It's closer to Dutch or German. I had no issue understanding transit signage in Amsterdam. The difficult words are calques and idioms that don't directly translate, i.e. opponthoud. Exit is uitgang, literally an "outgoing". Entrance is ingang, ingoing.
Once upon a time I was walking with a friend around Amsterdam and a man walked up to me and asked me where something was (a nearby restaurant), I answered in English with directions and he thanked me, then a moment later this exchange happened:
- Wait! You can speak Netherlands?
- No. Sorry.
- But you can! I am speaking it!
- No you're not! You're speaking English!
He just blinked and walked off, probably assuming I was playing a trick, but my friend asked what that was all about, and had to convince me that she didn't understand anything he was saying, and wouldn't have said anything to me at all about it except that she heard me insist he was speaking English!
She asked me to try and remember what exactly I was hearing, and I realised I couldn't! I could only remember something like "do you know where [placename that sounded familiar] is?" and maybe that there was a heavy accent, but not exactly how it sounded.
Every now and then I think of this and I wonder if I actually understand English at all, or if I'm just so used to saying that I understand it (in response to something that sounds something like a question) that I started to believe it.
Very much reminds me of a Kids in the Hall skit from ages ago. Two guys are at a party, one says "hello", the other says -- in perfect English -- "Sorry I don't understand you, I don't speak English. please don't beat me up." The first guy assumes it's a joke and plays along until he gets annoyed at the perfect accent and responses ("no really, I don't understand what you're saying, nor what I'm saying, I've just practiced this conversation a lot. please don't beat me up.")
Eventually the first guy tires of being mocked by this guy claiming not to speak English and beats the guy up.
Totally hilarious example of what you experienced taken to an extreme.
This is a fascinating phenomenon that I've encountered before. It seems that some multilingual people cannot easily tell which language they are speaking and/or switch languages during conversation.
A friend who is learning Dutch once complained to me that Dutch speakers will switch to English the moment they hear you are struggling with the language. I suggested she should explicitly ask people to keep the conversation in Dutch.
In one instance, she did that, and the (native Dutch-speaking) person she was talking to agreed to her request, and then proceeded in English anyway! She asked that person multiple times, and they just kept speaking English without addressing her request. Baffling.
When watching German films with subtitles, I will sporadically understand phrases. When it happens it doesn't sound like German; it's some very strange English dialect. Ich habe das gestern Abend gesungen. I have that yester evening a-sung.
My wife had a very similar experience, except in her case, we were awaiting a flight somewhere outside the US—I think in Asia—and she carried on a conversation with a group of flight attendants in Spanish (her second language, but she's fluent).
Quite a ways in it emerged that they were from an Italian airline and speaking Italian. They were no doubt (we imagine) well used to speakers of Romance languages especially Spanish making themselves understood... she however was quite entertained.
(This being HN I suppose it's de rigeur to cite Richard Feynman's bit about Italian dialectical differences leaving room for him to entertain himself by amiably yelling made-up Italian to people in his neighborhood, who chalked up his unintelligibility to such differences, not realizing they were being trolled as it were...)
This is very much debatable. Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin, whereas half of English words are Latinic or Romanic. [1]
Some properties of English's grammar are also more similar to Romance languages than Germanic ones. For example, whereas Germanic languages only mark tense on verbs, English verbs (like Spanish verbs) are marked with aspect in addition to tense: there is a distinction between "I played tennis"/"I have played tennis"/"I was playing tennis".
I'm not saying English is a Romance language. But it's a much more interesting problem to figure out why it's not considered a Romance language than you imply.
> This is very much debatable. Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin, whereas half of English words are Latinic or Romanic. [1]
I think that's complicated by the fact that many english words of latin origin were inherited from a germanic source and thus from an intelligibility standpoint the overlap between english and dutch or german is partially additive with latin. e.g. [1]
Unfortunately the source is dead, but at one point a study ranked english/german as 60% lexical similarity compared to english/french at 27% [2]. Anecdotally, I think dutch and german are easier for an english speaker because of comparatively more overlap in simple words. Heavy use of compound words in dutch/german also gives an english listener a better chance of recognizing part of the word and inferring the meaning from context.
> Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin, whereas half of English words are Latinic or Romanic.
Are you measuring by fraction of words in a word list, or fraction of words in a typical utterance? Word usage is highly non-uniform, so you'll get very different ratios between the former and latter.
English verbs (like Spanish verbs) are marked with aspect in addition to tense: there is a distinction between "I played tennis"/"I have played tennis"/"I was playing tennis".
Where is the verb marking you speak of? Because I don't see any difference between played and played. Your example of how English uses auxiliary verbs to convey different verb aspects is a Germanic construct. I don't really understand how you use this as an example of Romance lineage in English.
> Germanic languages only mark tense on verbs, English verbs (like Spanish verbs) are marked with aspect in addition to tense:
What exactly do you mean by "aspect"?
> there is a distinction between "I played tennis"/"I have played tennis"/"I was playing tennis".
