It's closer to Dutch or German. I had no issue understanding transit signage in Amsterdam. The difficult words are calques and idioms that don't directly translate, i.e. opponthoud. Exit is uitgang, literally an "outgoing". Entrance is ingang, ingoing.
Once upon a time I was walking with a friend around Amsterdam and a man walked up to me and asked me where something was (a nearby restaurant), I answered in English with directions and he thanked me, then a moment later this exchange happened:
- Wait! You can speak Netherlands?
- No. Sorry.
- But you can! I am speaking it!
- No you're not! You're speaking English!
He just blinked and walked off, probably assuming I was playing a trick, but my friend asked what that was all about, and had to convince me that she didn't understand anything he was saying, and wouldn't have said anything to me at all about it except that she heard me insist he was speaking English!
She asked me to try and remember what exactly I was hearing, and I realised I couldn't! I could only remember something like "do you know where [placename that sounded familiar] is?" and maybe that there was a heavy accent, but not exactly how it sounded.
Every now and then I think of this and I wonder if I actually understand English at all, or if I'm just so used to saying that I understand it (in response to something that sounds something like a question) that I started to believe it.
Very much reminds me of a Kids in the Hall skit from ages ago. Two guys are at a party, one says "hello", the other says -- in perfect English -- "Sorry I don't understand you, I don't speak English. please don't beat me up." The first guy assumes it's a joke and plays along until he gets annoyed at the perfect accent and responses ("no really, I don't understand what you're saying, nor what I'm saying, I've just practiced this conversation a lot. please don't beat me up.")
Eventually the first guy tires of being mocked by this guy claiming not to speak English and beats the guy up.
Totally hilarious example of what you experienced taken to an extreme.
When I was a kid my boychoir hosted a choir from Estonia (this was before the fall of the Iron Curtain, so this was a big deal), and I remember when I was trying to help out back-stage at their concert and one of the Estonian boys needed help, but the only thing he could say was "I don't speak English", in a perfect midwestern accent (the Estonian choir director had drilled his entire choir on that one phrase). The cognitive dissonance was hard to deal with.
Prior to a trip to Poland I listen to some language tapes and learn how to say "I don't understand Polish" in polish (something like "nya rezumium popolski").
Almost everybody understood English and finally when I ran into somebody who didn't and used that Polish phrase, I realized I could have just said in English "I don't understand Polish" and it actually would have been clearer communication.
I learned the same phrase in perfect BBC Polish and it backfired. I said it so well that the Poles just ignored it and continued to speak in Polish. Then I ended up with a Polish girlfriend back in the states and learned real fast. She was gorgeous.
I don’t understand why it would have been clearer to use a language they didn’t understand. Actually a lot of comments under this article aren’t making a lot of sense. A lot of claims of of paradox where I don’t see it.
This is a fascinating phenomenon that I've encountered before. It seems that some multilingual people cannot easily tell which language they are speaking and/or switch languages during conversation.
A friend who is learning Dutch once complained to me that Dutch speakers will switch to English the moment they hear you are struggling with the language. I suggested she should explicitly ask people to keep the conversation in Dutch.
In one instance, she did that, and the (native Dutch-speaking) person she was talking to agreed to her request, and then proceeded in English anyway! She asked that person multiple times, and they just kept speaking English without addressing her request. Baffling.
I tend to switch to the language hinted at by the accent of the person I'm speaking to. And I only notice which language I speak when I can't find a word. The question then becomes whether I can substitute the word from another language familiar to the recipients.
In bilingual places you'll see people switching mid-sentence when they have a better expression in the other language for what they are about to say.
When watching German films with subtitles, I will sporadically understand phrases. When it happens it doesn't sound like German; it's some very strange English dialect. Ich habe das gestern Abend gesungen. I have that yester evening a-sung.
My wife had a very similar experience, except in her case, we were awaiting a flight somewhere outside the US—I think in Asia—and she carried on a conversation with a group of flight attendants in Spanish (her second language, but she's fluent).
Quite a ways in it emerged that they were from an Italian airline and speaking Italian. They were no doubt (we imagine) well used to speakers of Romance languages especially Spanish making themselves understood... she however was quite entertained.
(This being HN I suppose it's de rigeur to cite Richard Feynman's bit about Italian dialectical differences leaving room for him to entertain himself by amiably yelling made-up Italian to people in his neighborhood, who chalked up his unintelligibility to such differences, not realizing they were being trolled as it were...)
This is very much debatable. Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin, whereas half of English words are Latinic or Romanic. [1]
Some properties of English's grammar are also more similar to Romance languages than Germanic ones. For example, whereas Germanic languages only mark tense on verbs, English verbs (like Spanish verbs) are marked with aspect in addition to tense: there is a distinction between "I played tennis"/"I have played tennis"/"I was playing tennis".
I'm not saying English is a Romance language. But it's a much more interesting problem to figure out why it's not considered a Romance language than you imply.
> This is very much debatable. Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin, whereas half of English words are Latinic or Romanic. [1]
I think that's complicated by the fact that many english words of latin origin were inherited from a germanic source and thus from an intelligibility standpoint the overlap between english and dutch or german is partially additive with latin. e.g. [1]
Unfortunately the source is dead, but at one point a study ranked english/german as 60% lexical similarity compared to english/french at 27% [2]. Anecdotally, I think dutch and german are easier for an english speaker because of comparatively more overlap in simple words. Heavy use of compound words in dutch/german also gives an english listener a better chance of recognizing part of the word and inferring the meaning from context.
> Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin, whereas half of English words are Latinic or Romanic.
Are you measuring by fraction of words in a word list, or fraction of words in a typical utterance? Word usage is highly non-uniform, so you'll get very different ratios between the former and latter.
>Are you measuring by fraction of words in a word list, or fraction of words in a typical utterance?
I think he's measuring the first, which gives a skewed picture, the latter is why english is considered a germanic language. The core of the language is all germanic words and you can still get by reasonably well without using any of the french/latin additions. Generally if a word is smaller and less 'fancy' it's of germanic origins, if it's longer and 'fancier' it's probably of romance origins.
English verbs (like Spanish verbs) are marked with aspect in addition to tense: there is a distinction between "I played tennis"/"I have played tennis"/"I was playing tennis".
Where is the verb marking you speak of? Because I don't see any difference between played and played. Your example of how English uses auxiliary verbs to convey different verb aspects is a Germanic construct. I don't really understand how you use this as an example of Romance lineage in English.
I think they're saying the difference is between "played" and "have played." The difference is more distinguished in other verbs, like "ate" vs "have eaten." The word "ate" is the past tense, and "eaten" is the participle.
And it's different in that "have" implies some sort of connection to the present. You wouldn't say "When I was a kid, I have played a lot of video games." You'd say "When I was a kid, I played a lot of video games."
I don't think this should imply a Romance connection, though, as Germanic languages do it, too. Using "have" and a participle seems like more of an areal feature to languages from Western Europe.
With respect to past tense, a "common" thing in english appears to be that the imperfect of a verb is the same word as the past particilpe of that verb. So "played" can be the imperfect tense itself, or the participle of perfect tense in "have played".
In German, this doesn't happen. Imperfect tense is often formed by using a "-te" ending to the verb (so "spiel(en)" -> "spielte"), while the past participle prepends "ge-" and appends "t" or "en" (so "gespielt" - (I have) "played"). The form "... was playing" would also exist, "... war spielen", and again with a difference how the infinitive is formed (-ing vs. -en).
To me, grammar of temporal forms in English is more Romance-language than German language. The fact that English lost any form of case, and most of gender, is neither German nor Romance though.
I sometimes used to joke with English friends that the language is the least common denominator of all the people overrunning the Island in the last 3000 years. Use a bit of everything, leave all the hard stuff out, and write it in a nonphonetic way like Irish.
German does not have this feature! In German, there is no difference in meaning between "Ich spielte Tennis" and "Ich habe Tennis gespielt". (The difference is in register, "Ich spielte Tennis" is more formal.)
In English, in contrast, there is a clear difference in usage between, say, "I was playing tennis while my kids were in school", and "I have played tennis while my kids were in school".
(forgot to say, German would know "Ich war Tennis spielen ..." as much as "Ich habe Tennis gespielt ..."; the first one would be considered imperfect passive, and yes I would agree perfect passive, "Ich bin Tennis spielen gewesen ..." would be unusual to say. The english form, "I have been playing tennis ..." is common though. As is "I have played tennis", and yes I'd agree the two aren't interchangeable)
I defer to you for that, simply because I'm a native speaker of German and "only" long-term fluid in English. I don't entirely grasp the difference between the two - other than "phrasing" (and on that level it exists in both), and would be likely to use them interchangeably. In both German and English.
> Germanic languages only mark tense on verbs, English verbs (like Spanish verbs) are marked with aspect in addition to tense:
What exactly do you mean by "aspect"?
> there is a distinction between "I played tennis"/"I have played tennis"/"I was playing tennis".
Sure:
-- (I) played (Tennis) ~~ jugué
-- (When I) played (Tennis) ~~ jugaba
-- (When I've) played (Tennis) ~~ jugado
English (like German) might say they need auxiliary words to explain what's going on, and Spanish people might say they're just conjugating the verb differently, but I think this is just because things are written down;
Because, if I say any of these sentences in Spanish or English rapidly enough, someone who does not know the language will not know where each word begins and ends, and it may just sound like English "conjugates" at the beginning of words and Spanish "conjugates" at the end. What's the real difference here?
> But it's a much more interesting problem to figure out why [English is] not considered a Romance language than you imply.
I think most of the time people talk about the "rules" of a language, we're not really talking about something that will help acquire the language (or be better understood): we're really just yapping about geography and time.
So what do you think would be different if English was more widely considered a Romance language?
I am referring to aspect in the sense that it's used in linguistics [1].
I'm honestly getting a lot of responses here from people who clearly don't have a good grasp of linguistics, but you take the cake by composing a long-form response without at least bothering to Google the terms I have used.
I think most of the time
people talk about the
"rules" of a language, we're
not really talking about
something that will help
acquire the language (or be
better understood): we're
really just yapping about
geography and time.
Language families are not just formed across geography and time. Genetically, Hindi is closer to French than it is to Tibetan. People move, you know.
The most frequently used words are almost all Germanic. There are a lot of technical words with Latin or Greek etymologies that are hardly used in quotidian conversation.
Which 'aspect' is supposed to be missing in Germanic language verbs? Because I can say those three example forms (aspect tenses?) in both Swedish and German without any limitation.
I think the parent was specifically referring to "I was playing", which in German would not be expressed using only forms of the verb. You would have to use an adverb, as in "ich spielte gerade". Or you could noun the verb: "ich war am Spielen".
"Ich war am Spielen" is not really Standard German. It's a West German/Ripuarian dialect form that people from that area sometimes use when conversing in Standard German. But yes, it does communicate the progressive aspect in the same manner that "I was playing" does in English. I agree that "nouning" the verb is an arbitrary distinction.
Even if you want to give this one to German, English also has the prospective aspect, which is missing in German (prospective "I'm going to play tennis", vs. perfective "I will play tennis").
> Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin
That's the % in the dictionary. More than half of Japanese vocabulary in the dictionary is based on Chinese but no one argues Japanese is a Chinese creole. I forget by whom but it was once pointed out to me that in some genres - ranging from drinking songs to nursery rhymes - the words that come from Old English often make up more than 90% of the words. Similarly, if you sample the dialog in a kitchen or office while people gossip the ratio is also going to skew heavily like 70 - 80% Germanic. (Japanese shows a similar effect with all its Chinese vocabulary.)
