“Now how many of y’all think BoBo gonna try to convince us that polls don’t matter… of course unless they are trash for Biden & great for Trump!”

Who speaks like this?

  • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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    11 months ago

    English is a terrible language, and I say that as a native speaker.

    It’s a language from an isolated island that only the lower class spoke for centuries. For generations English royalty didn’t even speak English.

    So the commoners just did whatever they wanted with it.

    It why we use English words for livestock, but when someone eats it, we use French.

    The people who could speak English were the ones raising the animals, not eating them.

    • cygnus@lemmy.ca
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      11 months ago

      It why we use English words for livestock, but when someone eats it, we use French.

      The people who could speak English were the ones raising the animals, not eating them.

      This is amusing but I’m not sure it’s accurate. Even in French (or other Latin languages) the words differ.

      Vache = Boeuf
      Cochon = Porc
      Poule = Poulet (as in English, chicken is the same)

      • orclev@lemmy.world
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        11 months ago

        There is an element of truth to what he said, but of course the reality is a lot more complicated. Generally the more low class and common a word is, the more likely it is to derive from Germanic, while the “fancier” a word is the more likely to come from French or some other language. E.G. mother and father derive from Proto-Germanic, while a word like mayor is derived from Latin by way of Old French.

        English is still an absolute trainwreck of a language though. It’s a thousand years of just kind of winging it in terms of grammar and vocabulary. It started as essentially a creole and then outlived both the languages it spawned from as well as just absorbing whatever random words and languages it bumped into along the way.

        Most other languages at least went through an overhaul or two along the way to clean up their worst eccentricities, but any attempts at “fixing” English over the years have been partial attempts at best and mostly just made things worse. In particular the current state of spelling in English is just the absolute worst with nearly all the rules being utterly arbitrary and just kind of randomly slapped together over the years.