Sure:
-- (I) played (Tennis) ~~ jugué
-- (When I) played (Tennis) ~~ jugaba
-- (When I've) played (Tennis) ~~ jugado
English (like German) might say they need auxiliary words to explain what's going on, and Spanish people might say they're just conjugating the verb differently, but I think this is just because things are written down;
Because, if I say any of these sentences in Spanish or English rapidly enough, someone who does not know the language will not know where each word begins and ends, and it may just sound like English "conjugates" at the beginning of words and Spanish "conjugates" at the end. What's the real difference here?
> But it's a much more interesting problem to figure out why [English is] not considered a Romance language than you imply.
I think most of the time people talk about the "rules" of a language, we're not really talking about something that will help acquire the language (or be better understood): we're really just yapping about geography and time.
So what do you think would be different if English was more widely considered a Romance language?
The most frequently used words are almost all Germanic. There are a lot of technical words with Latin or Greek etymologies that are hardly used in quotidian conversation.
Which 'aspect' is supposed to be missing in Germanic language verbs? Because I can say those three example forms (aspect tenses?) in both Swedish and German without any limitation.
> Only around one in four English words is Germanic in origin
That's the % in the dictionary. More than half of Japanese vocabulary in the dictionary is based on Chinese but no one argues Japanese is a Chinese creole. I forget by whom but it was once pointed out to me that in some genres - ranging from drinking songs to nursery rhymes - the words that come from Old English often make up more than 90% of the words. Similarly, if you sample the dialog in a kitchen or office while people gossip the ratio is also going to skew heavily like 70 - 80% Germanic. (Japanese shows a similar effect with all its Chinese vocabulary.)
Indeed, it's not tricky to write about everyday grounded things with nothing but straight Anglo-Saxon roots. (I've been doing it so far this whole paragraph -- oh that's Greek.) Difficult to achieve similar results utilizing exclusively Latinate vocabulary.
Of course, a history book or engineering manual will be different, and Graeco-Latin vocabulary might well be in the majority there.
You can barely order food or drinks in Dutch in Amsterdam. Pancake house, server doesn’t speak Dutch. Local pub, server doesn’t speak Dutch. I don’t think that would happen in London or New York. You go to the pub or NY diner and they can’t speak English
incidentally, outgang is technically a modern English word, but I've never heard it spoken in real life. You can see literary uses of its precessor "utgang" in Old English here [0]
And it's closer to Frisian than Dutch. If the Battle of Hastings hadn't happened, these languages would be easily and mutually comprehensible. But that just shows that English descends from a branch of West Germanic. It changed gradually over time, kept a core Germanic vocabulary for its basic terms, and borrowed a lot from other languages as it needed more complex concepts, moreso than Modern High German which allows for easy word invention through combination.
Creoles are defined as languages emerging from pidgins, which themselves are often simplified forms of speech that allow linguistically separate groups to communicate. English is not that. It has an unbroken line of native speakers whose usage gradually evolved, while maintaining a system of complex syntactic rules as well as a literature.
Fantastic summation — much easier to understand than the article itself or the referenced Wikipedia pages.
In two short paragraphs I learned a ton about the distinctions between pidgins, creoles, and ("full"?) languages, in addition to how languages evolve in both subcultures and ("dominant"?) cultures.
I can now apply this knowledge in the context of the Louisiana Creole population, the name of which has previously served to confuse me as to the definition of "creole", as well as other creole languages and populations in the Caribbean.
You can argue either way, because "creole" to too vaguely defined. The term was invented to cover a set of languages that had interesting historical and structural similarities, but it turns out to be hard to establish the boundaries of the set. I think it's unfair to the researchers to politicize it as some "post-colonial" writers have been doing.
It fascinates me how linguistics is completely enmeshed in human identity in a such a way that it is impossible to categorize languages without tackling some thorny questions. All the topics you aren't supposed to discuss in polite company (religion, political affiliation, and race) become unavoidable when trying to figure out the relationship of Serbian to Croatian, what is a creole vs. a pidgin, and the relationship of Yiddish and Ladino to medieval German and Spanish (respectively). Fun stuff.
Creole is both a sociohistoric and linguistic term. The fact that the linguistic attributes are difficult to put boundaries on is extremely common for linguists: we won’t even claim to tell you what the definition of “word” is!
As for whether English is a Creole, it’s important to understand the motivation for Creolistics at its origin. It started, and continues, as an effort to legitimize a set of languages that before were considered illegitimate, un-interesting and utterly lacking on features worth studying. Part of that reputation is inextricably bound up in colonialism and racism.
Could you squint and call English a
Creole? Sure. But you’d be doing the same disservice to “Creole” as you would by saying “technically we’re all [in the US] African American because all humans originated in Africa.” It’s a disingenuous point, and one that could easily be mistaken for trying to reverse the legitimization efforts that brought the term into existence to begin with.
This is an interesting take; I've often seen the opposition to English as a creole trying to stress that English is a "real" language as opposed to the true creoles, which are as you say often treated as less legitimized.
In that sense saying that English, the language of global communication and commerce, originated from a creole shows that that is a perfectly legitimate type of language and the same is true as other creoles. So to me it does more of a service than a disservice!
My personal definition of “word” is “a unit of semantic meaning”. Don’t ask me to define that.
Are numbers words? Are abbreviations words? Can a words contain other words? Can the same sentence have a different number of words when spoken versus written? Yes to all, and more.