Indeed, it's not tricky to write about everyday grounded things with nothing but straight Anglo-Saxon roots. (I've been doing it so far this whole paragraph -- oh that's Greek.) Difficult to achieve similar results utilizing exclusively Latinate vocabulary.
Of course, a history book or engineering manual will be different, and Graeco-Latin vocabulary might well be in the majority there.
You can barely order food or drinks in Dutch in Amsterdam. Pancake house, server doesn’t speak Dutch. Local pub, server doesn’t speak Dutch. I don’t think that would happen in London or New York. You go to the pub or NY diner and they can’t speak English
incidentally, outgang is technically a modern English word, but I've never heard it spoken in real life. You can see literary uses of its precessor "utgang" in Old English here [0]
And it's closer to Frisian than Dutch. If the Battle of Hastings hadn't happened, these languages would be easily and mutually comprehensible. But that just shows that English descends from a branch of West Germanic. It changed gradually over time, kept a core Germanic vocabulary for its basic terms, and borrowed a lot from other languages as it needed more complex concepts, moreso than Modern High German which allows for easy word invention through combination.
Creoles are defined as languages emerging from pidgins, which themselves are often simplified forms of speech that allow linguistically separate groups to communicate. English is not that. It has an unbroken line of native speakers whose usage gradually evolved, while maintaining a system of complex syntactic rules as well as a literature.
Fantastic summation — much easier to understand than the article itself or the referenced Wikipedia pages.
In two short paragraphs I learned a ton about the distinctions between pidgins, creoles, and ("full"?) languages, in addition to how languages evolve in both subcultures and ("dominant"?) cultures.
I can now apply this knowledge in the context of the Louisiana Creole population, the name of which has previously served to confuse me as to the definition of "creole", as well as other creole languages and populations in the Caribbean.
It fascinates me how linguistics is completely enmeshed in human identity in a such a way that it is impossible to categorize languages without tackling some thorny questions. All the topics you aren't supposed to discuss in polite company (religion, political affiliation, and race) become unavoidable when trying to figure out the relationship of Serbian to Croatian, what is a creole vs. a pidgin, and the relationship of Yiddish and Ladino to medieval German and Spanish (respectively). Fun stuff.
You can argue either way, because "creole" to too vaguely defined. The term was invented to cover a set of languages that had interesting historical and structural similarities, but it turns out to be hard to establish the boundaries of the set. I think it's unfair to the researchers to politicize it as some "post-colonial" writers have been doing.
Creole is both a sociohistoric and linguistic term. The fact that the linguistic attributes are difficult to put boundaries on is extremely common for linguists: we won’t even claim to tell you what the definition of “word” is!
As for whether English is a Creole, it’s important to understand the motivation for Creolistics at its origin. It started, and continues, as an effort to legitimize a set of languages that before were considered illegitimate, un-interesting and utterly lacking on features worth studying. Part of that reputation is inextricably bound up in colonialism and racism.
Could you squint and call English a
Creole? Sure. But you’d be doing the same disservice to “Creole” as you would by saying “technically we’re all [in the US] African American because all humans originated in Africa.” It’s a disingenuous point, and one that could easily be mistaken for trying to reverse the legitimization efforts that brought the term into existence to begin with.
This is an interesting take; I've often seen the opposition to English as a creole trying to stress that English is a "real" language as opposed to the true creoles, which are as you say often treated as less legitimized.
In that sense saying that English, the language of global communication and commerce, originated from a creole shows that that is a perfectly legitimate type of language and the same is true as other creoles. So to me it does more of a service than a disservice!
My personal definition of “word” is “a unit of semantic meaning”. Don’t ask me to define that.
Are numbers words? Are abbreviations words? Can a words contain other words? Can the same sentence have a different number of words when spoken versus written? Yes to all, and more.
Well, a good example is "ice cream" - I've seen it described as a "compound word without a hyphen" - which is fair because while ice cream has ice and cream as things that are used to make it, "ice cream" is definitely something distinct that is not trivially decomposable from the individual words.
A good definition of "a unit of semantic meaning" might be "fulfills a 'part of speech' in a sentence" - but even that is hard in English. For example: "I set the table up" - up modifies set to create the "phrasal verb" set up, and isn't related to its typical meaning of position. But remove that little word and the whole meaning of the sentence drastically changes. I've seen "up" in this instance described as an adverb, which tends to be the "throwaway stat" for words that don't fit any of the other traditional parts of speech.
Another I like is contractions. If say “can not” but it sounds like “can’t”, how many words is that?
I might say that “not” does not have any semantic meaning in isolation, as its only use is to negate the meaning of some other word, so perhaps “can not” and “can’t” are both just one word.
Perhaps such graphemes and phonemes aren’t actually words.
Another interesting question is whether words are truly a product of language (the natural skill) or writing (the synthetic technology). Did “words” exist before writing?
Is the English un- a word? Before you reflexively say no, consider that it has a specific meaning even though it never appears on its own and never receives word stress.
Is the French je a word? Before you reflexively say yes, consider that it never appears on its own and never receives word stress even though it has a specific meaning.
Is the Latin que a word? (The Q in SPQR, “senatus populusque Romanus”, although perhaps it’d be more authentic to write “SENATVSPOPVLVSQVEROMANVS”.) It has a well-defined meaning: “and”. It goes after whatever word you’d put “and” before; not syntactic constituent, word. It counts as a part of that word for the purposes of stress, so POpulus but popuLUSque.
> Is the French je a word? Before you reflexively say yes, consider that it never appears on its own and never receives word stress even though it has a specific meaning.
And? That doesn't change what the word "word" mean. Even in french, where "word" is "mot". There's no rule saying that a word has to be able to appear on its own to be named a "word".
More specifically "je" is defined, by linguists, in french, as a "mot grammatical".
It's a bit like the old saying, "All models are wrong, some models are useful." The concept of a "word" is useful in everyday language, particularly in English -- it's host language, unsurprisingly enough -- and (probably) other Indo-European languages. However, in a more precise context, it breaks down because of edge cases.
For example, "words" in agglutinative languages[1] (e.g., Turkish) act very differently from "words" in English. It's hard (impossible?) to capture all that variety in a pithy way. "A string of morphemes" might work, but that's hardly a satisfactory definition!
Maybe a good analogy for the HN crowd would be like asking, "How many characters are in a string?"
I think it's obvious that there might not be one unifying definition that spans all human languages. "Word" is an English word refering to a specific of the English language. A class in JS is not the same as class in C++, big deal? ;)
As for English, I'm happy defining it through written language and spacing. "Can't", "unmarried", and "walkie-talkie" all one word each.
We might as well think of "word" in foreign enough languages as separate concepts. Doesn't seem meaningful to try to fit fundamentally different structures into the same conceptual molds. Which I guess ties back to your original point regarding if it's a useful excercise taxonimizing English as creole.
In Chinese, it's very difficult to define word boundaries.
Each character is a syllable, with a particular pronunciation and a constellation of meanings, usually closely related to one another. There are very common combinations of characters that appear together, which one could define as words. However, often, you could just as easily view the individual characters as words, or the combination as a word.
In some cases, the combination of two characters means something totally different from what the characters alone would mean (e.g., 东西, where the characters literally mean "East-West," but the combination means "thing"), so the combination is clearly a word. But sometimes, the meaning of the combination is basically a combination of the words' meanings (e.g., 吃饭, where the characters literally mean "eat-food," and the combination means "to eat, have a meal").
Because written Chinese doesn't use spaces, I guess it doesn't really matter what one defines as a word. The issue just doesn't come up, practically speaking.
I should note that typically discussions of language are more fruitful around spoken (or signed) languages rather than writing. Writing is an artificial formal system, and as such sometimes has aspects which are much more socilogiclaly determined than spoken language, which tends to evolve more freely.
Also, the problems you raise here are mostly just as applicable to English, though perhaps for somewhat fewer words. Is a "walkie-talkie" one word, or two? How about "unmarried"? The un- prefix has a distinct meaning on its own, even if it never appears alone, after all. Or how about "can't"? Technically it's a contraction of "can not", and those words do sometimes appear separately as well, even in this same meaning.
The issues I raise are somewhat applicable to English, but to a far lesser extent.
In Chinese, just about every syllable has its own set of meanings. In English, there are compound words, and some words have prefixes or suffixes, but you can't just arbitrarily break a word into its syllables and assign a meaning to every syllable. Imagine if the word "syllable" could be broken down as syl-la-ble, and every person who spoke English could tell you what "syl," "la" and "ble" individually meant. That's the situation in Chinese, for almost every polysyllabic word you can utter. They can almost all be decomposed into syllables that have individual meanings. It's a very different paradigm from English.
Yes, I understand there is a huge difference of the degree to which this applies to the language. I was just pointing out that none of these things should be alien to an English speaker, and even a linguist who only knew English would have had similar struggles to define "word" because of these problems (though of course they could have decided to file them under "exceptions", which doesn't work for Chinese).
There is no generally accepted definition in linguistics, but AI researchers have come to the consensus that a word is one or more LLM tokens ;)
I’m not a linguist, but I would define a word as a part of a sentence composed out of one or more syllables, with word boundaries either implicitly or explicitly specified by different methods in different languages, e.g. by using pauses, longer or shorter phonemes, by using accents, rhythm, or intonation, or simply by remembering words as part of learning a lexical vocabulary.
A word is something that can be categorized as to which part of speech it belongs (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, etc.)
Depending on the languages it’s not always clear whether prefixes and/or suffixes are part of the word a separate words.
Similarly with compound words - do they count as a single or multiple words?
A short sentence in one language may enter another language as a single opaque word.
Joking aside, is it common to use regular expressions? Seems like the method only works for languages with spaces. I think a more sophisticated lexer may be necessary, but are there are non-regex, "fast approximations" that work across most languages? This is a problem that I have not tried solving before.
That's just passing the problem onto how you define \b. Since Japanese uses no spaces, it would match entire phrases or sentences as "words", treating only punctuation as word boundaries.
"Ain't ain't a word 'cause it don't match the regex."
BTW, should be "\b\w+\b". The \b is a zero-width match for the start or end of a word. Your pattern requires a space before and after:
>>> import re
>>> re.compile(r"\b\w+\b").findall("What's the problem?")
['What', 's', 'the', 'problem']
>>> re.compile(r"\s\w+\s").findall("What's the problem?")
[' the ']
The subject of the quote is Creolistics, not the definition of Creole. If you are looking for scientific definitions of linguistic categories you are going to be very disappointed. Language involves humans. Language is messy.
As well, any question that involves “meaning” must itself answer the question “to whom?” I answered from the perspective of (some) linguists, but as another user pointed out, non-linguists might very well and with no ill intention consider it an appropriate term.
In Spanish 'criollo' is the word for 'creole', and its meaning has changed a fair bit from the French. It's more like "local", "ex-colonial", "dating all the way back to colonial times".
> Nothing wrong with such words, but trying to logically reason about them is not going to be fruitful
Very few phenomena outside of physics have scientific definitions, yet we logically reason about them all the time, as we indeed must to make any sense of our world ethically, socially, and economically. Even making the physical human-built world around us relies a great deal on non-scientific definitions.
The entire field of linguistics is based upon reasoning about and finding patterns on top of "non-scientific" definitions. As professor McWhorter (quoted in the article) has said in his lectures: "It's all just a puff of air".
It's more about how people define the term. I don't think I've seen the position made disingenuously.
Most people I've spoken to think of creole as a mixed language that becomes it's own language. To them that describes English and how it came to be.
