I can't believe they discussed plurals in English and missed the most interesting piece!
The -s endings came after Norsemen conquered England, and the introduction of it was from their language, connected to old French. This also is why in English, you have words like "ox/cows" and "beef": the Norsemen who were nobles essentially influenced the English to use their words for the animals since they were served as food to them (beef), while the English people who slaved in the fields raising the actual animals (cow) continued to use their ancestors' words for the live animals. This is why we have different words for the meat of the animals (beef, poultry, mutton) vs. the actual animals (cows, chicken, sheep).
I think you are mixing up Norsemen and Normans. Norsemen (Scandinavians, sometimes called Vikings) spoke a Germanic language (called old Norse, the ancestor of current Scandinavian languages), while the Normans spoke French. English have been influenced by both, but the Norman invasion was later. Beef, veal, mutton etc. are from french.
The Normans were partly descended from the Norsemen.
They tried to conquer England for the best part of a millennium, failed, conquered parts of France and Italy instead - by war and diplomacy - and then conquered England.
Sure. Had the Normans been the only outside group coming to the British islands after Rome left it would be fine to call them Norsemen, Germanics or even just continentals, but due to the long sequence of invasions it is very reasonable to use and expect the most specific terms. The word "poultry" certainly did not come on a boat before 1066, and only on a very specific subset of the boats that came that year.
Although, interestingly, they spoke a dialect of French that is different from, for example, Parisian French. And you can tell when a word was borrowed into English from French based on whether it starts with consonant sounds that are from the Norman dialect vs. the Parisian dialect. As an example (IIRC), William is a Norman name, whereas Guillaume is the Parisian version of the same name.
Side note: if that kind of stuff is interesting to you, I can highly recommend The History of English podcast.
You might be able to argue the Normans influenced the normalization towards plurals endings in S, but languages are generally pretty resistant to borrowing grammatic features wholesale versus, say, borrowing vocabulary.
Which situation specifically? Serbo-Croatian doesn't have that differentiation between the name of the animal and of its meat. There are others (regional "astal" being my favourite example), but the similar pattern can happen in any language.
Do you mean the sound combination "el", or the fact of having a definite article?
Latin did not have articles. The use of articles is a grammatical feature that has been borrowed between languages. But yes: that kind of borrowing is a lot less frequent than borrowing of vocabulary.
Must do, actual Old Norse is similar to Old English and have similar plural endings and a generally similar grammar. Many irregular verbs share a common ancestor and are similar even today.
Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian have kept more of the insanely complex rules for pluralisation actually.
... I must say I have never really thought about the complex rules - I had to compare and I'd say Swedish is more complex than the other Nordic languages.
Although they kept the cases - that there are only traces of left in Swedish - even Icelandic seems simpler.
The non-related words for ox, cow and beef.
I can confirm the same at least in Czech, Ukrainian, Belarusian and Russian. But not in, say, Polish (where 'beef' has its root from 'ox')
In russian (and most likely some other slavic langauges) beef ("говядина") is meat of any cattle because it comes from anchient-russian "говядо" which literally means "cattle".
Pretty much same for ox - from the old form of "big" "великий" - big animal.
Cow "корова" most likely comes from protoslavic korva and most likely inherited from ancient-indian "carvati" - "chewing".
i always thought it's too disassociate the actual animal from meat you are eating to make it anonymous, it's much easier to eat beef than dead cow's meat
Wamba, up and help me an thou beest a man; take a turn round the back o' the hill to gain the wind on them; and when thous't got the weather-gage, thou mayst drive them before thee as gently as so many innocent lambs."
"Truly," said Wamba, without stirring from the spot, "I have consulted my legs upon this matter, and they are altogether of opinion, that to carry my gay garments through these sloughs, would be an act of unfriendship to my sovereign person and royal wardrobe; wherefore, Gurth, I advise thee to call off Fangs, and leave the herd to their destiny, which, whether they meet with bands of travelling soldiers, or of outlaws, or of wandering pilgrims, can be little else than to be converted into Normans before morning, to thy no small ease and comfort."
"The swine turned Normans to my comfort!" quoth Gurth; "expound that to me, Wamba, for my brain is too dull, and my mind too vexed, to read riddles."
"Why, how call you those grunting brutes running about on their four legs?" demanded Wamba.
"Swine, fool, swine," said the herd, "every fool knows that."
"And swine is good Saxon," said the Jester; "but how call you the sow when she is flayed, and drawn, and quartered, and hung up by the heels, like a traitor?"
"Pork," answered the swine-herd.
"I am very glad every fool knows that too," said Wamba, "and pork, I think, is good Norman-French; and so when the brute lives, and is in the charge of a Saxon slave, she goes by her Saxon name; but becomes a Norman, and is called pork, when she is carried to the Castle-hall to feast among the nobles; what dost thou think of this, friend Gurth, ha?"
"It is but too true doctrine, friend Wamba, however it got into thy fool's pate."
"Nay, I can tell you more," said Wamba, in the same tone; there is old Alderman Ox continues to hold his Saxon epithet, while he is under the charge of serfs and bondsmen such as thou, but becomes Beef, a fiery French gallant, when he arrives before the worshipful jaws that are destined to consume him. Mynheer Calf, too, becomes Monsieur de Veau in the like manner; he is Saxon when he requires tendance, and takes a Norman name when he becomes matter of enjoyment."
