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Admin
Could've been Dutch too, at least in the northeast. France was more south shore I think?
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We'll all be espeaking spanish soon.
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The problem is not that Bat Out of Hell is in bad taste and the Sound of Music is in good taste. The way that they're similar is that they are now both old fogey music.
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I had forgotten about the Dutch, but they had just about shot their load on the international conquest scene by then. The pain in the rear end was that bloody upstart corporal with delusions of empire (something the Europeans produce quite often). Which is one of the reasons why you got your independence, as fighting two wars is worse than fighting one war on two fronts (so to speak). Mind you we did give them a bit of a thrashing in 1812 (which is why the Whitehouse is called the white house - IIRC - something about it being black with soot)
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Depending on your cyber punk preferences, it will be that or Mandarin. But I get your point. The Spanish have a lot to answer for.
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Maybe. But the Mexicans and the Central / South Americans are actually moving in.
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That's an issue with having a big back garden, you need a lot of fencing to keep the vermin out.
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never mind, :hanzo: d.
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Continuing the discussion from Are You Using?:
The joke, of course, is that Brits can understand Americans, whatever dialect they are babbling in, but Americans have great difficulty understanding Brits, even if they are speaking in an accent not far removed from upper-class Bostonian.
It's the vocab, innit. Better adam and eve it, when you clap your mince pies on our dickybirds you don't have the foggiest.
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Most yanks are all wind and no trousers, or variations of. And thinking about that, I have absolutely no idea what it actually means other than that that you and I both know what it means. Were I to describe it some other way, the best I could come up with is: Put up or shut up.
And even then they still couldn't shut up. :rofl: :trolleybus: :taking_the_piss: :etc: :etc:
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I'll take a shot at that...
"Better believe it, when you clap your eyes on our words?"
Or was the joke the fact that your example was relatively unconvoluted? If so, whoosh me.
I often wish I could get the notice in Outlook at the top of the email while I'm composing it, but not the autoreply.
Also: My first thought, for some reason, was "Haven't I actually met a Miles Null?"
I haven't, by the way.
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I'm ignoring everything in your post before the following quote because it had fuck-all to do with what I posted.
When choosing "you and I" or "you and me", use "you and I" as the subject of the phrase. "You and me" should be used as the object of the phrase or after a preposition. This is even confirmed by the link you provide in your post:
This is the same in both the American and British dialects of English. Now that we have establish an agreement of the rules of grammar to be applied here, let's review the sentence in question:
Since the only part truly being contested is the first phrase, let's deconstruct that. Here, the first "I" is the subject of the phrase, "to include" is the action of the phrase, and "you and I" is the object. Given the rules that we have agreed upon – based on the link you provided – the construction of the object is clearly incorrect and needs to be changed to "you and me".
Thank you for providing evidence that "as far as you are aware" isn't far enough. I recommend reading your sources in future before you try using them to support your ignorance.
Given that the rules of grammar in this case are the same, this little tidbit, though interesting, is irrelevant.
That's a dumb conclusion. The point that George Bernard Shaw was making is that 'Muricans and Brits speak the same language, but because of differences in idioms, cultures, and customs there are often misunderstandings. Unfortunately, because of our common language, the misunderstandings are easily missed and may even go unnoticed until it is too late to fix the problem.
And if you really want to take that kind of conclusion, you should be thanking the French for English existing as we know it. Before the Normans invaded England in the 11th century, "English" was a Germanic language.
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More or less what I was saying above but more neatly put. I forgot you and me - you and me is the object of the verb, hence accusative. We get confused in English because case endings are dying out and we only really retain them for pronouns. I, me, my where me is for everything other than nominative and genitive. But for you we only have you and your, i.e. you for everything except genitive. Thank Turing and Hopper that computer languages do not have inflections.
I agree with most of your post. But isn't English still a Germanic language? OK English has a lot of borrowings, and there are in fact two forms of English, though not to the same extent as with Greek.
e.g.
It is imperative that verification of identity of personnel eventuates prior to admission versus Check who people are before you let them in.