Even if you require colonisation to be part of it the position can stand. The Anglo-Saxon's colonisation by the Romans and the Normans are a big part of how the English mixture was formed.
If your definition requires an indigenous, non-European, language being modified by contact with a European coloniser's language. Then sure, English isn't a creole language. But I don't think that's how most people use the term creole colloquially.
You're going to have to explain how fifth century Germanic settlers in Britain were colonised by the Romans who arrived in Britain four centuries earlier and were largely a spent force by the time the Germans rolled in ...
Germanic conquerors may be first partially reverse-colonized by the culture they conquered (which heavily romanized with Celtic substrate) and then later further colonized by norman conquerors who were themselves carriers of the remnants of the Roman cultural heritage.
Germanic people (franks) conquered Gaul and you wouldn't call modern french a Germanic language.
Linguistic dynamics are utterly fascinating and complex
I've been listening to The Rest is History podcast lately, and a lot of this happened in Islam via converts.
Tom Holland was saying that many now fundamental Islamic practices were imported into the faith via converts. For example such as praying 5 times a day was apparently a Zoroastrian practice.
The same thing happened to many Cristian practices.
The Eucharist may have originated in the cult of Dionysus.
Probably also Christmas is also a tradition that bears the roots of a pre-christian festivity that has been merged with / subsumed in Christian tradition
I expect that a creole language will evolve over centuries into something that is less and less considered as a creole when compared with more recent creole languages.
I think it's more useful to consider "creolization events" in the history of a language rather than a blanket "creole/non-creole" attribute
It's not a very interesting concept if it's limited to one place and time. I think you can abstract a lot of the features of the languages originally classified as creoles and apply them where-ever they make sense.
Personally I would say that Modern English is not a creole, and Old English is not a creole, but there was certainly a period of time in the early middle english period were England was invaded by the Norse and Normans that a lot of creole-like changes happened to the english language -- particularly the loss of grammatical gender and many declensions and conjugations and a simplification of grammar, and it happened for similar reasons -- an upper strata of society that spoke a different language being forced to communicate with the local people. And English at the time was definitely not considered an important language worth studying and people very rarely bothered even writing any books in English. I think it's worth thinking about the similarities and difference between what happened to english in the early middle english period, and other "true" creole languages beyond just saying it's not creole because it didn't happen in the 18th century.
I don't understand this comment. It makes absolutely no claims about the definition of a creole, and it makes no claims about how English doesn't conform to that definition. It just talks about "squinting" at languages, mentions black Americans for no particular reason, and accuses anyone who would argue that English is a creole of being "disingenuous" for trying to reverse the "legitimazation."
It's like the perfect troll comment. Makes no argument, implies anyone who would disagree is probably racist, and uses black Americans as a comparison for no particular reason.*
Here's my opinion: English is the result of a simplification of grammar caused by Old Norse and Old English crashing into each other with the same words but different grammar; then the French forced French usage in commerce, so most people started using a ton of French words with this English grammar. That last part sounds exactly like a creole.
Is your argument that considering English a creole lets English people off the hook for something? Are things that happen to non-white people somehow delegitimized when they are also noted in white people? Are white people so special and unique that everything else has to be defined by it's non-whiteness? If I'm missing your point, what was it?
[*] As a black American, I'm starting to recognize this as a long-standing feature of western rhetoric. A lot of modern argument seems to boil down to which side is more like black Americans. Humorously, actual black Americans are never considered to be like metaphorical black Americans; we're actually spoiled whiners with a sense of entitlement.
> I don't understand this comment. It makes absolutely no claims about the definition of a creole, and it makes no claims about how English doesn't conform to that definition. It just talks about "squinting" at languages, mentions black Americans for no particular reason, and accuses anyone who would argue that English is a creole of being "disingenuous" for trying to reverse the "legitimazation."
> It's like the perfect troll comment. Makes no argument, implies anyone who would disagree is probably racist, and uses black Americans as a comparison for no particular reason.*
I don't think you're engaging with the author's point: it is _precisely_ that the study of Creole languages wasn't a top-down predetermined "this is the definition of something, and we're studying it" program, but arose after the fact to label the work of a school of linguistics.
> Is your argument that considering English a creole lets English people off the hook for something?
> If I'm missing your point, what was it?
The point is that the author assumes that concepts arise by labelling the results of historical processes, but ultimately our goal is to describe a historical process.
It's not warranted to jump to speculating about "western rhetoric" or "modern argument", which doesn't substantially engage with the OP. Nor is it warranted to speculate that the author "implies anyone who would disagree is probably racist".
>Here's my opinion: English is the result of a simplification of grammar caused by Old Norse and Old English crashing into each other with the same words but different grammar; then the French forced French usage in commerce, so most people started using a ton of French words with this English grammar. That last part sounds exactly like a creole.
Grandparent's point is that you're stretching the meaning of the term to a level of generality that applies to everything, therefore meaning nothing in particular.
Your point applies to French just as much as English: Gaulic Celtic speakers poorly adopt Latin after getting bull rushed by Romans, then mix in Frankish terms when the Romans' former allies take over; or how about Sicilian: a mash-up of Latin, Greek, Germanic, Arabic conquerors.
You have to go pretty far to find a language which isn't a fusion of other languages that results from different peoples entering into extended contact.
'Creole' is a word that only appears with its current meaning and history in the last 100 or so years, grandparent is simply preserving that particularity. Nothing more.
No one in 1200s Europe thought English or Sicilian were languages not worth engaging with as actual languages owing to modern racial connotations.
As an aside: would you know any good resources/other ways to learn about the social history of Sicilian-the-language? I know Maltese has had a similar social history, and its Arabic inheritance is very clear.
They definitely did think English was not a language worth engaging with. Even literate people in England barely thought of English as a language worth studying -- they wrote everything in Latin. Certainly the Norman conquerers only bothered to learn the minimum amount of English they had to to talk to the locals. That's why there are so many French words in English.
I think the status of a "creole" language is sort of time limited. After enough people are born speaking it and it's diverged enough from it's origin languages, it's just a language. English probably was very much like a creole language in particular places and times (particularly in northern england after the viking invasions for example).
That attitude is not unique to England though. Latin was the lingua franca of the European literate and scientific world, first because of the Church, and then because of the Renaissance. Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza also wrote primarily in Latin instead of their country's language. Pretty similar to how we are conversing in English right now, regardless of what language we speak in our home town.
>They definitely did think English was not a language worth engaging with. Even literate people in England barely thought of English as a language worth studying -- they wrote everything in Latin.
This... the point of the matter is that no one thought English was not a language in its own right. Not which landed aristocrat or educated clergymen wrote in English for other non-English speakers, which was the point of writing in Ecclesiastical Latin.
> The fact that the linguistic attributes are difficult to put boundaries on is extremely common for linguists: we won’t even claim to tell you what the definition of “word” is!
The definition of a "word" is always straightforward: a word is an atomic unit of language.
However, which units are or aren't atomic varies according to what it is you're measuring.
Lexically, "catch fire" is an atomic entity, which cannot be understood as the sum of its parts. It's just one part, and it needs its own dictionary entry, separate from "catch" and from "fire".
Syntactically, "catch fire" is definitely not atomic, because the past tense is "caught fire". From this perspective, it's enough to know "catch" and "fire".
Syntactically again, we can see that "an elephant" is in variation with "two elephants" / "my elephant" / "every elephant" / etc., and it's clear that "an elephant" is not atomic, but is understood as the composition of "a(n)" with "elephant".
Phonologically, as the citation-form spelling above hinted, "an elephant" is atomic; the article cannot exist independently and must attach to another word. Without knowing what that word is, you won't know how the article is pronounced.
Specialized terms for both of these types of phenomena exist - lexical words that are too large to be syntactic words are called idioms; syntactic words that are too small to be phonological words are called clitics. But the general lesson is that, despite the definition of "word" being clear, membership in the category varies according to what aspect of the language you're looking at.
This doesn't even begin to cover things, even for English. First of all, "catch fire" is at least partly understandable from its constituent parts - "catch" has a great variety of related meanings, and they all have to do with something taking hold of something else; I'm sure any English speaker who has encountered both words would intuit the meaning of "catch fire" without any problem, especially if they also encountered "to catch a cold". Of course, the meaning is slightly different, and it is quite invariant.
Your analysis of the phonetic atomicity is also unsatisfactory. First, the article can very well be pronounced independently - I can say "English has a single indefinite article, with two forms: 'a' or 'an'". Secondly, the 'a' form can be pronounced in two different ways, depending on how you want to highlight it within a sentence: "he ate a piece" could use the schwa, or the "long a" if you want to highlight the article itself "he ate [ay] piece, not your piece". So the article's pronunciation can change independently of the word it is applying to. Finally, in at least some English accents, many words can be pronounced differently in certain sequences than others - for example, in modern Southern English, an "r" sound is introduced almost always in speech when a word that ends in a vowel sound is followed by another word that starts with a vowel sound, e.g. "I saw-R-it". By your description, neither "saw" nor "it" are individual word phonologically, since you don't know how they will be pronounced unless we know the following word.
Overall, the atomicity of a linguistic construct is highly debatable, even in a particular context.
> First of all, "catch fire" is at least partly understandable from its constituent parts - "catch" has a great variety of related meanings, and they all have to do with something taking hold of something else
If you want to analyze it that way, you'll find that the semantics are the reverse of what you predict: when you catch fire, it's the fire that takes hold of you.
> First, the article can very well be pronounced independently - I can say "English has a single indefinite article, with two forms: 'a' or 'an'".
This argument is predicated on forgetting the difference between use and mention. What part of speech would you say an is in that sentence? Is it an article?
> Secondly, the 'a' form can be pronounced in two different ways, depending on how you want to highlight it within a sentence
Yes, problems arise when you need to place sentence-level stress on a feature that is too weak to bear stress. The same problem occurs for any English clitic, including 's, which in the general case doesn't even include a vowel. Most notably here, there's nothing about this specific to a before consonants; the rules for placing stress don't know what word you're following a with. If you need to stress an, the usual choice is /æ/. But also notably, when native speakers do this, they recognize it as a problem - it's just one they may not be able to work around.
> Finally, in at least some English accents, many words can be pronounced differently in certain sequences than others - for example, in modern Southern English, an "r" sound is introduced almost always in speech when a word that ends in a vowel sound is followed by another word that starts with a vowel sound, e.g. "I saw-R-it". By your description, neither "saw" nor "it" are individual word phonologically
This is not a word-level phenomenon in any way; intrusive R also occurs between syllables of a single word, as long as there's an appropriate vowel-vowel sequence. Placing one between saw and it would not normally be viewed as altering the pronunciation of either word (Which one do you think is altered? I guess by nonrhotic standards it would have to be it), but as the application of a general rule.
Placing /n/ between a and elephant is not the application of a general rule, it's the application of a rule specific to a.
> Overall, the atomicity of a linguistic construct is highly debatable, even in a particular context.
You're saying that people argue over which items count as words, not that they argue over what it means to count as a word.
> If you want to analyze it that way, you'll find that the semantics are the reverse of what you predict: when you catch fire, it's the fire that takes hold of you.
That is one of the meanings of catch, just like when you catch a cold, the cold takes hold of you, or when you catch your foot on something, that thing took hold of your foot.
> This argument is predicated on forgetting the difference between use and mention. What part of speech would you say an is in that sentence? Is it an article?
Fair enough, though I would still argue that being able to make a noun out of the article in this way relies on them having a stable, recognizable, individual pronunciation.
> This is not a word-level phenomenon in any way; intrusive R also occurs between syllables of a single word, as long as there's an appropriate vowel-vowel sequence.