"By St Dunstan," answered Gurth, "thou speakest but sad truths; little is left to us but the air we breathe, and that appears to have been reserved with much hesitation, solely for the purpose of enabling us to endure the tasks they lay upon our shoulders. The finest and the fattest is for their board; the loveliest is for their couch; the best and bravest supply their foreign masters with soldiers, and whiten distant lands with their bones, leaving few here who have either will or the power to protect the unfortunate Saxon. God's blessing on our master Cedric, he hath done the work of a man in standing in the gap; but Reginald Front-de-Boeuf is coming down to this country in person, and we shall soon see how little Cedric's trouble will avail him. ---Here, here," he exclaimed again, raising his voice, "So ho! so ho! well done, Fangs! thou hast them all before thee now, and bring'st them on bravely, lad."
The book The Unfolding of Language[1] describes the forces that shape how language evolves. One is extending the use of a pattern (e.g. "en" for plural), even in cases like this one where it wasn't technically appropriate. Another is the use of metaphor. E.g. "discover" used to mean "to remove the cover of", but now its meaning is purely metaphorical and the literal meaning has been mostly lost. Another is laziness: slurring long compound phrases together until they're effectively one word. A lot of conjugations/declentions are a result of this. I recommend this book if you're interested in how languages change over time; it's very well written.
EDIT: Another fun fact is that words sometimes begin to mean their _exact opposite_. For example, "wicked" used to mean "evil", but in England (and elsewhere, but especially England) it's started to mean "sweet".
Was ewt pronounce yoot like newt being pronounced nyoot? Then at leas in modern English it would have been "a ewt" to begin with and no n for confustion.
I read up on this (rebracketing it's called), and now I understand why the snakes called Natter in German are adders in English, and that even made it back to German as ...otter (Kreuzotter for example).
Worse imho is the "glasses", "pants", "pliers", "scissors", etc thing. Single object with plural name just because it happens to be made of two similar parts. Most objects are made of multiple parts though and they get a singular name just fine.
The W is called "double-u" because it dates from the era when U and V were the same letter (the consonant and vowel versions diverged) and there was no W letter, but only a doubled-U. The phrase, "I want a veal sandwich on Tuesday" would have been spelled, "I uuant a ueal sanduuich on Tuesday" (or, alternatively, "I vvant a veal sandvvich on Tvesday"). This is also why u, v, and w are consecutive in the alphabet.
This is similar to why the & character is called "ampersand"--it was originally considered a letter, and instead of the alphabet ending in "x, y, and z", it ended in "x, y, z, and per-se 'and'".
In Finland, it is still correct to treat V and W as equivalent when sorting (e.g. phonebooks). This applies both to Swedish and Finnish language and context. However, now it is more common to treat them as separate letters, which is also accepted.
(Finland is bilingual, and the characters sets, keyboards and sorting rules are same both for Finnish and Swedish.)
That's because in the Arabic script, from which the modern Persian script is derived, doesn't differentiate between vowels sounds like oo/oh and their related semivowels.
In Arabic, oo and v are both bilabial sounds (produced using both lips). In Persian, v is pronounced more labio-dentally (bottom lip, top teeth), which is perhaps what causes the confusion.
But the lack of written distinction for these sounds is common in many scripts including Indian, Greek, and older Latin.
The historical use of u and v can be seen in the Lord's Prayer from 1538:
> Our father whiche art in heuen,
> halowed be thy name.
> Let thy kyngdome cum vnto vs.
> Thy wyll be fulfylled as well in erthe,
> as it is in heuen.
In the first line we see how U was used within words for both U and V ('our' and 'heaven'). In the third line we see how V was used for words starting with U (as well as words starting with V).
Of course, this isn't universal, there are counter-examples of U used initially and V used medially!
Yeah, compared to my contrived example, U and V were usually differentiated for typographical reasons and not perfectly interchangeable (kind of like the S and the "long S" that looks like a lowercase "f", e.g. in the phrase "Congrefs of the United States" in the original Bill of Rights).
Another weird gray area between ligature and letter are the "æ" and "œ" characters, which are mainly used as ligatures for the British spellings of "foetus" and "encyclopaedia" but were, at some times, seen as actual letters. American spelling reforms erased this particular weirdness from our dialect.
I liked the story of young web developer who suggested a new glyph for 'Th' since it was clearly missing, blizzfully unaware of the letter Thor that had been used in English until printing became available.
Ðere was also ðe letter "ðæt" ("that"), a later invention ðat began as a stylistic alternative to þorn in Old English manuscripts, but fell out of favour early in þe Middle English period (during þe 1200s or so).
Þorn continued to be used to a limited extent in early printed works of English. The <th> digraph started to supplant it already in manuscripts during the Middle English period, with <þ> being retained only in limited contexts well before the introduction of the press in Europe (contexts being primarily common sigla (scribal abbreviations) like <þᵉ> for "the" and <þᵗ> for "that", and occasionally when the scribe felt like they might run out of room on the line).
