem synthesis recipes from German writ in 'Fraktur', where all the complex verbs and other un-hyphenated hyper-agglutinatives were piled up at the congested end of a single, multi-page mega-sentence did not help. Like Sudoku, there was but one (1) solution. We joked each could take longer to translate than do...
 
  • #90
Nik_2213 said:
Can we simply say that English is just an inherently 'Acquisitive' language ?? Something to do with sundry invasions, then ocean-spanning shipping and Empire...
The Indonesians weren't big on invading anyone but nevertheless have plenty of borrowed words. Many things came from other nations and the names of those things came with them. It seems to me that English is the same.
 
  • #91
Nik_2213 said:
Can we simply say that English is just an inherently 'Acquisitive' language ?? Something to do with sundry invasions, then ocean-spanning shipping and Empire...
English doesn't have a particularly high borrowing rate when compared to languages globally. There are languages like Armenian for which the borrowing rate is much, much higher.
 
  • #92
"Borrow" implies "return". English "borrows" like the mafia "borrows".

But where do you draw the line? Is "vendetta" a borrowed word? "Pork"? "Noon"?
 
  • #93
Vanadium 50 said:
"Borrow" implies "return". English "borrows" like the mafia "borrows".
I'm not really sure what you mean. English accepts words into its vocabulary like other languages. I'm not sure what "returning" a word would be. It's no different from any other language.
 
  • #94
The point is that "borrowing" is not really what happens.
 
  • #95
Vanadium 50 said:
The point is that "borrowing" is not really what happens.
I don't follow. Loanword or borrowing are the common terms in linguistics.
 
  • #96
Vanadium 50 said:
The point is that "borrowing" is not really what happens.
Clone seems more logical but I am not a linguist.
 
  • #97
jedishrfu said:
Please write after me that right makes wright.
I read the word "read" that was in red.
At first he led the way, but he lost the lead when he had to carry a sack full of lead.
LittleSchwinger said:
English doesn't have a particularly high borrowing rate when compared to languages globally.
That may be so, but English has "borrowed" words from many different sources. A partial list might include Norman French (pork, beef, garage), Italian (stucco, alto, adagio), German (strafe, angst, alpenglow), Russian (taiga, steppe), Persian (kiosk, bazaar, carafe), Hindi or Urdu (jungle, bandana, dinghy), Malay (amok, bamboo), Hawaiian (luau, lanai), Eskimo/Aleut (kayak, anorak), various U.S. Indian tribes (raccoon, opossum, chinook).

I could go on...
LittleSchwinger said:
borrowing are the common terms in linguistics.
More "taking" rather than "borrowing." That was V50's point.
 
  • #98
Mark44 said:
That may be so, but English has "borrowed" words from many different sources
Certainly. So have many languages. It's not that different from other languages in that regard. A similar list as the one you produced can be given for languages from Welsh to Chinese.

Mark44 said:
More "taking" rather than "borrowing." That was V50's point.
I'm not sure exactly what you mean. If you mean some of the words originally come from languages in areas that Anglophones colonised, that's only a small proportion of borrowings in English. Many other languages have such "taken" words, again English isn't unusual in that regard. In fact there are languages where such "taken" words are a larger portion of their vocabulary.

Again I'm not disputing these facts, but they're not something special or even unusual to English.
 
  • #99
LittleSchwinger said:
I'm not sure exactly what you mean. If you mean some of the words originally come from languages in areas that Anglophones colonised, that's only a small proportion of borrowings in English.
V50's point about "borrowed" was that when you borrow something, the implication is that you're going to give it back. Words that were "borrowed" by English aren't usually returned. That's all that was meant.
 
  • #100
Mark44 said:
V50's point about "borrowed" was that when you borrow something, the implication is that you're going to give it back. Words that were "borrowed" by English aren't usually returned. That's all that was meant.
But that's true for every borrowing in every language. What would "returning a word" even mean?
 

Hot Threads

Recent Insights

Back
Top