Well, we are trying to define what a "word" even is, so you can't bring this distinction in. A priori, "saw it" could be a word, just as my whole comment could be a single word. We are trying to come up with a formal definition of what it means to be a word; if we want "an elephant" to be a single word and "saw-r-it" to be two words, we need to come up with a distinction between these that doesn't presuppose that "saw" and "it" are separate words.
> Placing one between saw and it would not normally be viewed as altering the pronunciation of either word (Which one do you think is altered? I guess by nonrhotic standards it would have to be it), but as the application of a general rule.
Depending on the exact accent, not all words follow this rule. In certain accents, at least, it is quite specific to words that have an 'r' in their spelling (well, to words that historically had an r sound that was lost, and is usually preserved in the spelling), so "four o'clock" would get a linking R, but "saw it" would not. So at least in these cases, by your definition, we'd have to say that "four" is not an individual word, phonetically speaking. Also note that linking/intrusive R doesn't appear inside morphemes, normally, only between morphemes, or between morphemes and suffixes. So you get [Kafka-r-esque] in certain accents, but never inside, say, "dais".
> Placing /n/ between a and elephant is not the application of a general rule, it's the application of a rule specific to a.
This could also have been a general rule, that happens to apply to a single word in modern English. Regardless, as I have mentioned before, if you want to define "phonological word" as a unit whose exact pronunciation is only knowable when you have all parts present, then lots of phrases are phonological words in English, unless you add a lot of exceptions to your definition.
> You're saying that people argue over which items count as words, not that they argue over what it means to count as a word.
These are not that different in practice. If you have a good formal definition, then you should be able to say for any object whether it is a word, a part of a word, or a sequence of words. If you can't do that, you don't really have a definition. The definition you gave basically equates word with atomic, but then if "atomic" is not well defined, or even definable, then we're back to square one of not knowing what a word actually means.
Seriously, French is just a very crassified Romance language. As a near-native French speaker I was shocked one time in Paris at a restaurant where our server was from Italy and pronounce every letter in every French word and I still understood him.
Dropping 's's (and leaving behind a circumflex to remind one of the dropped 's')? That's a pretty crass evolution (but see the note at the bottom). Dropping trailing letters in words? Same thing. I understand that "oc" is really the Latin "hoc", meaning "this", and that "oui" is just an evolution -a shortening- of "hoc hic" ("this that"). "Oi" (pronounced "wah" in English) is just a vowel shift.
French is often treated as a high-class language, so I say 'crass' mainly to remind people that the evolution of French was really the result of every day people not treating it like a dead language to be preserved.
You're totally right, but just a minor correction: the word oui comes from oïl, which was the way to say "yes" in a family of languages called the langues d'oïl.[1] The word oïl is a shortened form of hoc ille in Latin.
German is badly spelt German. Damn High German consonant shift.
(E.g.compare ship, schip,
Schip, skib, skip vs. Schiff, or day, dag, Dag, dag, vs. Tag
etc. - we'd have a far neater, gradual Germanic transition around the North Sea if Low German had "won".
The book "fom winde ferfeelt" is basically a book-length version of the joke, written by a brazilian who was frustrated with the inconsistency in the rules of the German language.
They are UK English, but "spelled" and "learned" are in common usage too. I wouldn't consider it to be an Americanism if I read/heard those versions (I'm English, myself).
"that strategy of borrowing a word but giving it a slightly narrower meaning" – I think this happens with most borrowing, into any language. E.g. "opsjon" in Norwegian is from "option" but only means stock/legal options, never used in the common meaning of "choices". (And the video's own example with "les peoples".)
But my favorite example is when going into English from Norse, "fjord" has a quite narrow meaning in English, but must have been much broader in Norse when you look at Limfjorden in flat Denmark (more of a sound than a fjord) and Tunhovdfjorden (even Norwegians would think of this as a lake these days)
The Norwegian words for bay - like vik, bukt, does not necessarily imply broad or open. The main distinction appear to be length.
Bukt or gulf are the words mostly use for major bays, but bukt in particular can also be used for very short, narrow inlets, while fjords are used for some of our largest bays.
The Oslo fjord for example, is quite broad and open for most of its length. Most of the smaller bays in the fjord are bukter, but the largest, longest of them are also named fjords.
Not really. We have some really wide fjords in Norway; Sognefjorden is 4.5 km wide at its widest. A fjord is technically any body of water carved out by glaciers (inland lakes or coast inlets), but the word fjord is used pretty indiscriminately; lots of fjords are not glacial in origin.
I used to joke with a friend of mine who was of Netherlands descent by saying that Dutch is misspelled English. (And, yes, I'm aware of the several rounds of orthographic reforms that Dutch has experienced.)
Old English poetry tends to have commonality at the beginnings of words (e.g. alliteration) rather than rhyming at the ends of words. Or so I remember from The History of English Podcast.
It's now 180 episodes in and talking about Shakespeare. Old English was some episodes back, as you might imagine.
Is that the vocabulary of Germanic origin and imported from Germanic, or is it just the part of PIE that has not diverged between Latin and Germanic languages?
Mostly the former. Much of what is now France was dominated by speakers of Germanic languages after the fall of the Roman empire. They were eventually assimilated but left a linguistic legacy.
"This seems to me a rather feckless argument over how people want to define a term. Indisputably, modern English results from a blend of French and old English, in the process of which what we today call English absorbed a lot of French vocabulary, lost most of its inflection, and its verb conjugation was greatly simplified. Whether you want to call it a creole or not is pointless, what I just stated is still true."
English is basically a dialect of German spoken with French words.
The vast majority of our grammar rules come from German, whereas our vocabulary is a lot of French, however, mixed in with several hundred years of cultural integration due to the English-speaking world being hotbeds for immigration.
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
I love that quote and the imagery it invokes. I think it's funny because it feels true - English speakers aren't precious about roping in new words from other languages. I enjoy the concept of the hybrid word - a word made from a mix of languages (e.g. neuroscience, Minneapolis, cryptocurrency etc). "Eigenvalue" is a good one as it's a mix of German and French.
We know that human populations have been mixing throughout history, including with species that no longer exist.
We (Homo Sapiens) have genetic adaptations for speech, so it seems likely (but unproven AFAIK), that some Ur proto sound communication immediately fractured on migration, with isolated groups diverging rapidly, such that languages were not mutually comprehensible. Languages are cultural, so mutate much faster than genes. It seems unlikely that genetic adaptations for speech could evolve independently in different populations of our species.
So my expectation is that all languages could be described as creoles, and only the length of isolation since last contact and exchange is in question.
Some might call this purity, but it should not be called that, because it hitches a ride to genetic purity, and we know where that leads. Also pure does not mean best. It just means most unchanged, which often means less successful and more brittle. Creoles are antifragile.
It is often the case that creoles are more useful (successful) than pure languages. Creoles occur at points of contact, trade, exchange, invasion, colonization, enslavement, expansion and diffusion. Development and populations tend to benefit in those situations, so creoles are probably more likely to be useful and survive.
English is not the simplest language. It is certainly a mongrel, if not an academically verified creole.
English does not have a standard. Famously, the first serious and comprehensive modern dictionary (OED) documented actual usage, not imagined correctness.
By contrast, French, and most European languages, have a state-sponsored Academy to rule how the language should be used [1]. Central planning never works. English has evolved through many epochs of tribal conflict, invasion, conquest, colonization, trade, economic success, diasporas, intellectual influence, literature and modern media.
Ironically, it is more of a lingua franca than French. Notice how English beautifully and flexibly adopts a foreign
phrase for a foreign pidgin trade language, which did not include English :)
Many distant historical languages only survived by fervent religious preservation, rather than practical usefulness. Vernaculars diverged, as expected. Latin and Sanskrit come to mind. Priests self-perpetuated their influence, by ensuring they were the only people educated in an obscure dead language, who could read and interpret holy books. A nice rent-seeking grift if you can keep it going for 2,000 years (Catholic church; 500 years earlier for Protestants).
So the more interesting question does not involve the word creole, but instead asks: what are the current languages with the longest period of isolation?
[1] Not coincidentally, the law is the same. English Common Law says you can do anything reasonable, until someone complains, then judges resolve the case, and it becomes a precedent in the common law. But the French have a top-down Napoleonic Code, which tries to describe everything that's forbidden. Needless to say, thanks to the war-mongering megalomaniac Little Corsican, most of Europe has the same legal framework (and also drive on the right, because of Napoleon+Hitler - a remarkable double-punch combination).
Yeah, I figured that (after the fact). I figured that it wouldn't be harmful to post it. I am deeply apologetic, if it caused trauma. That was not the intent.
I read the headline on my iPad, just after I woke up. Just got back from my run, and I'll read the article after my shower.
I figured some helpful soul would do an RTFA, if that was the case, and was not disappointed.
It's closer to Dutch or German. I had no issue understanding transit signage in Amsterdam. The difficult words are calques and idioms that don't directly translate, i.e. opponthoud. Exit is uitgang, literally an "outgoing". Entrance is ingang, ingoing.
Once upon a time I was walking with a friend around Amsterdam and a man walked up to me and asked me where something was (a nearby restaurant), I answered in English with directions and he thanked me, then a moment later this exchange happened:
- Wait! You can speak Netherlands?
- No. Sorry.
- But you can! I am speaking it!
- No you're not! You're speaking English!
He just blinked and walked off, probably assuming I was playing a trick, but my friend asked what that was all about, and had to convince me that she didn't understand anything he was saying, and wouldn't have said anything to me at all about it except that she heard me insist he was speaking English!
She asked me to try and remember what exactly I was hearing, and I realised I couldn't! I could only remember something like "do you know where [placename that sounded familiar] is?" and maybe that there was a heavy accent, but not exactly how it sounded.
Every now and then I think of this and I wonder if I actually understand English at all, or if I'm just so used to saying that I understand it (in response to something that sounds something like a question) that I started to believe it.
Very much reminds me of a Kids in the Hall skit from ages ago. Two guys are at a party, one says "hello", the other says -- in perfect English -- "Sorry I don't understand you, I don't speak English. please don't beat me up." The first guy assumes it's a joke and plays along until he gets annoyed at the perfect accent and responses ("no really, I don't understand what you're saying, nor what I'm saying, I've just practiced this conversation a lot. please don't beat me up.")
Eventually the first guy tires of being mocked by this guy claiming not to speak English and beats the guy up.
Totally hilarious example of what you experienced taken to an extreme.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vgoEhsJORU
When I was a kid my boychoir hosted a choir from Estonia (this was before the fall of the Iron Curtain, so this was a big deal), and I remember when I was trying to help out back-stage at their concert and one of the Estonian boys needed help, but the only thing he could say was "I don't speak English", in a perfect midwestern accent (the Estonian choir director had drilled his entire choir on that one phrase). The cognitive dissonance was hard to deal with.
Prior to a trip to Poland I listen to some language tapes and learn how to say "I don't understand Polish" in polish (something like "nya rezumium popolski").
Almost everybody understood English and finally when I ran into somebody who didn't and used that Polish phrase, I realized I could have just said in English "I don't understand Polish" and it actually would have been clearer communication.
I learned the same phrase in perfect BBC Polish and it backfired. I said it so well that the Poles just ignored it and continued to speak in Polish. Then I ended up with a Polish girlfriend back in the states and learned real fast. She was gorgeous.
That was exactly the response I got.
However, I did not end up with a Polish girlfriend. Your "She was gorgeous", is, I recall, redundant.
> Your "She was gorgeous", is, I recall, redundant.