A mondegreen of "and per se and", meaning "and (the character) '&' by itself", which is how the symbol (&) was originally referred to in English. This formulation is due to the fact that in schools, when reciting the alphabet, any letter that could also be used as a word in itself ("A," "I," "O" and, at one point, "&") was preceded by the Latin expression per se (Latin for "by itself"). Also, it was common practice to add at the end of the alphabet the "&" sign, pronounced "and". Thus the end of the recitation would be: "X, Y, Z and per se and." This last phrase was routinely slurred to "ampersand" and the term crept into common English usage by around 1837.
This is the most ridiculous thing I ever heard, is it april fools day?
I read about "amper's and". Although I have no idea what an amper is, if memory serves the whole thing is related to merchant short hand, but it cannot get any more ridiculous than this joke somebody is having on you.
Grammatically plural nouns denoting single objects is something that occurs in multiple European languages (and perhaps others), not only English.
English French Slovak
pliers pinces kliešte
pants pantalons nohavice
scissors ciseaux nožnice
All plural. The singular "kliešť" exists, but it refers to an insect: the tick. The word "nohavica" is used when referring to just one of the pant legs. (E.g. one being rolled up, getting wet, or being sewn differently, or other such contexts.)
Interesting - I wondered how you'd differentiate between "ticks" and "pliers" in plural and figured it'd follow the same pattern as Czech (so something like "kliešťata") but when I looked it up on Google translate it's just the same as "pliers". Is that right?
And weirdly the Czech for "pliers" isn't the same as "ticks":
Though having pulled a handful of klíšťata from my dog already this summer, I'd have to concede to that "pliers" is actually a very appropriate homonym.
It’s funny to compare Slovak with Polish — you could also use “kleszcze” for pliers (and “kleszcz” is also tick), but it sounds archaic — today you’d say “szczypce” or “kombinerki”, which are also nouns without singular form. Also, “pants” are called “spodnie”, which also lacks singular form, but “nogawa/nogawka” still means a pant leg.
That's so interesting. In Bulgarian we're starting to interchangeably use singular/plural versions of some of these words. E.g. "scissors" is "nozhici" (ножици), but very often used in its singular "nozhica"; similar with pants - nominally "pantaloni" (borrowed from French, of course), but very often encountered as a "pantalon". However, "pliers" and "glasses" cannot be comfortably made to assume a singular form, so they're always plural.
> Grammatically plural nouns denoting single objects is something that occurs in multiple European languages (and perhaps others), not only English.
None of those examples in English unambiguously denote single objects, they all denote indefinite numbered collections. The explicit singular object in each case is "a pair of X", where "X" is the term you have listed, and that is a grammatically singular noun phrase denoting a singular object.
These are all Indo-European languages. But interestingly, this has been transported even to Finnic languages, which are grammatically entirely different and unrelated, but still have plural forms for the same words:
pants -> Finnish "housut", scissors -> "sakset"; there is no singular "housu" or "saksi" in that meaning. As above, there is the singular "saksi" but it means a Saxon.
Hmm. For the French part, "ciseaux" is true (the singular "ciseau" is what is called a chisel in English) but the rest is wrong.
A pair of pants is un pantalon, and a pair of pliers is also just une pince.
"Lunettes" (glasses) would be another word that is usually plural. Juste one lunette is a scope for just one eye (or some circular object with a hole in the middle).
In Polish it's the same story with "drzwi" (or "doors" - same thing as in English) as well as... "skrzypce" ("violin"). For some unfathomable reason it, too, is made to sound like a plural noun.
I can live with "glasses", "pants", "pliers" and "scissors", but "data" drives me crazy because even native speakers seem to be completely inconsistent when it comes to its number.
EDIT: Now that I think about it there is another one that is hard for me, even it I know it is the correct form in English: visa (singular) and visas (plural). In my mother tongue it follows the same pattern as datum and data, it's Visum (singular) and Visa (plural).
As a native speaker I refuse to say 'these data' or the word datum. I prefer 'this data' for plural and 'this piece of data' for singular. Yes I know its wrong in some sense, but I think that ship has sailed
I've also seen "data point" used when a singular form is required. I think in common usage, "data" is a mass noun like "mayonnaise" rather than a plural.
"Datum" (and its plural, "datums") is legitimate if you're talking about, eg, one filled-out survey form, or one array element. It's basically like "water molecule"; you wouldn't say "these water are cold", but "this datum is a outlier" makes sense.
While I understand, and agree that you are correct, I still don't like this wording. I prefer the sound of 'this data point is an outlier' or 'this point is an outlier'
Data is a plural of datum, if you're considering the individual pieces, but it's more commonly used (in my experience as a US native) as a collection singular like sand. Ex the sand has formed a hill, the data has filled the hard drive.
We are reading a lovely article about how "childer" is a plural, and children is some sort of troubling double plural. The word data is somewhat older and its use has had even more time to change. I wish the dictionary would lose the fight on data and we could all just say "the data is conclusive" and be happy about it. It sounds much more natural.
That's interesting. I've never encountered "datums" but a quick Google search turned up plenty of examples (like "Tidal Datums") and that "This plural is permissible only in the sense of 'fixed reference points'" [1].
dat- is the stem, I suppose, -um is a grammatical ending. Data simply suits the English ear better because it's close to the nominal suffix -er. How do you like this dater point?
