I've always said that English isn't a language, it's three languages in a trench coat stabbing and robbing other languages in a seedy back alley, rifling through their pockets for words and loose grammar.
this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2025
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What language doesn't match this description? People keep saying this like english is more built out of other languages than the others and, like, how do you think other languages are made? Do you expect someone to just suddenly come up with "anireslurp" for "table" and everyone in the country just uses it?
While loanwords are probably a thing in any language, there are definitely languages that seem to be a bit stricter with grammar, I think? I'd say German is an example.
Japanese is crazy with loanwords though. They steal them and if that's not enough they put the japanizing bean on it, so air conditioning becomes エアコン (romanization of that word again is eakon)
German has more rules with cases and whatnot but a lot of that is ignored in day to day speech, especially in certain sociolects. Similarly the syntax of German sometimes gets slightly altered in spoken German.
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There are lots of languages like this tbh
English speakers just say this because it's the main language they're familiar with
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Yes.
I'm all for using language to the best of your ability in order to try ensuring that you're communicating what you mean to, but one must recognize and accept that all languages are fluid and evolve over time. Pedantry done in an attempt to be helpful (i.e. educating someone who may not understand the issue) is fine - something I would encourage, even. Pedantry done in condescension is not only not helpful, but the resentment it can create is actually counterproductive.
Eh em.
"They're"
/s
~~/s~~
I'm thoroughly lost. Where did I use any variation of that?
While I'm here, you've reminded me of another issue: I use the "swipe/glide" typing feature on Android all the time, and it routinely screws things like that up. Yet another reason to not be too critical since the person may know the correct usage, but didn't notice the technology fail.
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Yep! You see it sometimes on lemmy, it's public corrections clearly done to be nasty
I think it's a holdover from redditors. You'd see that kinda shit all the time over there, someone being pedantic for no other reason than to try and score internet points. from my experience, it's mostly something I see from .worlders.
Yep there's a lot of nastiness on reddit. I don't miss it at all
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It's what I love about English. France is over there passing laws to keep their language pure, while English speakers are picking up bits of greasy string from the gutter to see if they can fit it in a sentence.
I think it's important to be aware that there's the academy on one hand, which is made up of wrinkly old bourgeois men (and some women), and the french people on the other, who are, much like the english, a patchwork of ethnicities and accents that's ever-evolving. France is a combination of several historical regions with their own language (Breton, Occitan, Provençal, Alsacien, Normand, Catalan, Basque, etc.), and that's not counting all the languages brought by immigrants from the former colonies, that infuse contemporary french with some of their own words. The academy is completely at odds with reality.
"The shower drain of languages." That seems an apt description.
Some people call it a melting pot. I call it a public toilet.
English could use some spelling rules though, that shit is a joke.
We don't need spelling rules, we need a new alphabet. See the Shavian alphabet. It'd be like the English equivalent of Hangul.
A quick reminder: our alphabet isn't English, it's Latin. The letters were only ever meant to represent sounds in Latin and were retrofitted onto the English language (which is why it sucks so much).
Even if we were to adopt something like the Shavian alphabet, it would only work for a few generations at most until sound change and dialect divergence built up enough to once again strongly divorce spelling from pronunciation. Not to mention the fact that it's impossible to come up with a phonetic* alphabet that accounts in a useful way for dialect differences, even just in American English.
This has already happened with hangul - spellings that were once phonetic (though, again, in only certain dialects) have now become conventional due to sound change.
So, you'd end up having to either completely replace the alphabet again every hundred or so years, or you'd be right back where we currently are. Plus, interventions into the spelling system will a) make older publications harder to read without mass-translating them all into the new systems every few decades and b) will create reading difficulties for the generations that end up having to switch with each new update.
Not to mention spelling things the way we currently do (imperfectly) preserves etymological information about the words in question.
Not to say our current system is perfect, but rather that any such system is arbitrary, and will eventually become conventionalized either way without active, persistent intervention.
*Used here in the lay sense, not the linguistic sense. I've added this later since the conversation below turned to the difference between phonetics and phonology, and my use of "phonetic" in this comment could be seen as confusing in that context.
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Other Germanic languages use the Latin alphabet and have much more consistent spelling.
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It needs a RECHTSCHREIBREFORM (spelling reform).
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Pretentious in the opposite direction, though maybe that's to be expected coming from someone trained in Latin grammar but not linguistics.
English is just as intelligible as any other natural human language is, and all languages borrow (including Latin!). English stands out a bit for its high rate of borrowing compared to other languages, but, again, this behavior is completely normal and there are a number of languages with even higher rates of borrowings than English has.
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English is a creole gone feral.
Some poor sheep farmers who thought the Thames was a lovely bit of river spent one thousand years getting rolled by the Picts, the Romans, the Angles, the Normans, the Saxons, the Franks, the Danes... and half of those were just the French wearing different hats. All of these conquerors, heirs, and particularly rowdy tourists left a significant linguistic impact on this mongrel archipelago of mayonnaise-filled peasants.
Within a reasonable degree of willingness to adapt to each other, yeah.
But in n the absence of basic sense, we gotta go to a dictionary and accept what's there to end the issue without homicide.
Pretentious. You can be stodgy, but not wildly so.
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