Your recollection is accurate
I don’t understand why it would have been clearer to use a language they didn’t understand. Actually a lot of comments under this article aren’t making a lot of sense. A lot of claims of of paradox where I don’t see it.
By saying something in their language, you imply that you do speak a little bit of Polish.
I wonder if that’s before or after the classic Family Guy gag:
https://youtu.be/cFN46vwg0M0?si=ycF5-duHXKBXoOZ1
Kids in the hall ended 7 years before family guy premiered.
They picked up a new season https://m.imdb.com/title/tt11921588/
This is a fascinating phenomenon that I've encountered before. It seems that some multilingual people cannot easily tell which language they are speaking and/or switch languages during conversation.
A friend who is learning Dutch once complained to me that Dutch speakers will switch to English the moment they hear you are struggling with the language. I suggested she should explicitly ask people to keep the conversation in Dutch.
In one instance, she did that, and the (native Dutch-speaking) person she was talking to agreed to her request, and then proceeded in English anyway! She asked that person multiple times, and they just kept speaking English without addressing her request. Baffling.
I tend to switch to the language hinted at by the accent of the person I'm speaking to. And I only notice which language I speak when I can't find a word. The question then becomes whether I can substitute the word from another language familiar to the recipients.
In bilingual places you'll see people switching mid-sentence when they have a better expression in the other language for what they are about to say.
You may find this interesting - "13 American Accents Ranked EASIEST to HARDEST to Understand": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=go6qDjwO69M
Towards the end I have no chance of understanding it.
When watching German films with subtitles, I will sporadically understand phrases. When it happens it doesn't sound like German; it's some very strange English dialect. Ich habe das gestern Abend gesungen. I have that yester evening a-sung.
Surreal. Is English your native language?
My wife had a very similar experience, except in her case, we were awaiting a flight somewhere outside the US—I think in Asia—and she carried on a conversation with a group of flight attendants in Spanish (her second language, but she's fluent).
Quite a ways in it emerged that they were from an Italian airline and speaking Italian. They were no doubt (we imagine) well used to speakers of Romance languages especially Spanish making themselves understood... she however was quite entertained.
(This being HN I suppose it's de rigeur to cite Richard Feynman's bit about Italian dialectical differences leaving room for him to entertain himself by amiably yelling made-up Italian to people in his neighborhood, who chalked up his unintelligibility to such differences, not realizing they were being trolled as it were...)
This is very much debatable. Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin, whereas half of English words are Latinic or Romanic. [1]
Some properties of English's grammar are also more similar to Romance languages than Germanic ones. For example, whereas Germanic languages only mark tense on verbs, English verbs (like Spanish verbs) are marked with aspect in addition to tense: there is a distinction between "I played tennis"/"I have played tennis"/"I was playing tennis".
I'm not saying English is a Romance language. But it's a much more interesting problem to figure out why it's not considered a Romance language than you imply.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_influence_in_English
> This is very much debatable. Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin, whereas half of English words are Latinic or Romanic. [1]
I think that's complicated by the fact that many english words of latin origin were inherited from a germanic source and thus from an intelligibility standpoint the overlap between english and dutch or german is partially additive with latin. e.g. [1]
Unfortunately the source is dead, but at one point a study ranked english/german as 60% lexical similarity compared to english/french at 27% [2]. Anecdotally, I think dutch and german are easier for an english speaker because of comparatively more overlap in simple words. Heavy use of compound words in dutch/german also gives an english listener a better chance of recognizing part of the word and inferring the meaning from context.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_Latinates_of_G...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity
> Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin, whereas half of English words are Latinic or Romanic.
Are you measuring by fraction of words in a word list, or fraction of words in a typical utterance? Word usage is highly non-uniform, so you'll get very different ratios between the former and latter.
>Are you measuring by fraction of words in a word list, or fraction of words in a typical utterance?
I think he's measuring the first, which gives a skewed picture, the latter is why english is considered a germanic language. The core of the language is all germanic words and you can still get by reasonably well without using any of the french/latin additions. Generally if a word is smaller and less 'fancy' it's of germanic origins, if it's longer and 'fancier' it's probably of romance origins.
English verbs (like Spanish verbs) are marked with aspect in addition to tense: there is a distinction between "I played tennis"/"I have played tennis"/"I was playing tennis".
Where is the verb marking you speak of? Because I don't see any difference between played and played. Your example of how English uses auxiliary verbs to convey different verb aspects is a Germanic construct. I don't really understand how you use this as an example of Romance lineage in English.
I think they're saying the difference is between "played" and "have played." The difference is more distinguished in other verbs, like "ate" vs "have eaten." The word "ate" is the past tense, and "eaten" is the participle.
And it's different in that "have" implies some sort of connection to the present. You wouldn't say "When I was a kid, I have played a lot of video games." You'd say "When I was a kid, I played a lot of video games."
I don't think this should imply a Romance connection, though, as Germanic languages do it, too. Using "have" and a participle seems like more of an areal feature to languages from Western Europe.
With respect to past tense, a "common" thing in english appears to be that the imperfect of a verb is the same word as the past particilpe of that verb. So "played" can be the imperfect tense itself, or the participle of perfect tense in "have played".
In German, this doesn't happen. Imperfect tense is often formed by using a "-te" ending to the verb (so "spiel(en)" -> "spielte"), while the past participle prepends "ge-" and appends "t" or "en" (so "gespielt" - (I have) "played"). The form "... was playing" would also exist, "... war spielen", and again with a difference how the infinitive is formed (-ing vs. -en).
To me, grammar of temporal forms in English is more Romance-language than German language. The fact that English lost any form of case, and most of gender, is neither German nor Romance though.
I sometimes used to joke with English friends that the language is the least common denominator of all the people overrunning the Island in the last 3000 years. Use a bit of everything, leave all the hard stuff out, and write it in a nonphonetic way like Irish.
German does not have this feature! In German, there is no difference in meaning between "Ich spielte Tennis" and "Ich habe Tennis gespielt". (The difference is in register, "Ich spielte Tennis" is more formal.)
In English, in contrast, there is a clear difference in usage between, say, "I was playing tennis while my kids were in school", and "I have played tennis while my kids were in school".
(forgot to say, German would know "Ich war Tennis spielen ..." as much as "Ich habe Tennis gespielt ..."; the first one would be considered imperfect passive, and yes I would agree perfect passive, "Ich bin Tennis spielen gewesen ..." would be unusual to say. The english form, "I have been playing tennis ..." is common though. As is "I have played tennis", and yes I'd agree the two aren't interchangeable)
I defer to you for that, simply because I'm a native speaker of German and "only" long-term fluid in English. I don't entirely grasp the difference between the two - other than "phrasing" (and on that level it exists in both), and would be likely to use them interchangeably. In both German and English.
> Germanic languages only mark tense on verbs, English verbs (like Spanish verbs) are marked with aspect in addition to tense:
What exactly do you mean by "aspect"?
> there is a distinction between "I played tennis"/"I have played tennis"/"I was playing tennis".
Sure:
-- (I) played (Tennis) ~~ jugué
-- (When I) played (Tennis) ~~ jugaba
-- (When I've) played (Tennis) ~~ jugado
English (like German) might say they need auxiliary words to explain what's going on, and Spanish people might say they're just conjugating the verb differently, but I think this is just because things are written down;
Because, if I say any of these sentences in Spanish or English rapidly enough, someone who does not know the language will not know where each word begins and ends, and it may just sound like English "conjugates" at the beginning of words and Spanish "conjugates" at the end. What's the real difference here?
> But it's a much more interesting problem to figure out why [English is] not considered a Romance language than you imply.
I think most of the time people talk about the "rules" of a language, we're not really talking about something that will help acquire the language (or be better understood): we're really just yapping about geography and time.
So what do you think would be different if English was more widely considered a Romance language?
I am referring to aspect in the sense that it's used in linguistics [1].
I'm honestly getting a lot of responses here from people who clearly don't have a good grasp of linguistics, but you take the cake by composing a long-form response without at least bothering to Google the terms I have used.
Language families are not just formed across geography and time. Genetically, Hindi is closer to French than it is to Tibetan. People move, you know.[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_aspect
You don't know what words are based on pauses, but whether you can rearrange them in a different sentence.
The most frequently used words are almost all Germanic. There are a lot of technical words with Latin or Greek etymologies that are hardly used in quotidian conversation.
> quotidian
iswydt
Don’t bring Welsh into this. ;)
Which 'aspect' is supposed to be missing in Germanic language verbs? Because I can say those three example forms (aspect tenses?) in both Swedish and German without any limitation.
I think the parent was specifically referring to "I was playing", which in German would not be expressed using only forms of the verb. You would have to use an adverb, as in "ich spielte gerade". Or you could noun the verb: "ich war am Spielen".
Nit: isn’t “playing” itself “nouning the verb” via a gerund / participle construct?
I actually am not sure of the subtleties on this grammatical point.
"Ich war am Spielen" is not really Standard German. It's a West German/Ripuarian dialect form that people from that area sometimes use when conversing in Standard German. But yes, it does communicate the progressive aspect in the same manner that "I was playing" does in English. I agree that "nouning" the verb is an arbitrary distinction.
Even if you want to give this one to German, English also has the prospective aspect, which is missing in German (prospective "I'm going to play tennis", vs. perfective "I will play tennis").
> Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin
That's the % in the dictionary. More than half of Japanese vocabulary in the dictionary is based on Chinese but no one argues Japanese is a Chinese creole. I forget by whom but it was once pointed out to me that in some genres - ranging from drinking songs to nursery rhymes - the words that come from Old English often make up more than 90% of the words. Similarly, if you sample the dialog in a kitchen or office while people gossip the ratio is also going to skew heavily like 70 - 80% Germanic. (Japanese shows a similar effect with all its Chinese vocabulary.)
Indeed, it's not tricky to write about everyday grounded things with nothing but straight Anglo-Saxon roots. (I've been doing it so far this whole paragraph -- oh that's Greek.) Difficult to achieve similar results utilizing exclusively Latinate vocabulary.
Of course, a history book or engineering manual will be different, and Graeco-Latin vocabulary might well be in the majority there.
> But it's a much more interesting problem to figure out why it's not considered a Romance language than you imply.
the language backbone is still Germanic
You can barely order food or drinks in Dutch in Amsterdam. Pancake house, server doesn’t speak Dutch. Local pub, server doesn’t speak Dutch. I don’t think that would happen in London or New York. You go to the pub or NY diner and they can’t speak English
incidentally, outgang is technically a modern English word, but I've never heard it spoken in real life. You can see literary uses of its precessor "utgang" in Old English here [0]
[0]https://bosworthtoller.com/search?q=utgang
the question is not really whether english is germanic (it's clearly germanic! nobody disagrees!) but whether it's a creole
opponthoud -> oponthoud
Although, because I'm looking at it, I get semantic satiation.
And it's closer to Frisian than Dutch. If the Battle of Hastings hadn't happened, these languages would be easily and mutually comprehensible. But that just shows that English descends from a branch of West Germanic. It changed gradually over time, kept a core Germanic vocabulary for its basic terms, and borrowed a lot from other languages as it needed more complex concepts, moreso than Modern High German which allows for easy word invention through combination.
Creoles are defined as languages emerging from pidgins, which themselves are often simplified forms of speech that allow linguistically separate groups to communicate. English is not that. It has an unbroken line of native speakers whose usage gradually evolved, while maintaining a system of complex syntactic rules as well as a literature.
Fantastic summation — much easier to understand than the article itself or the referenced Wikipedia pages.