In Germany we even stopped pretending that it's just a bunch of bricks and use the word as if it were the name of the game. We say "Let's play Lego". Does this sound strange in English?
Totally opaque to whether that's "lego's" or "legos" and children in general probably don't care for an overzealous syntactic classification of single morphemes either.
Is "gimme the lego over there" strange? I think it is, and if it is, then it's an interesting dater point to support this hypothesis.
I have the same pet peeve with media, especially in french where média is used only as a singular, with les médias for the plural. Médium is exclusively used for ways of expression, and médiums for speaking with the dead. I get that language evolves but this specific evolution really bothers me.
Fewer people know Latin in Britain now. So the Latin derived words are usually used as fully adopted words target than being treated as quoted Latin. This seems right to me.
"Forums" (rather than fora) seems a little awkward to me, but "data point" seems more natural than "datum". But then I never learnt Latin at school. At some point we need to stop applying the grammar rules of foreign languages to fully adopted words.
the point is that they were initially adopted specifically in this way in the dictionary in the first place. Ignorance and years of bad education took their toll.
The visa thing sounds like a back-formation unique to your mother tongue. The word "visa" is the past participle of videre (Latin for "to see"). So it is not a plural in its formation/derivation.
You're mistaken. The verb is vidēre, videō, vidī, visum.
There is also the noun vīsum, -ī, plural visa with the primary meaning the seen [thing], appearance, perception. This is the word that was borrowed into English and other languages.
Why not look it up before you assert someone is wrong? It's explained in detail in [0]. It's clear that visa is used as a past participle, not as a noun, and it's applied in the singular. There is no support anywhere for the use of visum as a singular and visa as a plural. Which is what I believe I said above.
That one is actually because it's two different words:
"people" is the plural form of "person", i.e. one person, two people, as a group
"people" (pl. "peoples") is a group of people as a unit, e.g. a tribe or an ethnic group or the citizens of a country
"persons" is ALSO the plural of "person" but only used when you talk about individuals rather than a group (e.g. "person of interest" -> "persons of interest", not "people of interest")
Yes this is a bit awkward and yes sometimes what's grammatically possible still sounds awkward even to native speakers (e.g. I'd argue "the polices" is a legitimate term when discussing multiple police organisations of a country as an abstract group but it sounds extremely wrong to most people apparently).
I believe "persons" is similar to "people" but differs in register.
For example, there is a UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Obviously, native speakers would say "people with disabilities" in almost every situation, but that would be too informal for the title of a treaty.
Likewise, law enforcement use formal speech such as "persons of interest" to bolster their authority, but nobody would ever say "I sat next to two Australian persons on the flight".
Um, I'm a native speaker and might say "I sat next to two Australian persons on the flight."
Admittedly, it's more likely I'd say "I sat next to two Ozzies on the flight." (No, not Aussies, Ozzies. Like Ozzy Ozbourne. Because that's how it sounds to me when Aussies say 'Aussies.')
Its uneasy coexistence with the usually-technically-valid-and-occasionally-preferred persons is the real problem. Peoples is pretty rare and only for the specific case where it's referring to a plurality of tribes/nations as peoples...
We use the spelling datum/data. We pronounce it 'dar-ta' not 'day-taa'. I want to say we pronounce it 'day-tum' not 'dar-tum' but both sound fine to me, possibly thanks to all of the exported American English we consume or possibly just because we're weird.
I appreciate the apparent strangeness of this, but it's certainly not unique within the language.
> Worse imho is the "glasses", "pants", "pliers", "scissors", etc thing. Single object with plural name just because it happens to be made of two similar parts.
As a countable noun, aside from also being a drinking vessel, "a glass" is a lens or monocle. A pair of glasses is exactly a pair of those. These definitions are still in current use.
Its true that the singular terms for the others are no longer in common current use, so the plural seems odd, but glasses is a particularly bad example.
Also, I think your "simpler" transcription is actually less phonologically accurate.
For instance, I would transcribe the "er" in "wonder" as [ɝ]. In some dialects, it would actually just be [ɜ] without any pronounced trace of the "r" like sound. In actuallity, I suspect that it is actually [ɜɹ] underlying, and the two sounds just coalesce into [ɝ] when you pronounce them.
That is to say, the "er" sound is viewed a variant of the vowel moreso than it is a variant of "r". I have the same complaint about "simplr" and "evr".
For "nglsh", I just do not see any motivation to remove the vowels. It is true that English allows "n" to act as a vowel, but in "English", there is a pretty clear [I] (as in Igloo) before the [n]. Similarly, [l] could act as a vowel, but there is also a pretty clear [I] following it.
Finally for "cach", I can't really complain about this being worse, as "ch" is our way of writing tsh ( /t͡ʃ/ ), but if we are simplifying English, it would be nice to clean up this too and show the relationship between that sound and the t sound.
Something that HN readers often don't understand is that being an engineer or having advanced understanding of a field does not equate having an understanding of linguistics, despite being a native speaker of a language. Merely striking out letters from words doesn't make a language or its spelling any simpler...