Well, a good example is "ice cream" - I've seen it described as a "compound word without a hyphen" - which is fair because while ice cream has ice and cream as things that are used to make it, "ice cream" is definitely something distinct that is not trivially decomposable from the individual words.
A good definition of "a unit of semantic meaning" might be "fulfills a 'part of speech' in a sentence" - but even that is hard in English. For example: "I set the table up" - up modifies set to create the "phrasal verb" set up, and isn't related to its typical meaning of position. But remove that little word and the whole meaning of the sentence drastically changes. I've seen "up" in this instance described as an adverb, which tends to be the "throwaway stat" for words that don't fit any of the other traditional parts of speech.
Is the English un- a word? Before you reflexively say no, consider that it has a specific meaning even though it never appears on its own and never receives word stress.
Is the French je a word? Before you reflexively say yes, consider that it never appears on its own and never receives word stress even though it has a specific meaning.
Is the Latin que a word? (The Q in SPQR, “senatus populusque Romanus”, although perhaps it’d be more authentic to write “SENATVSPOPVLVSQVEROMANVS”.) It has a well-defined meaning: “and”. It goes after whatever word you’d put “and” before; not syntactic constituent, word. It counts as a part of that word for the purposes of stress, so POpulus but popuLUSque.
It's a bit like the old saying, "All models are wrong, some models are useful." The concept of a "word" is useful in everyday language, particularly in English -- it's host language, unsurprisingly enough -- and (probably) other Indo-European languages. However, in a more precise context, it breaks down because of edge cases.
For example, "words" in agglutinative languages[1] (e.g., Turkish) act very differently from "words" in English. It's hard (impossible?) to capture all that variety in a pithy way. "A string of morphemes" might work, but that's hardly a satisfactory definition!
Maybe a good analogy for the HN crowd would be like asking, "How many characters are in a string?"
There is no generally accepted definition in linguistics, but AI researchers have come to the consensus that a word is one or more LLM tokens ;)
I’m not a linguist, but I would define a word as a part of a sentence composed out of one or more syllables, with word boundaries either implicitly or explicitly specified by different methods in different languages, e.g. by using pauses, longer or shorter phonemes, by using accents, rhythm, or intonation, or simply by remembering words as part of learning a lexical vocabulary.
A word is something that can be categorized as to which part of speech it belongs (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, etc.)
Depending on the languages it’s not always clear whether prefixes and/or suffixes are part of the word a separate words.
Similarly with compound words - do they count as a single or multiple words?
A short sentence in one language may enter another language as a single opaque word.
It's not a very interesting concept if it's limited to one place and time. I think you can abstract a lot of the features of the languages originally classified as creoles and apply them where-ever they make sense.
Personally I would say that Modern English is not a creole, and Old English is not a creole, but there was certainly a period of time in the early middle english period were England was invaded by the Norse and Normans that a lot of creole-like changes happened to the english language -- particularly the loss of grammatical gender and many declensions and conjugations and a simplification of grammar, and it happened for similar reasons -- an upper strata of society that spoke a different language being forced to communicate with the local people. And English at the time was definitely not considered an important language worth studying and people very rarely bothered even writing any books in English. I think it's worth thinking about the similarities and difference between what happened to english in the early middle english period, and other "true" creole languages beyond just saying it's not creole because it didn't happen in the 18th century.
The subject of the quote is Creolistics, not the definition of Creole. If you are looking for scientific definitions of linguistic categories you are going to be very disappointed. Language involves humans. Language is messy.
As well, any question that involves “meaning” must itself answer the question “to whom?” I answered from the perspective of (some) linguists, but as another user pointed out, non-linguists might very well and with no ill intention consider it an appropriate term.
> Nothing wrong with such words, but trying to logically reason about them is not going to be fruitful
Very few phenomena outside of physics have scientific definitions, yet we logically reason about them all the time, as we indeed must to make any sense of our world ethically, socially, and economically. Even making the physical human-built world around us relies a great deal on non-scientific definitions.
The entire field of linguistics is based upon reasoning about and finding patterns on top of "non-scientific" definitions. As professor McWhorter (quoted in the article) has said in his lectures: "It's all just a puff of air".
It's more about how people define the term. I don't think I've seen the position made disingenuously.
Most people I've spoken to think of creole as a mixed language that becomes it's own language. To them that describes English and how it came to be.
Even if you require colonisation to be part of it the position can stand. The Anglo-Saxon's colonisation by the Romans and the Normans are a big part of how the English mixture was formed.
If your definition requires an indigenous, non-European, language being modified by contact with a European coloniser's language. Then sure, English isn't a creole language. But I don't think that's how most people use the term creole colloquially.
You're going to have to explain how fifth century Germanic settlers in Britain were colonised by the Romans who arrived in Britain four centuries earlier and were largely a spent force by the time the Germans rolled in ...
I don't understand this comment. It makes absolutely no claims about the definition of a creole, and it makes no claims about how English doesn't conform to that definition. It just talks about "squinting" at languages, mentions black Americans for no particular reason, and accuses anyone who would argue that English is a creole of being "disingenuous" for trying to reverse the "legitimazation."