In short there is a pseudo-educated Latinate English deriving from the British private school system in which proficiency in Latin conveyed the highest academic status, and there is also a much more Germanic common English with shorter words.
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Because of this:
The rest of you post is pure 24 carat, grade A, Bullshit. The point of everything
Was to argue the point of the inclusion of the "you and I"
And to echo the sentiment of
I posted a non specific, untargeted, personally preferred, rewording of the "joke". If the was an ulterior motive, it was to demonstrate how some (so tightly) anally pedantic dickweeds get so wound up about a minor insignificant issue that they lose sight of the "big picture". Assuming, of course, they could see it it the first place perhaps is some form of compensation for the fact that they cannot see "it" to begin with
As for
Perhaps you should read "more" and not just abort your reading when you have found the "golden rivet" of a suitable size for your personal use (a very obscure, offensive reference).
Continuing on with:
Is the point I was making, about the quote and, I suppose, indirectly about the joke.
Finally:
Whilst the Normans did influence the English language, I think you will find it is still "Germanic", or Anglo-Saxon, as we would prefer to call it. Would you like some sample words?
Oh, yeah!. I was under the impression, that for an American to be considered French, is a insult. But I could be wrong about that.
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Really? I kayun kind of mayuk out Kayuntaeucky, but that's because I've lived a long time in the English South-West. Also, of course, we can often understand the words but not the meaning because they are used so differently. Telling English jokes in the US is likely to go down a bomb outside the US BBC-viewing community, but contrariwise grasping US idiom can completely floor Brits. I used to be fairly good as a translator but I am very out of practice and I would hate to have to be in a negotiating team nowadays.
No, modern English is not Anglo-Saxon, which is an inflected language. I do not think that you have to learn it at Cambridge as part of the English degree any more, but my son in law did as part of his history degree and yes it is not understandable without considerable learning. At school we learned to read Chaucerian English, and that isn't trivial. In fact, you need quite a bit of help to understand Shakespeare in the original or the King James Bible.
First line of Beowulf (Anglo-Saxon now called Old English) “Hwæt! We Gar-Dena in gear-dagum, þeod-cyninga, þrym gefrunon, hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!”
First line of Canterbury Tales, Middle English Whan that aprille with his shoures soote
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Still is, although it also has heavy Latin/Romance influence, and a bit of (Ancient) Greek thrown in for good measure :stuck_out_tongue:
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It's not just the idioms - and this really applies to all English speaking countries, and that's Brand names.
I don't know it is was true, or is even still true (perhaps somebody can verify?) But I was was told / read somewhere 20-30 years ago that the
AustriansAustralians had a product called Durex. As did the British.The British product was a male prophylactic / contraceptive "thing", the Australian was something like "duct tape". The reason why it was amusing at the time was that the former were not allowed to be advertised on UK TV at the time. In a related way, the advertisements for them (and female sanitary "stuff") were quite inventive in the early days - advertising a product without saying what it was and what is was used for.
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You can't say things like that without giving examples. Well, you can, but it would be nice to cite.
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English is not Anglo-saxon. It is Anglo-Frisian.
:hanzo:d
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Telephone
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That's like a weird @accalia
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It's an example of the Greek influence on English: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/telephone#Etymology
Here's a few more to choose from: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:English_terms_derived_from_Ancient_Greek
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You were informed correctly, and we all laughed heartily at the newly arrived Australian engineer who asked our department secretary if she had any Durex. So did she, when it was explained to her. (This was the same guy who later tried to move his computer and cut the inch-diameter Ethernet cable because it was in the way.)
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Another example is the thong; in the UK, it's racy underwear, but in Australia, it's a sandal or flip-flop (the latter being a peculiarly British term IIRC)
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In the US, I can remember common usage changing from the later to the former in the last 30 years.
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@loose I'm British. You were wrong, it's "you and me". "You and me" is the object of the verb "include" in your sentence, so it takes the accusative case. There are no two ways about it. "You and I" is simply pure wrongness stemming from hypercorrection. As it has already been put, you can tell it's wrong because "Were I to include I in that number" sounds wrong, whereas "Were I to include me in that number" sounds less wrong (the only reason it sounds a little wrong is because usually you'd use the reflexive "myself", as also mentioned by that other guy whose nickname I'm too lazy to scroll down to right now).