How long are we going to continually spell things like: knife, night, knight, thought, etc. When you add up the generations of wasted human effort in spelling words in such pointless ways, its mind boggling.
Define "pointless". Each word has its own etymology, and if we're going to be honest here, the different spellings aren't _that_ complicated. Take it up with English's ancestors for borrowing words from many different languages, and then with more recent ancestors for the great vowel shift, among other things leading to change.
Language is never going to make sense. It's not prescriptive- we just make changes, arbitrarily, sometimes due to mistakes, and it either catches on or it doesn't. Trying to "fix" language is an impossible task because no one is making the rules. English in particular doesn't have a language council making decisions, unlike say, Korean. It doesn't matter anyways because "Standard English" is quite different than day to day conversation, and even in formal settings it's based on stylistic guidelines, not hard rules.
Just let it be- devising an _arbitrary_ method of attempting to corral an entire language is an impossible task. And any work would be undone within one generation anyways since languages evolve. Esperanto, a manufactured language, has already seen linguistic changes by its native speakers (kids who were taught it growing up).
Spelling comes from the root of each individual word. It makes sense to keep them written this way. Not everything makes phonetic sense especially in English where imported words are countless.
I'm reminded of how English orthography has that weird thing where the presence of a silent E can seemingly change the vowel in the previous syllable. For example the Tom Lehrer song, "who can turn a can into a cane? Silent E..."
So a hypothetical "nife" would never be mistaken for "neef", as "nif" could be.
We could also just add accents, diacrits to exhaustion to englissh letters. Without that in arabic you couldn't even tell /a/, /e/, /i/ apart, they are all aleph in word initial position. Our orthographie is phine, your pronnuntzashun is just lazy
You can write phonetically on the Latin alphabet perfectly fine, for example Finnish does so. In the case of English, its a matter of standardizing the pronunciation of characters (considering it requires every English speaker to essentially learn to write/read again, just changing the alphabet to Arabic is almost easier).
At this point gender in most languages has almost nothing to do with the semantic meaning of the words themselves -- biological gender or whatever -- and we might as well call it something less culturally loaded like "noun class". A famous example is "das Mädchen" in German -- a masculine (edit: neuter, I mean!) noun for a biologically feminine person. Languages are littered with such inconsistencies, and as a language learner almost all of the genders are not discoverable from the semantic meaning of the word. Why is "ei bok" (Norwegian for "a book") feminine, when it's categorically an inanimate thing?
"Das Mädchen" is actually neuter, because it's descended from the diminutive of "Magd" (English "maid"). It's the same for "das Jüngelchen", except that "der Junge" is much more common for boys.
I don't think there's any case where German has a word of the opposite gender for a person whose gender is known, because it's usually easy to adapt the default (masculine) form by appending "-in".
I have a hunch that the nominally feminine gender is rather one of subjunction, not to say subjugation. Der Himmel -> Die Sonne -> Das Wetter. Der Tag -> Die Nacht -> Das Jahr. Der Mond -> Die Sterne -> Das Pantheon ... OK, I am not quite sure, but at least gender was an innovation in Germanic, whereas the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European knew inflection for in-/animate -- e.g. there were two different words for fire, where the the other gave ignition [1].
It stands to reason that the feminin came to be at the boundary between these.
PS: This is fun ... Der Mensch -> Die Familie -> Das Dorf. Der Krieger, die Krieger, das Kriegen. Der Aktionär -> die Aktie. Die Aktionärinnen ... das Aktienpaket. Der Karren (car), Die Karre (load), das Ankarren, das Herangekarrte, das Karree (See [2] for more on four wheels, strange animism, etc. Ultimately inconclusive).
Note that the pluralizing morpheme -en was written -in in old german. Also note that many case inflections come out as -en, so I suppose that female forms were in the objectified part of speech more often, where the gender is not reflected in the article (den Kindern, Männern, Frauen).
In other languages, there is a number (dual) that deals with cases like this. It's been dropping from most languages where it's used. In Russian it's mostly gone, but alot of the endings remain.
Also lot's of languages when borrowing from English do away with the plural if it's obvious. Like in french, a pair of jeans is just un jean, singular.
English has some vestiges of the grammatical dual, in terms of having a special word for the case of two: both vs all, either vs any, neither vs none. (And for real pedants, between vs among.)
Dual doesn't really help in this case. In a dual system, we would have something like:
1 pant
2 pantx
3+ pants
The problem with the words op is describing is that they should, semantically, belong to the category of 1 object, but morphologically (and syntactically) belong to the category of not-1 object. Adding a separate category for 2 objects does not address this.
It'd be great if we native English-speakers would tolerate — and even encourage — "mistakes" in English to streamline (refactor?) the language and make it easier for non-native speakers to become fluent:
+ The world would be better off with an easy-to-use, global lingua franca.
+ For historical reasons, both good and bad, at the moment English is the logical candidate. (The use of an alphabet also supports English as a global lingua franca, but "misspellings" should be tolerated as well as discussed at length in the comments here.)
+ We should accept usages such as "childs," vice children, and "it's" as a possessive, as being proper English and not mistakes. (English as a Second Language teachers could doubtless come up with a long list of such "mistakes.")
Such an approach to achieving a common global tongue would be more likely to succeed than was seen with Esperanto.
