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English is weird
Tova:
--- Quote from: Case on 25 Jan 2019, 13:09 ---and here's a bit of east-Frisian low Saxon:
<youtube>naa naa naa naa naaaaa naaaaaa</youtube>
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Well, some things are universal.
Morituri:
One thing about English that I have appreciated is that English has a great capacity for coining new words that are, even though perhaps made up on the spot, recognizable as proper English words. Some are understood by nearly all native speakers ("He didn't like people in general, but he was feeling particularly _stabby_ that morning because he was angry about the car.") and some by most ("Well, an _omnicidal_ species could launch relativistic kill missiles toward every star in the galaxy relatively cheaply."). And some are deliberately obscure, or understandable to relatively few ("Trump's foreign policy seems potentially _eschatogenic_.").
It's mostly a pale shadow of the compounding capabilities of German, in that there aren't any formal construction rules or really exact methods of tying a constructed word its meaning. But it's remarkably clear and creates relatively short, easily usable words. And in some ways, I think the very lack of those formal construction rules makes it more flexible.
Mostly it uses existing English root words, with unexpected or unusual affixes. Or it uses Latin or Greek roots. Like most of the vocabulary thefts of English, it imports roots meaning the same thing in different languages and then draws distinctions between them for finer gradations of meaning. Sometimes that differentiation can result in mixed constructions blending roots from different languages. For example, "_polyamory_", a relatively recent coinage, is a blend of Latin and Greek roots for "many loves" denoting someone who forms multiple romantic attachments, where "_polyphilia_", which would be the consistently Greek form, would denote someone who has many sexual pathologies. Why? Because one root has been imported into English associated with romantic or emotional love, and the other with sexual deviance. For unknown reasons. We don't even think about this, but it just sort of works out.
Cornelius:
--- Quote from: Morituri on 27 Jan 2019, 11:37 ---It's mostly a pale shadow of the compounding capabilities of German, in that there aren't any formal construction rules or really exact methods of tying a constructed word its meaning. But it's remarkably clear and creates relatively short, easily usable words. And in some ways, I think the very lack of those formal construction rules makes it more flexible.
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While I agree with most of what you say, most languages do not have any real formal rules, outside of the realm of prescriptive linguistics. But the implicit rules that most speakers with a certain rate of proficiency use, are fairly unbending - hence why real language change is a fairly slow process - other than vocabulary fashions. The limit on compounds in English is one example of that.
Although, the inability to form longer compounds might have more to do with the definition of a word in English. Though it's not easy to find a good definition of what can and cannot be considered a word in English - or in most languages.
Case:
--- Quote from: Morituri on 27 Jan 2019, 11:37 ---It's mostly a pale shadow of the compounding capabilities of German, in that there aren't any formal construction rules or really exact methods of tying a constructed word its meaning. But it's remarkably clear and creates relatively short, easily usable words. And in some ways, I think the very lack of those formal construction rules makes it more flexible.
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Morituri? This is what happened when German discovered that English had a word - spillage - that itself did not:
('Tropfmengen sind sofort aufzunehmen' - lit.: 'Drip-amounts are to be soaked up immediately' = 'Please clean up spillages')
Please tell me again about those rules you speak of. :facepalm:
English may be a thieving Bully, German ... is ze Borg. The result doesn't need to be pretty, but you will be assimilated.
Akima:
--- Quote from: Case on 25 Jan 2019, 03:37 ---In Europe, it's mostly the romance cultures that are miffed that English has won the European lingua-franca wars.
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Do the Italians, or Spaniards, get bent out of shape about it, or is it just the French? :mrgreen:
--- Quote from: Morituri on 27 Jan 2019, 11:37 ---One thing about English that I have appreciated is that English has a great capacity for coining new words that are, even though perhaps made up on the spot, recognizable as proper English words.
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The fact that verbs have no case in Chinese means that the distinction between nouns and verbs is perhaps a bit weaker than in more strongly inflected languages. Formally a "particle" character is used to tell the reader if the preceding character is to be read as a noun, verb, adjective etc. but it is often dropped if the context makes it clear. So you can pretty freely use nouns as verbs and vice versa. Although English has done this too, for a long time, as displayed by words like "roof", my impression from reading modern English usage, compared to old novels, is that noun-verbing and verb-nouning is becoming more and more common.
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