In two short paragraphs I learned a ton about the distinctions between pidgins, creoles, and ("full"?) languages, in addition to how languages evolve in both subcultures and ("dominant"?) cultures.
I can now apply this knowledge in the context of the Louisiana Creole population, the name of which has previously served to confuse me as to the definition of "creole", as well as other creole languages and populations in the Caribbean.
There's a video where Eddie Izzard speaks Old English to a speaker of Frisian to demonstrate.
As a Norwegian speaker, I can also pick up much of that dialogue without the subtitles (though I have the advantage of also speaking passable German)
[dead]
It fascinates me how linguistics is completely enmeshed in human identity in a such a way that it is impossible to categorize languages without tackling some thorny questions. All the topics you aren't supposed to discuss in polite company (religion, political affiliation, and race) become unavoidable when trying to figure out the relationship of Serbian to Croatian, what is a creole vs. a pidgin, and the relationship of Yiddish and Ladino to medieval German and Spanish (respectively). Fun stuff.
You can argue either way, because "creole" to too vaguely defined. The term was invented to cover a set of languages that had interesting historical and structural similarities, but it turns out to be hard to establish the boundaries of the set. I think it's unfair to the researchers to politicize it as some "post-colonial" writers have been doing.
Creole is both a sociohistoric and linguistic term. The fact that the linguistic attributes are difficult to put boundaries on is extremely common for linguists: we won’t even claim to tell you what the definition of “word” is!
As for whether English is a Creole, it’s important to understand the motivation for Creolistics at its origin. It started, and continues, as an effort to legitimize a set of languages that before were considered illegitimate, un-interesting and utterly lacking on features worth studying. Part of that reputation is inextricably bound up in colonialism and racism.
Could you squint and call English a Creole? Sure. But you’d be doing the same disservice to “Creole” as you would by saying “technically we’re all [in the US] African American because all humans originated in Africa.” It’s a disingenuous point, and one that could easily be mistaken for trying to reverse the legitimization efforts that brought the term into existence to begin with.
This is an interesting take; I've often seen the opposition to English as a creole trying to stress that English is a "real" language as opposed to the true creoles, which are as you say often treated as less legitimized.
In that sense saying that English, the language of global communication and commerce, originated from a creole shows that that is a perfectly legitimate type of language and the same is true as other creoles. So to me it does more of a service than a disservice!
My personal definition of “word” is “a unit of semantic meaning”. Don’t ask me to define that.
Are numbers words? Are abbreviations words? Can a words contain other words? Can the same sentence have a different number of words when spoken versus written? Yes to all, and more.
Well, a good example is "ice cream" - I've seen it described as a "compound word without a hyphen" - which is fair because while ice cream has ice and cream as things that are used to make it, "ice cream" is definitely something distinct that is not trivially decomposable from the individual words.
A good definition of "a unit of semantic meaning" might be "fulfills a 'part of speech' in a sentence" - but even that is hard in English. For example: "I set the table up" - up modifies set to create the "phrasal verb" set up, and isn't related to its typical meaning of position. But remove that little word and the whole meaning of the sentence drastically changes. I've seen "up" in this instance described as an adverb, which tends to be the "throwaway stat" for words that don't fit any of the other traditional parts of speech.
Those are all very good examples.
Another I like is contractions. If say “can not” but it sounds like “can’t”, how many words is that?
I might say that “not” does not have any semantic meaning in isolation, as its only use is to negate the meaning of some other word, so perhaps “can not” and “can’t” are both just one word.
Perhaps such graphemes and phonemes aren’t actually words.
Another interesting question is whether words are truly a product of language (the natural skill) or writing (the synthetic technology). Did “words” exist before writing?
> Are numbers words? Are abbreviations words?
Not the interesting part, I think.
Is the English un- a word? Before you reflexively say no, consider that it has a specific meaning even though it never appears on its own and never receives word stress.
Is the French je a word? Before you reflexively say yes, consider that it never appears on its own and never receives word stress even though it has a specific meaning.
Is the Latin que a word? (The Q in SPQR, “senatus populusque Romanus”, although perhaps it’d be more authentic to write “SENATVSPOPVLVSQVEROMANVS”.) It has a well-defined meaning: “and”. It goes after whatever word you’d put “and” before; not syntactic constituent, word. It counts as a part of that word for the purposes of stress, so POpulus but popuLUSque.
> Is the French je a word? Before you reflexively say yes, consider that it never appears on its own and never receives word stress even though it has a specific meaning.
And? That doesn't change what the word "word" mean. Even in french, where "word" is "mot". There's no rule saying that a word has to be able to appear on its own to be named a "word".
More specifically "je" is defined, by linguists, in french, as a "mot grammatical".
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mot_grammatical
Maybe what you're after is the difference between a "mot grammatical" and a "mot lexical"? But both are "mots" (words).
> we won’t even claim to tell you what the definition of “word” is!
What's your best attempt? :-)
It's a bit like the old saying, "All models are wrong, some models are useful." The concept of a "word" is useful in everyday language, particularly in English -- it's host language, unsurprisingly enough -- and (probably) other Indo-European languages. However, in a more precise context, it breaks down because of edge cases.
For example, "words" in agglutinative languages[1] (e.g., Turkish) act very differently from "words" in English. It's hard (impossible?) to capture all that variety in a pithy way. "A string of morphemes" might work, but that's hardly a satisfactory definition!
Maybe a good analogy for the HN crowd would be like asking, "How many characters are in a string?"
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language
(IANALinguist).
I think it's obvious that there might not be one unifying definition that spans all human languages. "Word" is an English word refering to a specific of the English language. A class in JS is not the same as class in C++, big deal? ;)
As for English, I'm happy defining it through written language and spacing. "Can't", "unmarried", and "walkie-talkie" all one word each.
We might as well think of "word" in foreign enough languages as separate concepts. Doesn't seem meaningful to try to fit fundamentally different structures into the same conceptual molds. Which I guess ties back to your original point regarding if it's a useful excercise taxonimizing English as creole.
In Chinese, it's very difficult to define word boundaries.
Each character is a syllable, with a particular pronunciation and a constellation of meanings, usually closely related to one another. There are very common combinations of characters that appear together, which one could define as words. However, often, you could just as easily view the individual characters as words, or the combination as a word.
In some cases, the combination of two characters means something totally different from what the characters alone would mean (e.g., 东西, where the characters literally mean "East-West," but the combination means "thing"), so the combination is clearly a word. But sometimes, the meaning of the combination is basically a combination of the words' meanings (e.g., 吃饭, where the characters literally mean "eat-food," and the combination means "to eat, have a meal").
Because written Chinese doesn't use spaces, I guess it doesn't really matter what one defines as a word. The issue just doesn't come up, practically speaking.
I should note that typically discussions of language are more fruitful around spoken (or signed) languages rather than writing. Writing is an artificial formal system, and as such sometimes has aspects which are much more socilogiclaly determined than spoken language, which tends to evolve more freely.
Also, the problems you raise here are mostly just as applicable to English, though perhaps for somewhat fewer words. Is a "walkie-talkie" one word, or two? How about "unmarried"? The un- prefix has a distinct meaning on its own, even if it never appears alone, after all. Or how about "can't"? Technically it's a contraction of "can not", and those words do sometimes appear separately as well, even in this same meaning.
The issues I raise are somewhat applicable to English, but to a far lesser extent.
In Chinese, just about every syllable has its own set of meanings. In English, there are compound words, and some words have prefixes or suffixes, but you can't just arbitrarily break a word into its syllables and assign a meaning to every syllable. Imagine if the word "syllable" could be broken down as syl-la-ble, and every person who spoke English could tell you what "syl," "la" and "ble" individually meant. That's the situation in Chinese, for almost every polysyllabic word you can utter. They can almost all be decomposed into syllables that have individual meanings. It's a very different paradigm from English.
Yes, I understand there is a huge difference of the degree to which this applies to the language. I was just pointing out that none of these things should be alien to an English speaker, and even a linguist who only knew English would have had similar struggles to define "word" because of these problems (though of course they could have decided to file them under "exceptions", which doesn't work for Chinese).
Some times the boundaries between words in English are clear, and sometimes they are a bit blurry.
There is no generally accepted definition in linguistics, but AI researchers have come to the consensus that a word is one or more LLM tokens ;)
I’m not a linguist, but I would define a word as a part of a sentence composed out of one or more syllables, with word boundaries either implicitly or explicitly specified by different methods in different languages, e.g. by using pauses, longer or shorter phonemes, by using accents, rhythm, or intonation, or simply by remembering words as part of learning a lexical vocabulary.
A word is something that can be categorized as to which part of speech it belongs (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, etc.)
Depending on the languages it’s not always clear whether prefixes and/or suffixes are part of the word a separate words.
Similarly with compound words - do they count as a single or multiple words?
A short sentence in one language may enter another language as a single opaque word.
It depends on the architecture of your CPU.
\s\w+\s
;)
すみません! It's because you have no space around. A more correct regexp would be \b\w+\b, with zero-width "word boundary" psttetbs instead of spaces.
That's just passing the problem onto how you define \b. Since Japanese uses no spaces, it would match entire phrases or sentences as "words", treating only punctuation as word boundaries.
"Ain't ain't a word 'cause it don't match the regex."
BTW, should be "\b\w+\b". The \b is a zero-width match for the start or end of a word. Your pattern requires a space before and after:
That makes sense. I was trying to translate "A word is a group of letters with whitespace on either side" into regex.
I was being facetious, obviously, but you've already identified a serious problem with that definition (is "what's" two words or one?)
> It started, and continues, as an effort to legitimize a set of languages
OK, but this is not a scientific definition.
Nothing wrong with such words, but trying to logically reason about them is not going to be fruitful.
The subject of the quote is Creolistics, not the definition of Creole. If you are looking for scientific definitions of linguistic categories you are going to be very disappointed. Language involves humans. Language is messy.
As well, any question that involves “meaning” must itself answer the question “to whom?” I answered from the perspective of (some) linguists, but as another user pointed out, non-linguists might very well and with no ill intention consider it an appropriate term.
In Spanish 'criollo' is the word for 'creole', and its meaning has changed a fair bit from the French. It's more like "local", "ex-colonial", "dating all the way back to colonial times".
> OK, but this is not a scientific definition.
> Nothing wrong with such words, but trying to logically reason about them is not going to be fruitful
Very few phenomena outside of physics have scientific definitions, yet we logically reason about them all the time, as we indeed must to make any sense of our world ethically, socially, and economically. Even making the physical human-built world around us relies a great deal on non-scientific definitions.
The entire field of linguistics is based upon reasoning about and finding patterns on top of "non-scientific" definitions. As professor McWhorter (quoted in the article) has said in his lectures: "It's all just a puff of air".
It's more about how people define the term. I don't think I've seen the position made disingenuously.
Most people I've spoken to think of creole as a mixed language that becomes it's own language. To them that describes English and how it came to be.
Even if you require colonisation to be part of it the position can stand. The Anglo-Saxon's colonisation by the Romans and the Normans are a big part of how the English mixture was formed.
If your definition requires an indigenous, non-European, language being modified by contact with a European coloniser's language. Then sure, English isn't a creole language. But I don't think that's how most people use the term creole colloquially.
You're going to have to explain how fifth century Germanic settlers in Britain were colonised by the Romans who arrived in Britain four centuries earlier and were largely a spent force by the time the Germans rolled in ...
Thanks, I'd have a hard time doing that. I got the history reversed.
Dang, and it's too late for me to add an edit now as well.
I think the broad point still stands, in spite of that error.
> The Anglo-Saxon's colonisation by the Romans
That never happened; it was the other way around.