> It'd be great if we native English-speakers would tolerate — and even encourage — "mistakes" in English to streamline (refactor?) the language and make it easier for non-native speakers to become fluent
This is how languages evolve already. Mistakes become accepted over time.
The problem with "turning it up to 11" (or not offering mistakes any resistance before giving in to them; being conservative about it helps to single out the most persistent ones, working as natural selection of sorts)... is that not all the learners will make the same mistakes.
> English as a Second Language teachers could doubtless come up with a long list of such "mistakes."
Exactly, it would be a very long list. And much dependent on the background of the learner (aka their first language). What'd be obvious and easy for me as a Pole is not necessarily the same for a Spaniard.
Meaning this approach would lead to further diversification, rather than unification of the language.
> "misspellings" should be tolerated as well
As a non-native speaker, I'm pretty sure that widespread acceptance for spelling mistakes would pose more difficulty for me in the long run.
It is way easier for a native speaker to see past them.
So, while your mileage may vary, I, for one, vote thanks but no thanks :)
> As a non-native speaker, I'm pretty sure that widespread acceptance for spelling mistakes would pose more difficulty for me in the long run.
GP here. You and @maginary make an interesting point, namely that standardized spelling helps non-native speakers. The problem with English is that much of our existing standardized spelling is quite non-intuitive to pronounce, e.g., rough, through, thorough. Perhaps some kind of spelling reform as discussed by @philipps and @jherdman below would help, although other comments here also discuss the problems that have arisen with such efforts.
Aside from V-2 already commented on, I'd like to add that spelling mistakes such as
> "it's" as a possessive
are mostly native-speaker exclusive. Your/you're, there/their, etc. spelling mistakes you just don't see non native speakers make. This is because they're just that, spelling mistakes.
So while native speakers know what they mean but it's just associated with a sound in their head, they just write out that sound. Non natives on the other hand usually think about the grammar, the right word, etc. I don't think I've ever met a non-native speaker that makes the there/their mistake e.g.
English is refactored quite frequently. I'm by no means an expert, but here are some observations.
* American English could be considered one such refactoring. Some common changes include: removing vowels without sound (e.g. "labour" => "labor", "colour" => "color"), removing duplicate letters ("programme" => "program"), and reversing some "re" words (e.g. "theatre" => "theater"). More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_refo...
* The printing press introduced some too. The best example I can think of is the general removal of diaereses (e.g. "microörganism" => "microorganism"). Though I'm less certain of this one.
I'm a little surprised none of the gamer speak refactorings haven't made their way into the written word in a serious way, especially given their prevalence in such a large portion of the population.
I wonder whether it has converted into less spelling mistakes committed by AE users (in comparison to BE users)... Obviously, controlling for variables such as level of education and the like... Have there been any studies on the subject?
German speaking countries went through an effort to reduce the most obvious spelling exceptions in 1996. It introduced new spelling for many existing words but also allowed the use of the previous spelling to continue (in effect creating the situation OP describes where different options are equally valid). I lived in Germany at the time and remember a lot of resistance and confusion after the changes went through. Also, some of the leading newspapers defined their own in-house rules (based on valid interpretation of the official rules).
Can I make a wish? As a non-native speaker it would be great to have a consistent alphabet, it wouldn't matter the order of the letters, a letter would always correspond to a single sound, specially with vocals. If the Latin alphabet is not suitable for this then it would be great to have a new alphabet or maybe just the Latin one but with some letters added.
This is basically impossible for English, since for many vowels, the various dialects map the diaphonemes of English into mutually incompatible sets of phonemes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabe... (and even that chart is underestimating the differences - tour and moor definitely have different phonemes in en-AU, even though they are allegedly from the same diaphoneme.
If you had a conservative spelling system, where each diaphoneme was mapped to a single letter, speakers of dialects with many merges (e.g. American English) would struggle to spell correctly, since they would be unable to distinguish several letters apart. If you had a simplified system, then most speakers would get confused by merges that existed in the spelling system but not in their own dialects; and speakers of more conservative dialects wouldn't be able to write sounds that are to them different.
(It's too late to revise my original post:) By tolerating and collecting "mistakes" in English, I have in mind the same approach as waiting to lay some of the sidewalks on a new campus until it becomes clear where the actual traffic will be, as opposed to insisting that everyone walk only on the pre-planned sidewalks.
In Russian it's "ребёнок" (child) and "дети" (children). "Дети" is actually a plural form of now archaic "дитя" and used because... "ребёнок" does not have a plural form.
The funny thing here is that "ребёнок" while not being archic comes from an anchient-russian "робя", which has plural form "робята", which is actually used in modern language too, but meaning can be anything from "boys" to "guys" or any other generalisation of a group of young people (both boys and girls).
PS: at the same time you can actually invent a plural for "ребенок" if you want to, but it may be considered as something similar to cockney, but used on purpose in otherwise normal speech.
This only goes so far back. I believe they actually came from German. Oxen in German is Ochsen German still actively uses the -en plural, and all nouns in the dative plural must use -n.