It's like the perfect troll comment. Makes no argument, implies anyone who would disagree is probably racist, and uses black Americans as a comparison for no particular reason.*
Here's my opinion: English is the result of a simplification of grammar caused by Old Norse and Old English crashing into each other with the same words but different grammar; then the French forced French usage in commerce, so most people started using a ton of French words with this English grammar. That last part sounds exactly like a creole.
Is your argument that considering English a creole lets English people off the hook for something? Are things that happen to non-white people somehow delegitimized when they are also noted in white people? Are white people so special and unique that everything else has to be defined by it's non-whiteness? If I'm missing your point, what was it?
[*] As a black American, I'm starting to recognize this as a long-standing feature of western rhetoric. A lot of modern argument seems to boil down to which side is more like black Americans. Humorously, actual black Americans are never considered to be like metaphorical black Americans; we're actually spoiled whiners with a sense of entitlement.
>Here's my opinion: English is the result of a simplification of grammar caused by Old Norse and Old English crashing into each other with the same words but different grammar; then the French forced French usage in commerce, so most people started using a ton of French words with this English grammar. That last part sounds exactly like a creole.
Grandparent's point is that you're stretching the meaning of the term to a level of generality that applies to everything, therefore meaning nothing in particular.
Your point applies to French just as much as English: Gaulic Celtic speakers poorly adopt Latin after getting bull rushed by Romans, then mix in Frankish terms when the Romans' former allies take over; or how about Sicilian: a mash-up of Latin, Greek, Germanic, Arabic conquerors.
You have to go pretty far to find a language which isn't a fusion of other languages that results from different peoples entering into extended contact.
'Creole' is a word that only appears with its current meaning and history in the last 100 or so years, grandparent is simply preserving that particularity. Nothing more.
No one in 1200s Europe thought English or Sicilian were languages not worth engaging with as actual languages owing to modern racial connotations.
> I don't understand this comment. It makes absolutely no claims about the definition of a creole, and it makes no claims about how English doesn't conform to that definition. It just talks about "squinting" at languages, mentions black Americans for no particular reason, and accuses anyone who would argue that English is a creole of being "disingenuous" for trying to reverse the "legitimazation."
> It's like the perfect troll comment. Makes no argument, implies anyone who would disagree is probably racist, and uses black Americans as a comparison for no particular reason.*
I don't think you're engaging with the author's point: it is _precisely_ that the study of Creole languages wasn't a top-down predetermined "this is the definition of something, and we're studying it" program, but arose after the fact to label the work of a school of linguistics.
> Is your argument that considering English a creole lets English people off the hook for something?
> If I'm missing your point, what was it?
The point is that the author assumes that concepts arise by labelling the results of historical processes, but ultimately our goal is to describe a historical process.
It's not warranted to jump to speculating about "western rhetoric" or "modern argument", which doesn't substantially engage with the OP. Nor is it warranted to speculate that the author "implies anyone who would disagree is probably racist".
I expect that a creole language will evolve over centuries into something that is less and less considered as a creole when compared with more recent creole languages.
I think it's more useful to consider "creolization events" in the history of a language rather than a blanket "creole/non-creole" attribute
> The fact that the linguistic attributes are difficult to put boundaries on is extremely common for linguists: we won’t even claim to tell you what the definition of “word” is!
The definition of a "word" is always straightforward: a word is an atomic unit of language.
However, which units are or aren't atomic varies according to what it is you're measuring.
Lexically, "catch fire" is an atomic entity, which cannot be understood as the sum of its parts. It's just one part, and it needs its own dictionary entry, separate from "catch" and from "fire".
Syntactically, "catch fire" is definitely not atomic, because the past tense is "caught fire". From this perspective, it's enough to know "catch" and "fire".
Syntactically again, we can see that "an elephant" is in variation with "two elephants" / "my elephant" / "every elephant" / etc., and it's clear that "an elephant" is not atomic, but is understood as the composition of "a(n)" with "elephant".
Phonologically, as the citation-form spelling above hinted, "an elephant" is atomic; the article cannot exist independently and must attach to another word. Without knowing what that word is, you won't know how the article is pronounced.
Specialized terms for both of these types of phenomena exist - lexical words that are too large to be syntactic words are called idioms; syntactic words that are too small to be phonological words are called clitics. But the general lesson is that, despite the definition of "word" being clear, membership in the category varies according to what aspect of the language you're looking at.
This doesn't even begin to cover things, even for English. First of all, "catch fire" is at least partly understandable from its constituent parts - "catch" has a great variety of related meanings, and they all have to do with something taking hold of something else; I'm sure any English speaker who has encountered both words would intuit the meaning of "catch fire" without any problem, especially if they also encountered "to catch a cold". Of course, the meaning is slightly different, and it is quite invariant.
Your analysis of the phonetic atomicity is also unsatisfactory. First, the article can very well be pronounced independently - I can say "English has a single indefinite article, with two forms: 'a' or 'an'". Secondly, the 'a' form can be pronounced in two different ways, depending on how you want to highlight it within a sentence: "he ate a piece" could use the schwa, or the "long a" if you want to highlight the article itself "he ate [ay] piece, not your piece". So the article's pronunciation can change independently of the word it is applying to. Finally, in at least some English accents, many words can be pronounced differently in certain sequences than others - for example, in modern Southern English, an "r" sound is introduced almost always in speech when a word that ends in a vowel sound is followed by another word that starts with a vowel sound, e.g. "I saw-R-it". By your description, neither "saw" nor "it" are individual word phonologically, since you don't know how they will be pronounced unless we know the following word.