Germanic conquerors may be first partially reverse-colonized by the culture they conquered (which heavily romanized with Celtic substrate) and then later further colonized by norman conquerors who were themselves carriers of the remnants of the Roman cultural heritage.
Germanic people (franks) conquered Gaul and you wouldn't call modern french a Germanic language.
Linguistic dynamics are utterly fascinating and complex
Slightly off-topic, but for the Frankish/French/German evolution, this is usually considered a "marker": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oaths_of_Strasbourg
I'm not sure if any such "foundational" documents exist for English.
I've been listening to The Rest is History podcast lately, and a lot of this happened in Islam via converts.
Tom Holland was saying that many now fundamental Islamic practices were imported into the faith via converts. For example such as praying 5 times a day was apparently a Zoroastrian practice.
The same thing happened to many Cristian practices.
The Eucharist may have originated in the cult of Dionysus.
Probably also Christmas is also a tradition that bears the roots of a pre-christian festivity that has been merged with / subsumed in Christian tradition
Why don't just define a new word?
I mean you're linguists! :D
Pseudo-Creole, a language that's technically a Creole, but doesn't fit the sociohistoic context.
I think, it would be funny if a word for giving specific languages legitimacy is used to define a language that had more legitimacy to begin with.
Post-creole
I expect that a creole language will evolve over centuries into something that is less and less considered as a creole when compared with more recent creole languages.
I think it's more useful to consider "creolization events" in the history of a language rather than a blanket "creole/non-creole" attribute
Do pseudocreoles include concreoles, eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belter_Creole ?
Oye Hakalowda! Kowmang showxa lang belta hiya ke?
It's not a very interesting concept if it's limited to one place and time. I think you can abstract a lot of the features of the languages originally classified as creoles and apply them where-ever they make sense.
Personally I would say that Modern English is not a creole, and Old English is not a creole, but there was certainly a period of time in the early middle english period were England was invaded by the Norse and Normans that a lot of creole-like changes happened to the english language -- particularly the loss of grammatical gender and many declensions and conjugations and a simplification of grammar, and it happened for similar reasons -- an upper strata of society that spoke a different language being forced to communicate with the local people. And English at the time was definitely not considered an important language worth studying and people very rarely bothered even writing any books in English. I think it's worth thinking about the similarities and difference between what happened to english in the early middle english period, and other "true" creole languages beyond just saying it's not creole because it didn't happen in the 18th century.
I don't understand this comment. It makes absolutely no claims about the definition of a creole, and it makes no claims about how English doesn't conform to that definition. It just talks about "squinting" at languages, mentions black Americans for no particular reason, and accuses anyone who would argue that English is a creole of being "disingenuous" for trying to reverse the "legitimazation."
It's like the perfect troll comment. Makes no argument, implies anyone who would disagree is probably racist, and uses black Americans as a comparison for no particular reason.*
Here's my opinion: English is the result of a simplification of grammar caused by Old Norse and Old English crashing into each other with the same words but different grammar; then the French forced French usage in commerce, so most people started using a ton of French words with this English grammar. That last part sounds exactly like a creole.
Is your argument that considering English a creole lets English people off the hook for something? Are things that happen to non-white people somehow delegitimized when they are also noted in white people? Are white people so special and unique that everything else has to be defined by it's non-whiteness? If I'm missing your point, what was it?
[*] As a black American, I'm starting to recognize this as a long-standing feature of western rhetoric. A lot of modern argument seems to boil down to which side is more like black Americans. Humorously, actual black Americans are never considered to be like metaphorical black Americans; we're actually spoiled whiners with a sense of entitlement.
> I don't understand this comment. It makes absolutely no claims about the definition of a creole, and it makes no claims about how English doesn't conform to that definition. It just talks about "squinting" at languages, mentions black Americans for no particular reason, and accuses anyone who would argue that English is a creole of being "disingenuous" for trying to reverse the "legitimazation."
> It's like the perfect troll comment. Makes no argument, implies anyone who would disagree is probably racist, and uses black Americans as a comparison for no particular reason.*
I don't think you're engaging with the author's point: it is _precisely_ that the study of Creole languages wasn't a top-down predetermined "this is the definition of something, and we're studying it" program, but arose after the fact to label the work of a school of linguistics.
> Is your argument that considering English a creole lets English people off the hook for something?
> If I'm missing your point, what was it?
The point is that the author assumes that concepts arise by labelling the results of historical processes, but ultimately our goal is to describe a historical process.
It's not warranted to jump to speculating about "western rhetoric" or "modern argument", which doesn't substantially engage with the OP. Nor is it warranted to speculate that the author "implies anyone who would disagree is probably racist".
>Here's my opinion: English is the result of a simplification of grammar caused by Old Norse and Old English crashing into each other with the same words but different grammar; then the French forced French usage in commerce, so most people started using a ton of French words with this English grammar. That last part sounds exactly like a creole.
Grandparent's point is that you're stretching the meaning of the term to a level of generality that applies to everything, therefore meaning nothing in particular.
Your point applies to French just as much as English: Gaulic Celtic speakers poorly adopt Latin after getting bull rushed by Romans, then mix in Frankish terms when the Romans' former allies take over; or how about Sicilian: a mash-up of Latin, Greek, Germanic, Arabic conquerors.
You have to go pretty far to find a language which isn't a fusion of other languages that results from different peoples entering into extended contact.
'Creole' is a word that only appears with its current meaning and history in the last 100 or so years, grandparent is simply preserving that particularity. Nothing more.
No one in 1200s Europe thought English or Sicilian were languages not worth engaging with as actual languages owing to modern racial connotations.
As an aside: would you know any good resources/other ways to learn about the social history of Sicilian-the-language? I know Maltese has had a similar social history, and its Arabic inheritance is very clear.
They definitely did think English was not a language worth engaging with. Even literate people in England barely thought of English as a language worth studying -- they wrote everything in Latin. Certainly the Norman conquerers only bothered to learn the minimum amount of English they had to to talk to the locals. That's why there are so many French words in English.
I think the status of a "creole" language is sort of time limited. After enough people are born speaking it and it's diverged enough from it's origin languages, it's just a language. English probably was very much like a creole language in particular places and times (particularly in northern england after the viking invasions for example).
That attitude is not unique to England though. Latin was the lingua franca of the European literate and scientific world, first because of the Church, and then because of the Renaissance. Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza also wrote primarily in Latin instead of their country's language. Pretty similar to how we are conversing in English right now, regardless of what language we speak in our home town.
>They definitely did think English was not a language worth engaging with. Even literate people in England barely thought of English as a language worth studying -- they wrote everything in Latin.
This... the point of the matter is that no one thought English was not a language in its own right. Not which landed aristocrat or educated clergymen wrote in English for other non-English speakers, which was the point of writing in Ecclesiastical Latin.
[flagged]
> The fact that the linguistic attributes are difficult to put boundaries on is extremely common for linguists: we won’t even claim to tell you what the definition of “word” is!
The definition of a "word" is always straightforward: a word is an atomic unit of language.
However, which units are or aren't atomic varies according to what it is you're measuring.
Lexically, "catch fire" is an atomic entity, which cannot be understood as the sum of its parts. It's just one part, and it needs its own dictionary entry, separate from "catch" and from "fire".
Syntactically, "catch fire" is definitely not atomic, because the past tense is "caught fire". From this perspective, it's enough to know "catch" and "fire".
Syntactically again, we can see that "an elephant" is in variation with "two elephants" / "my elephant" / "every elephant" / etc., and it's clear that "an elephant" is not atomic, but is understood as the composition of "a(n)" with "elephant".
Phonologically, as the citation-form spelling above hinted, "an elephant" is atomic; the article cannot exist independently and must attach to another word. Without knowing what that word is, you won't know how the article is pronounced.
Specialized terms for both of these types of phenomena exist - lexical words that are too large to be syntactic words are called idioms; syntactic words that are too small to be phonological words are called clitics. But the general lesson is that, despite the definition of "word" being clear, membership in the category varies according to what aspect of the language you're looking at.
By god you've done it, you've solved linguistics!
This doesn't even begin to cover things, even for English. First of all, "catch fire" is at least partly understandable from its constituent parts - "catch" has a great variety of related meanings, and they all have to do with something taking hold of something else; I'm sure any English speaker who has encountered both words would intuit the meaning of "catch fire" without any problem, especially if they also encountered "to catch a cold". Of course, the meaning is slightly different, and it is quite invariant.
Your analysis of the phonetic atomicity is also unsatisfactory. First, the article can very well be pronounced independently - I can say "English has a single indefinite article, with two forms: 'a' or 'an'". Secondly, the 'a' form can be pronounced in two different ways, depending on how you want to highlight it within a sentence: "he ate a piece" could use the schwa, or the "long a" if you want to highlight the article itself "he ate [ay] piece, not your piece". So the article's pronunciation can change independently of the word it is applying to. Finally, in at least some English accents, many words can be pronounced differently in certain sequences than others - for example, in modern Southern English, an "r" sound is introduced almost always in speech when a word that ends in a vowel sound is followed by another word that starts with a vowel sound, e.g. "I saw-R-it". By your description, neither "saw" nor "it" are individual word phonologically, since you don't know how they will be pronounced unless we know the following word.
Overall, the atomicity of a linguistic construct is highly debatable, even in a particular context.
> First of all, "catch fire" is at least partly understandable from its constituent parts - "catch" has a great variety of related meanings, and they all have to do with something taking hold of something else
If you want to analyze it that way, you'll find that the semantics are the reverse of what you predict: when you catch fire, it's the fire that takes hold of you.
> First, the article can very well be pronounced independently - I can say "English has a single indefinite article, with two forms: 'a' or 'an'".
This argument is predicated on forgetting the difference between use and mention. What part of speech would you say an is in that sentence? Is it an article?
> Secondly, the 'a' form can be pronounced in two different ways, depending on how you want to highlight it within a sentence
Yes, problems arise when you need to place sentence-level stress on a feature that is too weak to bear stress. The same problem occurs for any English clitic, including 's, which in the general case doesn't even include a vowel. Most notably here, there's nothing about this specific to a before consonants; the rules for placing stress don't know what word you're following a with. If you need to stress an, the usual choice is /æ/. But also notably, when native speakers do this, they recognize it as a problem - it's just one they may not be able to work around.
> Finally, in at least some English accents, many words can be pronounced differently in certain sequences than others - for example, in modern Southern English, an "r" sound is introduced almost always in speech when a word that ends in a vowel sound is followed by another word that starts with a vowel sound, e.g. "I saw-R-it". By your description, neither "saw" nor "it" are individual word phonologically
This is not a word-level phenomenon in any way; intrusive R also occurs between syllables of a single word, as long as there's an appropriate vowel-vowel sequence. Placing one between saw and it would not normally be viewed as altering the pronunciation of either word (Which one do you think is altered? I guess by nonrhotic standards it would have to be it), but as the application of a general rule.
Placing /n/ between a and elephant is not the application of a general rule, it's the application of a rule specific to a.
> Overall, the atomicity of a linguistic construct is highly debatable, even in a particular context.
You're saying that people argue over which items count as words, not that they argue over what it means to count as a word.
> If you want to analyze it that way, you'll find that the semantics are the reverse of what you predict: when you catch fire, it's the fire that takes hold of you.
That is one of the meanings of catch, just like when you catch a cold, the cold takes hold of you, or when you catch your foot on something, that thing took hold of your foot.
> This argument is predicated on forgetting the difference between use and mention. What part of speech would you say an is in that sentence? Is it an article?