So, Ochsen -> Oxen, Maenner -> Men
(Slightly unrelated) So if you look at Scotland and Ireland, they've get some really interesting things in their dialects. die "Kirche" in German is a "church", in some dialects in scotland, it's a "kirker". Or in old dialects in Ireland, "children" is sometimes spoken as "childer".
EDIT: I retract my theory on the relationship between children and kindern :)
Curiously, Kinder and children are completely unrelated. Child comes from the Proto-Germanic kelþaz which further came from the Proto-Indo-European stem gel-. On the other hand, "Kind" comes from Proto-Germanic kinþa, which comes from a Proto-Indo-European stem ǵenh₁- meaning "to produce, to give birth", whence also "genesis", "genealogy" and "gonad".
German definitely did not cause those curious plurals. We know for sure Old English had them itself from Proto-Germanic, and it makes a lot more sense for a language to retain irregular forms for words that are used very often, than to loan grammar, which is a relatively rare occurrence.
EDIT: How do you type asterisks here? Escaping with a backslash doesn't work, nor does using three in a row
says from δελφύς (delphús, “womb”), which says from
From Proto-Indo-European gʷelbʰ- (“womb”)
I'd offer German "Quälgeister" as modified reflex of the latter. Also "Quell" is synonym for off-spring. Well, spring is a direct translation of "Quelle", i.e. source. Coincidence? Cry fits in, too.
I do not believe the dolphin theory, though. I guess tail-fish is more likely. they have a penis after all, which is way funnier in general, perhaps to funny for low brow scribe type doctors. Ancient Greek δελφίς (delphís) lends itself for φίς (phís) > fish. cf. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fin IMHO
No, those words are ancient, much older than any remotely modern German. They come from Proto-Germanic via Old English and have cognates in most Germanic languages. Kin words are usually among the most preserved and most rarely borrowed words in a language, as are words related to agriculture and animal husbandry.
I was referring to where the -n came from. After research it seems it came from the old case system, which originally came from german, not sure if it's the dative plural, was just a theory. Here's more about that:
Read the article; the -en in this particular case arose after the loss of the case system, in a hypercorrection during a period when -en and -s were the two main plural endings.
Speakers of my Irish-border dialect do sometimes use "childer" instead of "children", you're correct. I suppose many remnants of old English (and equally other languages) are preserved in random local dialects.
I wouldn't be surprised if it went father back. Farsi, another Indo European language has the -en/an ending, for human nouns. Child/Bache -> children/bachegan, brother/boradar -> brethren/boradaran,
Daughter/dokhtar -> dokhtaran. I'm not sure if they share the same derivations but seem related.
When I was growing up in rural Ireland in the 80s, it was quite common to hear childer used as the plural for child so it was interesting to read in the submitted article that this usage dates from Middle English. Some of my parents’ generation used this word but it was mostly spoken by my grandparents’ generation. Its usage seems to have mostly died out in the decades since then and I haven’t heard it spoken in years. On a related note, the word chisler was used by the older generations of Dubliners as colloquial term for child.
"kuiken" is Dutch for a chick, a young chicken (curious that in English, the form with the diminutive became the one used for the adult), whilst "kieken" is dialectical Dutch for "chicken". "kieken" and "kuiken" come from the same root, it's just that one of them got mutated by a sound change that never quite spread over the entire language.
"jongen" is another story. It used to be "jonge", which is the substantivized version of the adjective "jong" (young). The -n was later added by analogy from the other cases. This is why the plural is pronounced "jonges" (written "jongens"), and the diminutive is "jongetje" even in the standard language.
Huh... I wonder if the the "eng" from England and English related to the Middle English englen and Old English englas for "angels"? Is England the land of angels?
According to the Venerable Bede, Pope Gregory I drew the same parallel in ~595: "Non Angli, sed angeli – They are not Angles, but angels. Well named, for they have angelic faces and ought to be co-heirs with the angels in heaven.".
If you’re interested in that sort of minutia, there’s a History of English podcast that goes into it in mind numbing detail.
The answer is that the -s plural is from the Vikings/Norse, and the -en plural is from the more complex system inherited from Anglo Saxon languages.
English is like a creole or a pidgin language in a lot of ways and a lot of its features are due to various foreign invaders imposing their grammatical rules on the local vocabulary.
> The answer is that the -s plural is from the Vikings/Norse
Which is interesting, because modern Swedish has an -n plural (among other plurals) and no -s plural. Compare ögon (eyes) and öron (ears) with their old english eyen and earen. I guess it would follow that Swedish had a lot of Angle Saxon influence in its evolution.
It’s actually more that the Old Norse and Old English had different endings and the Vikings didn’t bother to figure out the English system. I don’t think they know whether the -s is from a Norse ending or whether the Norse settled on -s for other reasons.
The simplified version eventually spread because England was a mixture of various ethnicities for centuries and you’d have different variants of English from one town to the next— and after the Vikings you had the normans.
I think it’s the equivalent of the guy I was eating with at a restaurant in Nicaragua who yelled to the waitress ‘honey, el forko por favor?’ Like, there was an attempt at Spanish.
"... and the archaic eyen come from." - weirdly this isn't so archaic in the corner of Scotland I'm from. In our dialect we have "een" (which confusingly has a homonym "een" for "one"). Example usage:
Article misses the broader context. This is from the Germanic roots; existing Germanic languages still have this as a predominant pluralization pattern. German: auge (eye), augen (eyes).
