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Thought this was cool to post as i'm always studying the ''dead languages'' of western europe. The ancient Gauls who Ceasar conquered in 52 b.c. still have a few of their words as the base of some english words today.
According to my dictiionary (American Heritage), "ambassador" followed an interesting course. Traceable back to the Celtic languages of the British Isles, then to Latin, to Germanic, back to Latin to Old French, and finally settling back in the British Isles in English.
It's amazing as that over 2,500 years of all the different invaders (Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, Norse, Normans etc.) intermingling over all the years in Great Britain and yet we still have a few Celtic words used in the English language today that are mainly intact with the same meaning that the ancient Celts (brythonic, gaul etc) used.
English is very much a mongrel language; would that help it eventually become a common language around the world rather than an artificial language like Esperanto? In at least one global profession - air traffic control - I believe that English is the statutory language of use. Correct?
English is very much a mongrel language; would that help it eventually become a common language around the world rather than an artificial language like Esperanto? In at least one global profession - air traffic control - I believe that English is the statutory language of use. Correct?
I bet those Saxons and Angles fleeing west from the Huns in 450 a.d. and crossing over into Britain could have never imagined their small groups of people with their little known language of 1,500 years ago would be the ''Lingua Franca'' of the world today.
English is very much a mongrel language; would that help it eventually become a common language around the world rather than an artificial language like Esperanto? In at least one global profession - air traffic control - I believe that English is the statutory language of use. Correct?
English has both pluses and minuses as a universal language.
On the plus side, it has no declensions of nouns, no genders and only two numbers. Thee are only five parts to verb conjugation, two of which are perfectly regular. It also hax very blurred part-of-speech lines, so most words can be plugged into perform many grammatical functions without even having to change them. All this makes it very easy to speak.
But on the other side of the coin, it can be hard to understand, exactly for those reasons. A word, in unmodified form, can be a noun, verb, or attributive adjective with no markers to cue te listener, and all of that has to be inferred by the context and the position of the words relative to each other, which can be fluid in some instances and fixed in others.
In other words, the speaker has huge flexibility to do anything he wants with the parts of the language, but a person not familiar with the idioms can have no way of guessing what the speaker has just done.
It also does not help that English has perhaps the most non-phonetic orthography of any language in the world, save perhaps Gaelic, so the spelling and pronunciation of every word has to be individually learned. (though, through, tough, thought)
Also, English has two distinct forms for almost every verb concept---the formal one word verb (remove) and the informal two word verb (take away), which usually involves an irregular verb plus a preposition, often ambiguous or with no intuitive meaning (hold up [your hands or the bank], carry out [the trash or my orders]).
English is very much a mongrel language; would that help it eventually become a common language around the world rather than an artificial language like Esperanto? In at least one global profession - air traffic control - I believe that English is the statutory language of use. Correct?
It is indeed. It also remains the language of record in most scientific fields and other scholarly research.
English has both pluses and minuses as a universal language.
On the plus side, it has no declensions of nouns, no genders and only two numbers. Thee are only five parts to verb conjugation, two of which are perfectly regular. It also hax very blurred part-of-speech lines, so most words can be plugged into perform many grammatical functions without even having to change them. All this makes it very easy to speak.
But on the other side of the coin, it can be hard to understand, exactly for those reasons. A word, in unmodified form, can be a noun, verb, or attributive adjective with no markers to cue te listener, and all of that has to be inferred by the context and the position of the words relative to each other, which can be fluid in some instances and fixed in others.
In other words, the speaker has huge flexibility to do anything he wants with the parts of the language, but a person not familiar with the idioms can have no way of guessing what the speaker has just done.
It also does not help that English has perhaps the most non-phonetic orthography of any language in the world, save perhaps Gaelic, so the spelling and pronunciation of every word has to be individually learned. (though, through, tough, thought)
Also, English has two distinct forms for almost every verb concept---the formal one word verb (remove) and the informal two word verb (take away), which usually involves an irregular verb plus a preposition, often ambiguous or with no intuitive meaning (hold up [your hands or the bank], carry out [the trash or my orders]).
Or how about Carry out as in fast food??? And Hold Up can also mean stop.. wait...
I was just thinking of another word today that comes to us by a circuitous route, not in geography, but in logic. The verb that means to press a sequence of buttons on a keypad to activate a callphone connection comes from the Latin word for "day"--- Dial.
English is very much a mongrel language; would that help it eventually become a common language around the world rather than an artificial language like Esperanto? In at least one global profession - air traffic control - I believe that English is the statutory language of use. Correct?
I think you're correct..also, I believe, the computer field leans heavily to English. I read somewhere that India publishes the largest number of books in English each year of any nation....(it certainly has a large enough 'customer base' I suppose)
Many years ago I recall one of those 'memorable' moments, in the Southern Ocean off Cape Horn. On an American merchant ship, I was hanging out in the radio shack as we listened in on the local radio traffic. A Chilean patrol vessel was visible some distance off, and a tanker from somewhere in the Far East still farther away, and a Norwegian whaler (still legal in those days) was out of sight over the horizon...and ALL THREE were talking back-and-forth in English. (Some of it heavily accented, but English nevertheless). Odd sensation, but I suppose it was the only thing they all had in common.
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