Fair enough, though I would still argue that being able to make a noun out of the article in this way relies on them having a stable, recognizable, individual pronunciation.
> This is not a word-level phenomenon in any way; intrusive R also occurs between syllables of a single word, as long as there's an appropriate vowel-vowel sequence.
Well, we are trying to define what a "word" even is, so you can't bring this distinction in. A priori, "saw it" could be a word, just as my whole comment could be a single word. We are trying to come up with a formal definition of what it means to be a word; if we want "an elephant" to be a single word and "saw-r-it" to be two words, we need to come up with a distinction between these that doesn't presuppose that "saw" and "it" are separate words.
> Placing one between saw and it would not normally be viewed as altering the pronunciation of either word (Which one do you think is altered? I guess by nonrhotic standards it would have to be it), but as the application of a general rule.
Depending on the exact accent, not all words follow this rule. In certain accents, at least, it is quite specific to words that have an 'r' in their spelling (well, to words that historically had an r sound that was lost, and is usually preserved in the spelling), so "four o'clock" would get a linking R, but "saw it" would not. So at least in these cases, by your definition, we'd have to say that "four" is not an individual word, phonetically speaking. Also note that linking/intrusive R doesn't appear inside morphemes, normally, only between morphemes, or between morphemes and suffixes. So you get [Kafka-r-esque] in certain accents, but never inside, say, "dais".
> Placing /n/ between a and elephant is not the application of a general rule, it's the application of a rule specific to a.
This could also have been a general rule, that happens to apply to a single word in modern English. Regardless, as I have mentioned before, if you want to define "phonological word" as a unit whose exact pronunciation is only knowable when you have all parts present, then lots of phrases are phonological words in English, unless you add a lot of exceptions to your definition.
> You're saying that people argue over which items count as words, not that they argue over what it means to count as a word.
These are not that different in practice. If you have a good formal definition, then you should be able to say for any object whether it is a word, a part of a word, or a sequence of words. If you can't do that, you don't really have a definition. The definition you gave basically equates word with atomic, but then if "atomic" is not well defined, or even definable, then we're back to square one of not knowing what a word actually means.
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/793/
Is English just badly pronounced French [video]:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40495393
French is just badly pronounced Latin/Italian.
Seriously, French is just a very crassified Romance language. As a near-native French speaker I was shocked one time in Paris at a restaurant where our server was from Italy and pronounce every letter in every French word and I still understood him.
Dropping 's's (and leaving behind a circumflex to remind one of the dropped 's')? That's a pretty crass evolution (but see the note at the bottom). Dropping trailing letters in words? Same thing. I understand that "oc" is really the Latin "hoc", meaning "this", and that "oui" is just an evolution -a shortening- of "hoc hic" ("this that"). "Oi" (pronounced "wah" in English) is just a vowel shift.
French is often treated as a high-class language, so I say 'crass' mainly to remind people that the evolution of French was really the result of every day people not treating it like a dead language to be preserved.
You're totally right, but just a minor correction: the word oui comes from oïl, which was the way to say "yes" in a family of languages called the langues d'oïl.[1] The word oïl is a shortened form of hoc ille in Latin.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langues_d%27o%C3%AFl
Oh thank you for that! I had wondered.
Here is a different video by the same person (the `robWords` channel)
“How to translate French words WITHOUT KNOWING FRENCH (3 clever tricks)”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3BGaA3PC9tQ
I learned a lot from this and continue to find words that these lessons apply to.
Brilliant video. I would hardly have seen the connection between 'guêpe' and 'wasp' before.
https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/humor/spelling-reform.h...
If so it is equally badly spelled German.
German is badly spelt German. Damn High German consonant shift.
(E.g.compare ship, schip, Schip, skib, skip vs. Schiff, or day, dag, Dag, dag, vs. Tag etc. - we'd have a far neater, gradual Germanic transition around the North Sea if Low German had "won".
The book "fom winde ferfeelt" is basically a book-length version of the joke, written by a brazilian who was frustrated with the inconsistency in the rules of the German language.
*spelt.
"Spelled" is a perfectly cromulent word in UK English (the best English).
Interesting. I thought spelt and learnt were UK English.
They are UK English, but "spelled" and "learned" are in common usage too. I wouldn't consider it to be an Americanism if I read/heard those versions (I'm English, myself).
personally I prefer wheat.
Nope.
https://english.stackexchange.com/a/5714/
Long after the sword was smelt
In foreign lands did wielder welt.
The script upon the scabbard belt
Thereupon became misspelt.
A missing n?
"that strategy of borrowing a word but giving it a slightly narrower meaning" – I think this happens with most borrowing, into any language. E.g. "opsjon" in Norwegian is from "option" but only means stock/legal options, never used in the common meaning of "choices". (And the video's own example with "les peoples".)
But my favorite example is when going into English from Norse, "fjord" has a quite narrow meaning in English, but must have been much broader in Norse when you look at Limfjorden in flat Denmark (more of a sound than a fjord) and Tunhovdfjorden (even Norwegians would think of this as a lake these days)
this kind of crippled borrowing seems universal though, you only complement your own language where you have a hole
Well of course, fjords should have a narrow meaning. That's kind of what separates them from bays isn't it?
The Norwegian words for bay - like vik, bukt, does not necessarily imply broad or open. The main distinction appear to be length.
Bukt or gulf are the words mostly use for major bays, but bukt in particular can also be used for very short, narrow inlets, while fjords are used for some of our largest bays.
The Oslo fjord for example, is quite broad and open for most of its length. Most of the smaller bays in the fjord are bukter, but the largest, longest of them are also named fjords.
Not really. We have some really wide fjords in Norway; Sognefjorden is 4.5 km wide at its widest. A fjord is technically any body of water carved out by glaciers (inland lakes or coast inlets), but the word fjord is used pretty indiscriminately; lots of fjords are not glacial in origin.
I used to joke with a friend of mine who was of Netherlands descent by saying that Dutch is misspelled English. (And, yes, I'm aware of the several rounds of orthographic reforms that Dutch has experienced.)
The bit about non rhyming poetry forms makes me wonder how brit-pop would have sounded without those "french" structures.
Old English poetry tends to have commonality at the beginnings of words (e.g. alliteration) rather than rhyming at the ends of words. Or so I remember from The History of English Podcast.
It's now 180 episodes in and talking about Shakespeare. Old English was some episodes back, as you might imagine.
As with many others posting here IANALinguist.
thanks
With 40%+ Germanic vocabulary (per Braudel), is French rather a Germanic creole?
Is that the vocabulary of Germanic origin and imported from Germanic, or is it just the part of PIE that has not diverged between Latin and Germanic languages?
Mostly the former. Much of what is now France was dominated by speakers of Germanic languages after the fall of the Roman empire. They were eventually assimilated but left a linguistic legacy.
There's a good comment on the blog:
"This seems to me a rather feckless argument over how people want to define a term. Indisputably, modern English results from a blend of French and old English, in the process of which what we today call English absorbed a lot of French vocabulary, lost most of its inflection, and its verb conjugation was greatly simplified. Whether you want to call it a creole or not is pointless, what I just stated is still true."
English is basically a dialect of German spoken with French words.
The vast majority of our grammar rules come from German, whereas our vocabulary is a lot of French, however, mixed in with several hundred years of cultural integration due to the English-speaking world being hotbeds for immigration.
A few major differences between english and german that I think make them more than just a lexical substitution:
1. Word order
2. Morphology (ie you combine morphemes to create words differently in english and german)
This quote by John Nicoll is very poignant:
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
― James D. Nicoll
I love that quote and the imagery it invokes. I think it's funny because it feels true - English speakers aren't precious about roping in new words from other languages. I enjoy the concept of the hybrid word - a word made from a mix of languages (e.g. neuroscience, Minneapolis, cryptocurrency etc). "Eigenvalue" is a good one as it's a mix of German and French.
Funny ... I thought I was seeing Welsh but perhaps with too many vowels!
French + German
We know that human populations have been mixing throughout history, including with species that no longer exist.
We (Homo Sapiens) have genetic adaptations for speech, so it seems likely (but unproven AFAIK), that some Ur proto sound communication immediately fractured on migration, with isolated groups diverging rapidly, such that languages were not mutually comprehensible. Languages are cultural, so mutate much faster than genes. It seems unlikely that genetic adaptations for speech could evolve independently in different populations of our species.
So my expectation is that all languages could be described as creoles, and only the length of isolation since last contact and exchange is in question.
Some might call this purity, but it should not be called that, because it hitches a ride to genetic purity, and we know where that leads. Also pure does not mean best. It just means most unchanged, which often means less successful and more brittle. Creoles are antifragile.
It is often the case that creoles are more useful (successful) than pure languages. Creoles occur at points of contact, trade, exchange, invasion, colonization, enslavement, expansion and diffusion. Development and populations tend to benefit in those situations, so creoles are probably more likely to be useful and survive.
English is not the simplest language. It is certainly a mongrel, if not an academically verified creole. English does not have a standard. Famously, the first serious and comprehensive modern dictionary (OED) documented actual usage, not imagined correctness.
By contrast, French, and most European languages, have a state-sponsored Academy to rule how the language should be used [1]. Central planning never works. English has evolved through many epochs of tribal conflict, invasion, conquest, colonization, trade, economic success, diasporas, intellectual influence, literature and modern media.
Ironically, it is more of a lingua franca than French. Notice how English beautifully and flexibly adopts a foreign phrase for a foreign pidgin trade language, which did not include English :)
Many distant historical languages only survived by fervent religious preservation, rather than practical usefulness. Vernaculars diverged, as expected. Latin and Sanskrit come to mind. Priests self-perpetuated their influence, by ensuring they were the only people educated in an obscure dead language, who could read and interpret holy books. A nice rent-seeking grift if you can keep it going for 2,000 years (Catholic church; 500 years earlier for Protestants).
So the more interesting question does not involve the word creole, but instead asks: what are the current languages with the longest period of isolation?
[1] Not coincidentally, the law is the same. English Common Law says you can do anything reasonable, until someone complains, then judges resolve the case, and it becomes a precedent in the common law. But the French have a top-down Napoleonic Code, which tries to describe everything that's forbidden. Needless to say, thanks to the war-mongering megalomaniac Little Corsican, most of Europe has the same legal framework (and also drive on the right, because of Napoleon+Hitler - a remarkable double-punch combination).
[flagged]
> English is in all ways a Germanic language
Actually it's quite the outlier, due to its radically simplified verb system, loss of case and gender and large amounts of French vocabulary.
There's no "political program of obfuscation", there's simply a debate on whether these features make English a creole.
> it has absorbed loan words from Romance languages
Isn't a Creole defined by its simplified grammar rather than by the sources of its vocabulary?
No, that's a pidgin language. Creoles often develop out of pidgin languages but have full grammar and vocabularies.
No, it's neither. A creole is defined by its origins: it's a complete language that has developed out of a pidgin.
I was with you right up to the last sentence. There is no "larger political program of obfuscation" here", just sloppy use of terminology.
Obfuscating what?
That English is Germanic. A similar debate exists about how to categorize Yiddish, but for different reasons.
[flagged]
The SMBC from a couple of days ago, sort of spoke to that: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/arthur
That's the cartoon the Language Log post is commenting on. It's even included at the top of the entry.
Yeah, I figured that (after the fact). I figured that it wouldn't be harmful to post it. I am deeply apologetic, if it caused trauma. That was not the intent.
I read the headline on my iPad, just after I woke up. Just got back from my run, and I'll read the article after my shower.
I figured some helpful soul would do an RTFA, if that was the case, and was not disappointed.