Overall, the atomicity of a linguistic construct is highly debatable, even in a particular context.
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
I love that quote and the imagery it invokes. I think it's funny because it feels true - English speakers aren't precious about roping in new words from other languages. I enjoy the concept of the hybrid word - a word made from a mix of languages (e.g. neuroscience, Minneapolis, cryptocurrency etc). "Eigenvalue" is a good one as it's a mix of German and French.
Seriously, French is just a very crassified Romance language. As a near-native French speaker I was shocked one time in Paris at a restaurant where our server was from Italy and pronounce every letter in every French word and I still understood him.
Dropping 's's (and leaving behind a circumflex to remind one of the dropped 's')? That's a pretty crass evolution (but see the note at the bottom). Dropping trailing letters in words? Same thing. I understand that "oc" is really the Latin "hoc", meaning "this", and that "oui" is just an evolution -a shortening- of "hoc hic" ("this that"). "Oi" (pronounced "wah" in English) is just a vowel shift.
French is often treated as a high-class language, so I say 'crass' mainly to remind people that the evolution of French was really the result of every day people not treating it like a dead language to be preserved.
You're totally right, but just a minor correction: the word oui comes from oïl, which was the way to say "yes" in a family of languages called the langues d'oïl.[1] The word oïl is a shortened form of hoc ille in Latin.
German is badly spelt German. Damn High German consonant shift.
(E.g.compare ship, schip,
Schip, skib, skip vs. Schiff, or day, dag, Dag, dag, vs. Tag
etc. - we'd have a far neater, gradual Germanic transition around the North Sea if Low German had "won".
"that strategy of borrowing a word but giving it a slightly narrower meaning" – I think this happens with most borrowing, into any language. E.g. "opsjon" in Norwegian is from "option" but only means stock/legal options, never used in the common meaning of "choices". (And the video's own example with "les peoples".)
But my favorite example is when going into English from Norse, "fjord" has a quite narrow meaning in English, but must have been much broader in Norse when you look at Limfjorden in flat Denmark (more of a sound than a fjord) and Tunhovdfjorden (even Norwegians would think of this as a lake these days)
I used to joke with a friend of mine who was of Netherlands descent by saying that Dutch is misspelled English. (And, yes, I'm aware of the several rounds of orthographic reforms that Dutch has experienced.)
Is that the vocabulary of Germanic origin and imported from Germanic, or is it just the part of PIE that has not diverged between Latin and Germanic languages?
Old English poetry tends to have commonality at the beginnings of words (e.g. alliteration) rather than rhyming at the ends of words. Or so I remember from The History of English Podcast.
It's now 180 episodes in and talking about Shakespeare. Old English was some episodes back, as you might imagine.
"This seems to me a rather feckless argument over how people want to define a term. Indisputably, modern English results from a blend of French and old English, in the process of which what we today call English absorbed a lot of French vocabulary, lost most of its inflection, and its verb conjugation was greatly simplified. Whether you want to call it a creole or not is pointless, what I just stated is still true."
Readit News
- Wait! You can speak Netherlands?
- No. Sorry.
- But you can! I am speaking it!
- No you're not! You're speaking English!
He just blinked and walked off, probably assuming I was playing a trick, but my friend asked what that was all about, and had to convince me that she didn't understand anything he was saying, and wouldn't have said anything to me at all about it except that she heard me insist he was speaking English!
She asked me to try and remember what exactly I was hearing, and I realised I couldn't! I could only remember something like "do you know where [placename that sounded familiar] is?" and maybe that there was a heavy accent, but not exactly how it sounded.
Every now and then I think of this and I wonder if I actually understand English at all, or if I'm just so used to saying that I understand it (in response to something that sounds something like a question) that I started to believe it.
Eventually the first guy tires of being mocked by this guy claiming not to speak English and beats the guy up.
Totally hilarious example of what you experienced taken to an extreme.
A friend who is learning Dutch once complained to me that Dutch speakers will switch to English the moment they hear you are struggling with the language. I suggested she should explicitly ask people to keep the conversation in Dutch.
In one instance, she did that, and the (native Dutch-speaking) person she was talking to agreed to her request, and then proceeded in English anyway! She asked that person multiple times, and they just kept speaking English without addressing her request. Baffling.
Towards the end I have no chance of understanding it.
Quite a ways in it emerged that they were from an Italian airline and speaking Italian. They were no doubt (we imagine) well used to speakers of Romance languages especially Spanish making themselves understood... she however was quite entertained.
(This being HN I suppose it's de rigeur to cite Richard Feynman's bit about Italian dialectical differences leaving room for him to entertain himself by amiably yelling made-up Italian to people in his neighborhood, who chalked up his unintelligibility to such differences, not realizing they were being trolled as it were...)