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Yes I know :) It was just the thought of Aristotle calling Archimedes on the dog and bone and having a good old natter about matter and the universe and stuff whilst munching on a kebab washed down with some ouzo. And then comparing that mixed up image (and a perfectly grammatically correct Greek word that has no place in ancient Greece) with what has bee shown that can be done with the letters of a simple 2 letter word.
:rofl:
Oh, yeah. Can you "swypos" a single letter word?
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"Telephone", like some of the words in the Wiktionary, is a made up word, a conscious formation. I don't count them. In fact there is no such word as "telephone" in ancient Greek. The same goes for kilometre. In fact most of the words cited in the Wiktionary are conscious, deliberate borrowings, often scientific. (I'm not saying you were wrong in principle, just that made up compunds like telephone, kilogramme, stylophone aren't organic language.)
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I remember that stuff and the transceivers and the "special tool" to tap into the backbone (one turn to many and .....)
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Every word in English is derived from words in other languages
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That's me! :wave:
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You are possibly quite correct. As some articles point out the English language is a very subtle indicator of class and breeding. I was never very good at the technical aspects of the language - you can blame that on my education: which was very much determined by where I lived and my 11 plus results etc. Also, your language and vocabulary becomes whatever your local environment / social circle is. A "toff" wouldn't last 5 seconds (for one reason or another) in a working man's pub and vice versa.
My point is, I don't care. If it sounds OK to me (and everybody / geographical region has there own idea of what sound right), and it is accepted by others, then that will do for me. What I don't (or try very hard not to do) is force my view on others or judge them by my "standards". The problem is with that, is that is language is not just words it's tone and inflection. Which is why I don't (normally) get involved with "social media|" because it can lead to serious misunderstandings.
Totally Off the Wall (related) Thought: My understanding of the spoken oriental languages is that is is heavily dependant on tone - so how do they cope with "text only". (note to pedants: I'm talking about "text speak", not the formal written language - even though that may well be the answer - different tones of one "sound" mean different things, yet each has it's own discreet, if similar, glyph).
Admin
My keyboard is getting to be a serious pain to use. I'm having to hit the keys so hard to make them work that the surrounding ones are causing collateral damage. I'm see I'm going to have to get a new one from poundland.
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I guess the above post is so off-topic, that there will be a request for it to be jeffed. Come that, so is this. But then that is what happens when you start using a Forum Thread, for chat.
Admin
The
badnerdy jokes thread is :arrows:Admin
how do you feel about diarrhea?
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But not a made up conscious formation. Also, "English" is a portmanteau term for a continuously evolving language.
We have bread, the Germans have Brot. That isn't because some proto-English person invented cooked yeasted wheat, searched for a word, found the word Brot in German and decided it would sound nicer with a d rather than a t; it's because in getting from the German lands to England, there was a Grimm sound shift (that affected lots of other words.) In American, a lot of words ending in -t in English have also sound-shifted to -dh. Most of our words work like that; from Indo-European with a few borrowings sounds and forms have gradually shifted as populations radiated, but nobody said "hey, guys, this der, die, das stuff is too hard to learn, I've invented the word "the", let's use it instead."
Telephone is NOT a Greek work. If such a word had existed, it would mean a far off sound (like the horn of Roland in the Chanson.) The ancient Greeks did not have telephones. Instead, someone put together two Greek words to make an artificial word. The Germans were quite happy to use Fernsprecher, literally "far-speaker", in the same way, but still a soldier of Frederick the Great wouldn't have known what a Fernsprecher was, even though he understood the original words. In the same way words like arachnophobia are not Greek words. No ancient Greek ever said them. They are artificial constructs. I think almost all the words in the list above were deliberately chosen for scientific or technical reasons. In France there is an official committee which makes up these words, for consistency. No ancient Greek ever had a magnétophone or a caméscope. Contrast that with loan words like bungalow, kimchi, kookaburra - these are words borrowed from other languages to describe things that didn't exist in England, but which have been converted to English orthography and are pronounced a little differently from the original. The French are prone to doing this, to the great annoyance of the Académie. They are natural, organic language additions. Words also change meaning with time. The Greek didaskalos originally meant the trainer of the chorus, but came to mean any teacher. Hypocrite (hypokrites) was originally an actor, one who "answered back" the author's lines; it later acquired the meaning of someone who pretends to be respectable in real life. Again, no committee sat to decide this, it happened organically by growing numbers of people using a word in a certain way.