So how about the plurals of some words ending with "us", like fungus-fungi, but virus-viruses-not-virii and how about dingus-dingii-or-dinguses, doofus-doofii-or-doofuses and so forth?
pff, what we really need it's Chinese language written in pinyin lacking tones, that's as primitive grammar as you can get, it doesn't even have plural
people think Chinese it's complicated language, but the opposite it's truth, the characters and tones are making it scary, but once you get rid off characters and tones it's one of the simplest languages, much more logical than English
English itself it's extremely illogical languag with way too many exceptions not following general rule, heck even Slavic languages (again more difficult at first sight) are more logical than English
The evolution of language fascinates me. English has a fascinating history. 1000 years ago Old English and Althochdeutch (Old High German) were almost interchangeable (AFAIK). The really fascinating part was the period after 1066 for several centuries where English wasn't the court language of England.
Now this period and lack of centralization is probably responsible for the many dialects (which now are mostly just different accents for other reasons). But the language changed so much over this period. Middle English is largely readable (but weird) to the modern reader. Old English is basically a different language.
In this period English lost of what I like to call the bullshit like gender of (non-person) nouns. Case of nouns (other than pronouns) also basically disappeared. It still had the formal/informal distinction of the second person that so many other European languages had (but we lost that later). Verbs and nouns became way more regular.
None of this happened with German (although Germany as a country didn't really exist until the 19th century and was at best a collection of city-states prior to that) but German in its various forms was still the ruling language (although Latin always had a certain preeminence what with the Holy Roman Empire and the Electors and all).
Compare modern German grammar (where nouns and adjectives have to agree with case, number, gender and article). It strongly suggests that the ruling class seems to embody conservatism and traditions, which is unsurprising given that the status quo is pretty good if you're the ruling class.
You see this in England where the precursor to modern French was the court language of England for hundreds of years. This has the effect of keeping commoners out (even more than they already are by virtue of hereditary title).
It's almost like without central control English became more democratized.
Obviously the printing press had a massive effect in standardizing spelling (other posters have mentioned that u and v were largely interchangeable).
Radio (and later TV) had a massive effect on standardizing pronunciation.
But still English has rapidly changed. One example I remember is if you go back and listen to early speeches by Churchill you'll here him say "nazi" not as "natsi" but as "nazzi" (much like the non-American ss in "aussie"). But by later in the war (IIRC) the "ts" phenom had pretty much been imported into English.
Another thing I read was the mathematical model for how verbs become regular [1]. Basically, the less a verb is used, the sooner it becomes regular but how long it takes is quite predictable. Apparently "to wed" is the next verb to become regular. "To be" should take about 44,000 years.
It makes you realize just how rapidly language changes and how grammar really is descriptive not prescriptive and why it's completely pointless to get your pedantic about "literally", less vs fewer, "very unique" and so on.
There's a lot of misonceptions in here, some major, some minor.
English derives from a more coastal dialect of Germany, and is closest to Frisian and Dutch (the latter more by convergent evolution). Modern German comes from a High German dialect, which is much more different (although still West Germanic). In 1000, English and Frisian would likely have been mutually intelligible--particularly since they would have been visiting the same markets as traders--but the same would not be true for English and Dutch or English and Germanic.
Old English lost its inflection and became highly synthetic. This is primarily due to the influence of Old Norse, a North Germanic language, and the process would have begun some time before the Norman invasion in 1066. Note that a large Danish population settled in England in the 800s (the Great Dane Army invaded, and Alfred the Great ultimately let the settlers they brought with them stay), and they eventually brought Swein Forkbeard into England in response to Æthelred the Unready, which eventually leads to William's conquest in 1066 after several successive kings find themselves dead with no sons. The loss of inflection made it easier for North Germanic and West Germanic speakers to understand each other, since the roots were largely the same but the inflectional bits were different.
Your characterization of the Holy Roman Empire is wildly inaccurate. While there were several independent cities of the Holy Roman Empire, there were several large duchies and kingdoms--most notably Brandenburg, Bohemia, Saxony, the Palatinate (the four secular electors), as well as Bavaria and Austria. It was by no means "at best a collection of city-states."
Regularization is not an inherent process of language evolution. Actually, English isn't really systematically regularizing: American English has transformed the past participle of "dive" from "dived" to "dove", and there is effectively a movement to make the plural of "octopus" into "octopi" as opposed to the correct, regular "octopuses" (or the actual Greek plural "octopodes").
Because some dude or gal somewhere some time ago thought it would be funny that generations to come would need to learn irregular forms of some random words! Why would grammar rules apply all the same to all the words, not that logical is it? /s
The -s endings came after Norsemen conquered England, and the introduction of it was from their language, connected to old French. This also is why in English, you have words like "ox/cows" and "beef": the Norsemen who were nobles essentially influenced the English to use their words for the animals since they were served as food to them (beef), while the English people who slaved in the fields raising the actual animals (cow) continued to use their ancestors' words for the live animals. This is why we have different words for the meat of the animals (beef, poultry, mutton) vs. the actual animals (cows, chicken, sheep).