Some properties of English's grammar are also more similar to Romance languages than Germanic ones. For example, whereas Germanic languages only mark tense on verbs, English verbs (like Spanish verbs) are marked with aspect in addition to tense: there is a distinction between "I played tennis"/"I have played tennis"/"I was playing tennis".
I'm not saying English is a Romance language. But it's a much more interesting problem to figure out why it's not considered a Romance language than you imply.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_influence_in_English
I think that's complicated by the fact that many english words of latin origin were inherited from a germanic source and thus from an intelligibility standpoint the overlap between english and dutch or german is partially additive with latin. e.g. [1]
Unfortunately the source is dead, but at one point a study ranked english/german as 60% lexical similarity compared to english/french at 27% [2]. Anecdotally, I think dutch and german are easier for an english speaker because of comparatively more overlap in simple words. Heavy use of compound words in dutch/german also gives an english listener a better chance of recognizing part of the word and inferring the meaning from context.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_Latinates_of_G...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_similarity
Are you measuring by fraction of words in a word list, or fraction of words in a typical utterance? Word usage is highly non-uniform, so you'll get very different ratios between the former and latter.
Where is the verb marking you speak of? Because I don't see any difference between played and played. Your example of how English uses auxiliary verbs to convey different verb aspects is a Germanic construct. I don't really understand how you use this as an example of Romance lineage in English.
What exactly do you mean by "aspect"?
> there is a distinction between "I played tennis"/"I have played tennis"/"I was playing tennis".
Sure:
-- (I) played (Tennis) ~~ jugué
-- (When I) played (Tennis) ~~ jugaba
-- (When I've) played (Tennis) ~~ jugado
English (like German) might say they need auxiliary words to explain what's going on, and Spanish people might say they're just conjugating the verb differently, but I think this is just because things are written down;
Because, if I say any of these sentences in Spanish or English rapidly enough, someone who does not know the language will not know where each word begins and ends, and it may just sound like English "conjugates" at the beginning of words and Spanish "conjugates" at the end. What's the real difference here?
> But it's a much more interesting problem to figure out why [English is] not considered a Romance language than you imply.
I think most of the time people talk about the "rules" of a language, we're not really talking about something that will help acquire the language (or be better understood): we're really just yapping about geography and time.
So what do you think would be different if English was more widely considered a Romance language?
That's the % in the dictionary. More than half of Japanese vocabulary in the dictionary is based on Chinese but no one argues Japanese is a Chinese creole. I forget by whom but it was once pointed out to me that in some genres - ranging from drinking songs to nursery rhymes - the words that come from Old English often make up more than 90% of the words. Similarly, if you sample the dialog in a kitchen or office while people gossip the ratio is also going to skew heavily like 70 - 80% Germanic. (Japanese shows a similar effect with all its Chinese vocabulary.)
Indeed, it's not tricky to write about everyday grounded things with nothing but straight Anglo-Saxon roots. (I've been doing it so far this whole paragraph -- oh that's Greek.) Difficult to achieve similar results utilizing exclusively Latinate vocabulary.
Of course, a history book or engineering manual will be different, and Graeco-Latin vocabulary might well be in the majority there.
the language backbone is still Germanic
[0]https://bosworthtoller.com/search?q=utgang
Although, because I'm looking at it, I get semantic satiation.
Creoles are defined as languages emerging from pidgins, which themselves are often simplified forms of speech that allow linguistically separate groups to communicate. English is not that. It has an unbroken line of native speakers whose usage gradually evolved, while maintaining a system of complex syntactic rules as well as a literature.
In two short paragraphs I learned a ton about the distinctions between pidgins, creoles, and ("full"?) languages, in addition to how languages evolve in both subcultures and ("dominant"?) cultures.
I can now apply this knowledge in the context of the Louisiana Creole population, the name of which has previously served to confuse me as to the definition of "creole", as well as other creole languages and populations in the Caribbean.
As a Norwegian speaker, I can also pick up much of that dialogue without the subtitles (though I have the advantage of also speaking passable German)
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As for whether English is a Creole, it’s important to understand the motivation for Creolistics at its origin. It started, and continues, as an effort to legitimize a set of languages that before were considered illegitimate, un-interesting and utterly lacking on features worth studying. Part of that reputation is inextricably bound up in colonialism and racism.
Could you squint and call English a Creole? Sure. But you’d be doing the same disservice to “Creole” as you would by saying “technically we’re all [in the US] African American because all humans originated in Africa.” It’s a disingenuous point, and one that could easily be mistaken for trying to reverse the legitimization efforts that brought the term into existence to begin with.
In that sense saying that English, the language of global communication and commerce, originated from a creole shows that that is a perfectly legitimate type of language and the same is true as other creoles. So to me it does more of a service than a disservice!
Are numbers words? Are abbreviations words? Can a words contain other words? Can the same sentence have a different number of words when spoken versus written? Yes to all, and more.
A good definition of "a unit of semantic meaning" might be "fulfills a 'part of speech' in a sentence" - but even that is hard in English. For example: "I set the table up" - up modifies set to create the "phrasal verb" set up, and isn't related to its typical meaning of position. But remove that little word and the whole meaning of the sentence drastically changes. I've seen "up" in this instance described as an adverb, which tends to be the "throwaway stat" for words that don't fit any of the other traditional parts of speech.