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A nice short quote. The whole sentence is a bit longer, but this is the bit that gets remembered, probably for the etymology. Æthelstan would probably figure out what it means, even if he did think the grammar was evil.
Every word from good solid Anglo-Saxon stock. Except the last one. Needed a bit of French for the last one.
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Point of pendantry: “streets” is one that comes from Latin, though it would have been known by the Anglo-Saxons.
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Having brought up three kids I can tolerate it but I don't enjoy it.
However it turns out to have an interesting history. Made up by Hippokrates, it gradually evolved to "diarrie" in French, from where it made its way into English and was then Latinised again when the education system tried to Latinise English (and words like "det" were respelled as "debt" because there is a b in Latin, debita, but nobody could be persuaded to pronounce it.)
I guess the point I've been trying to make in these posts is that language is fluid and words change. As Herakleitos famously said, panta rei ("everything flows") - the "rei" is the same as the "rhoea" in "diarrhoea". A lot of the words we think of as Latin or Greek go back a lot further than that. You could say that diarrhoea is ancient Greek because Hippokrates coined it in 4th century BCE, but he joined two words that are far more ancient.
Unlike computer languages, real languages have imprecise borders and variable use. This is what makes them interesting. For instance, an example I've just been looking at this last week is the name of Thor's hammer, which across the Scandinavian world is variants on Mjollnir. Russian is a Slavic group language, but the Russian for lightning is molniya.
Anyway, enough of this, I've rambled enough to try anyone's patience.
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Compare with the word for “boy” in Swedish, “pojke”, which I think comes from Finnish, instead of from a germanic root. I believe that (as with the example you're talking about above) this reflects past trade, colonial and imperial patterns.
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Yes, that's equally odd, that such a common word that has existed in all its forms for so long, should be replaced like that. Completely off wtfery, it is odd that it was Sweden that had the empire rather than Finland - and today Finland is still linguistically Finnish and Swedish - yet here we have the conqueror borrowing a word from the conquered. Why do some words stick and not others?
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"Street" is very old. Of course etymology isn't usually an exact science and I have wondered if it is alternatively linked to the various forms of the word "straight". Roman roads were notoriously straight and so a word which in its earliest origins meant "stretched out" would make sense. Around here we didn't have the luxury of paved streets, no Watling Street for us, just the Fosse Way and lanes But "fight in the fields, the ways and lanes" doesn't have quite the same ring - though in fact that was exactly what happened, but in Normandy. If Normandy had had more streets and fewer lanes, the war could have been a bit shorter.
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English has borrowed lots of words from its empire, but usually where the word had no good English synonym (or perhaps was only commonly used by people with empire connections). Adopting for what would reasonably appear to be a common word… told you it was a strange case. :smile:
The Fosse Way is actually darn straight. It mostly doesn't look it on the ground because of a bunch of small wiggles from side to side (due to centuries of ox carts, I guess) but it's really extremely direct; the curves almost all cancel out very rapidly. And it's almost all drivable, apart from a few short stretches near Leicester, and a longer bit near Bath.
It'd be a fun road to drive except for all the other vehicles.
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A bit more food for thought: "camping" in French is "le camping", "football" in Russian transliterates into Latin script as "futbol".
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That's the issue with using ox for haulage - they meander.
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It beats a handcart.
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Ok. I'll bite :smile: [image]
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Not at all. Meat Loaf is musical theatre. Oh sure, it's musical theatre about rock'n'roll, but it isn't itself rock'n'roll: it's show tunes.