Not the interesting part, I think.
Is the English un- a word? Before you reflexively say no, consider that it has a specific meaning even though it never appears on its own and never receives word stress.
Is the French je a word? Before you reflexively say yes, consider that it never appears on its own and never receives word stress even though it has a specific meaning.
Is the Latin que a word? (The Q in SPQR, “senatus populusque Romanus”, although perhaps it’d be more authentic to write “SENATVSPOPVLVSQVEROMANVS”.) It has a well-defined meaning: “and”. It goes after whatever word you’d put “and” before; not syntactic constituent, word. It counts as a part of that word for the purposes of stress, so POpulus but popuLUSque.
What's your best attempt? :-)
For example, "words" in agglutinative languages[1] (e.g., Turkish) act very differently from "words" in English. It's hard (impossible?) to capture all that variety in a pithy way. "A string of morphemes" might work, but that's hardly a satisfactory definition!
Maybe a good analogy for the HN crowd would be like asking, "How many characters are in a string?"
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agglutinative_language
I’m not a linguist, but I would define a word as a part of a sentence composed out of one or more syllables, with word boundaries either implicitly or explicitly specified by different methods in different languages, e.g. by using pauses, longer or shorter phonemes, by using accents, rhythm, or intonation, or simply by remembering words as part of learning a lexical vocabulary.
A word is something that can be categorized as to which part of speech it belongs (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, etc.)
Depending on the languages it’s not always clear whether prefixes and/or suffixes are part of the word a separate words.
Similarly with compound words - do they count as a single or multiple words?
A short sentence in one language may enter another language as a single opaque word.
;)
Personally I would say that Modern English is not a creole, and Old English is not a creole, but there was certainly a period of time in the early middle english period were England was invaded by the Norse and Normans that a lot of creole-like changes happened to the english language -- particularly the loss of grammatical gender and many declensions and conjugations and a simplification of grammar, and it happened for similar reasons -- an upper strata of society that spoke a different language being forced to communicate with the local people. And English at the time was definitely not considered an important language worth studying and people very rarely bothered even writing any books in English. I think it's worth thinking about the similarities and difference between what happened to english in the early middle english period, and other "true" creole languages beyond just saying it's not creole because it didn't happen in the 18th century.
OK, but this is not a scientific definition.
Nothing wrong with such words, but trying to logically reason about them is not going to be fruitful.
As well, any question that involves “meaning” must itself answer the question “to whom?” I answered from the perspective of (some) linguists, but as another user pointed out, non-linguists might very well and with no ill intention consider it an appropriate term.
> Nothing wrong with such words, but trying to logically reason about them is not going to be fruitful
Very few phenomena outside of physics have scientific definitions, yet we logically reason about them all the time, as we indeed must to make any sense of our world ethically, socially, and economically. Even making the physical human-built world around us relies a great deal on non-scientific definitions.
The entire field of linguistics is based upon reasoning about and finding patterns on top of "non-scientific" definitions. As professor McWhorter (quoted in the article) has said in his lectures: "It's all just a puff of air".
Most people I've spoken to think of creole as a mixed language that becomes it's own language. To them that describes English and how it came to be.
Even if you require colonisation to be part of it the position can stand. The Anglo-Saxon's colonisation by the Romans and the Normans are a big part of how the English mixture was formed.
If your definition requires an indigenous, non-European, language being modified by contact with a European coloniser's language. Then sure, English isn't a creole language. But I don't think that's how most people use the term creole colloquially.
That never happened; it was the other way around.
It's like the perfect troll comment. Makes no argument, implies anyone who would disagree is probably racist, and uses black Americans as a comparison for no particular reason.*
Here's my opinion: English is the result of a simplification of grammar caused by Old Norse and Old English crashing into each other with the same words but different grammar; then the French forced French usage in commerce, so most people started using a ton of French words with this English grammar. That last part sounds exactly like a creole.
Is your argument that considering English a creole lets English people off the hook for something? Are things that happen to non-white people somehow delegitimized when they are also noted in white people? Are white people so special and unique that everything else has to be defined by it's non-whiteness? If I'm missing your point, what was it?
[*] As a black American, I'm starting to recognize this as a long-standing feature of western rhetoric. A lot of modern argument seems to boil down to which side is more like black Americans. Humorously, actual black Americans are never considered to be like metaphorical black Americans; we're actually spoiled whiners with a sense of entitlement.
Grandparent's point is that you're stretching the meaning of the term to a level of generality that applies to everything, therefore meaning nothing in particular.
Your point applies to French just as much as English: Gaulic Celtic speakers poorly adopt Latin after getting bull rushed by Romans, then mix in Frankish terms when the Romans' former allies take over; or how about Sicilian: a mash-up of Latin, Greek, Germanic, Arabic conquerors.
You have to go pretty far to find a language which isn't a fusion of other languages that results from different peoples entering into extended contact.
'Creole' is a word that only appears with its current meaning and history in the last 100 or so years, grandparent is simply preserving that particularity. Nothing more.
No one in 1200s Europe thought English or Sicilian were languages not worth engaging with as actual languages owing to modern racial connotations.
> It's like the perfect troll comment. Makes no argument, implies anyone who would disagree is probably racist, and uses black Americans as a comparison for no particular reason.*
I don't think you're engaging with the author's point: it is _precisely_ that the study of Creole languages wasn't a top-down predetermined "this is the definition of something, and we're studying it" program, but arose after the fact to label the work of a school of linguistics.
> Is your argument that considering English a creole lets English people off the hook for something?
> If I'm missing your point, what was it?
The point is that the author assumes that concepts arise by labelling the results of historical processes, but ultimately our goal is to describe a historical process.
It's not warranted to jump to speculating about "western rhetoric" or "modern argument", which doesn't substantially engage with the OP. Nor is it warranted to speculate that the author "implies anyone who would disagree is probably racist".
I mean you're linguists! :D
Pseudo-Creole, a language that's technically a Creole, but doesn't fit the sociohistoic context.
I think, it would be funny if a word for giving specific languages legitimacy is used to define a language that had more legitimacy to begin with.
I expect that a creole language will evolve over centuries into something that is less and less considered as a creole when compared with more recent creole languages.
I think it's more useful to consider "creolization events" in the history of a language rather than a blanket "creole/non-creole" attribute
Oye Hakalowda! Kowmang showxa lang belta hiya ke?
Dead Comment
The definition of a "word" is always straightforward: a word is an atomic unit of language.
However, which units are or aren't atomic varies according to what it is you're measuring.
Lexically, "catch fire" is an atomic entity, which cannot be understood as the sum of its parts. It's just one part, and it needs its own dictionary entry, separate from "catch" and from "fire".
Syntactically, "catch fire" is definitely not atomic, because the past tense is "caught fire". From this perspective, it's enough to know "catch" and "fire".
Syntactically again, we can see that "an elephant" is in variation with "two elephants" / "my elephant" / "every elephant" / etc., and it's clear that "an elephant" is not atomic, but is understood as the composition of "a(n)" with "elephant".
Phonologically, as the citation-form spelling above hinted, "an elephant" is atomic; the article cannot exist independently and must attach to another word. Without knowing what that word is, you won't know how the article is pronounced.
Specialized terms for both of these types of phenomena exist - lexical words that are too large to be syntactic words are called idioms; syntactic words that are too small to be phonological words are called clitics. But the general lesson is that, despite the definition of "word" being clear, membership in the category varies according to what aspect of the language you're looking at.
Your analysis of the phonetic atomicity is also unsatisfactory. First, the article can very well be pronounced independently - I can say "English has a single indefinite article, with two forms: 'a' or 'an'". Secondly, the 'a' form can be pronounced in two different ways, depending on how you want to highlight it within a sentence: "he ate a piece" could use the schwa, or the "long a" if you want to highlight the article itself "he ate [ay] piece, not your piece". So the article's pronunciation can change independently of the word it is applying to. Finally, in at least some English accents, many words can be pronounced differently in certain sequences than others - for example, in modern Southern English, an "r" sound is introduced almost always in speech when a word that ends in a vowel sound is followed by another word that starts with a vowel sound, e.g. "I saw-R-it". By your description, neither "saw" nor "it" are individual word phonologically, since you don't know how they will be pronounced unless we know the following word.
Overall, the atomicity of a linguistic construct is highly debatable, even in a particular context.
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
― James D. Nicoll
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40495393
Seriously, French is just a very crassified Romance language. As a near-native French speaker I was shocked one time in Paris at a restaurant where our server was from Italy and pronounce every letter in every French word and I still understood him.
Dropping 's's (and leaving behind a circumflex to remind one of the dropped 's')? That's a pretty crass evolution (but see the note at the bottom). Dropping trailing letters in words? Same thing. I understand that "oc" is really the Latin "hoc", meaning "this", and that "oui" is just an evolution -a shortening- of "hoc hic" ("this that"). "Oi" (pronounced "wah" in English) is just a vowel shift.
French is often treated as a high-class language, so I say 'crass' mainly to remind people that the evolution of French was really the result of every day people not treating it like a dead language to be preserved.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langues_d%27o%C3%AFl
“How to translate French words WITHOUT KNOWING FRENCH (3 clever tricks)”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3BGaA3PC9tQ
I learned a lot from this and continue to find words that these lessons apply to.
If so it is equally badly spelled German.
(E.g.compare ship, schip, Schip, skib, skip vs. Schiff, or day, dag, Dag, dag, vs. Tag etc. - we'd have a far neater, gradual Germanic transition around the North Sea if Low German had "won".
But my favorite example is when going into English from Norse, "fjord" has a quite narrow meaning in English, but must have been much broader in Norse when you look at Limfjorden in flat Denmark (more of a sound than a fjord) and Tunhovdfjorden (even Norwegians would think of this as a lake these days)
It's now 180 episodes in and talking about Shakespeare. Old English was some episodes back, as you might imagine.
As with many others posting here IANALinguist.
"This seems to me a rather feckless argument over how people want to define a term. Indisputably, modern English results from a blend of French and old English, in the process of which what we today call English absorbed a lot of French vocabulary, lost most of its inflection, and its verb conjugation was greatly simplified. Whether you want to call it a creole or not is pointless, what I just stated is still true."
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