Search results for 'tag:English vocabulary tag:Verbs' matching tags 'English vocabulary' and 'Verbs'

Re: Proficiency alongside "poverty".

Cool Breeze — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 12:05:04 GMT

Forbes wrote:
Cool Breeze, your English is faultless!

I think that Mr P has hit the nail on the head. In English the complexity resides in the syntax. Many say that English has no "grammar" because you do not need to grapple with conjugations and declensions, but of course if it had no grammar it would just be soup.

I have been to Thailand many times. I have made a not very sucessful attempt to learn Thai, which is even more analytical than English.

Forbes, in one respect I am more British than you: I have also been to Thailand many times but have never bothered to try and learn the language. I have noticed that they never put an English noun in the plural and that there are some other local peculiarities.

MrP's comment about syntax makes sense to me as well.

Thank you for your comment regarding my English. I wish it were faultless! I think I'm just fairly good at fooling people into thinking it is better than it actually is. I achieve this by using mainly words and expressions I am familiar with, in other words, I use English I have seen or heard before. However, occasionally I step aside from the well-trodden path either inadvertently or on purpose because I feel imprisoned by the obligation or compulsion to sound 'natural'. Maybe I'm something of a nonconformist. For example, I know full well that native speakers like to place only in the same position as the adverbs of frequency (often, always, never etc.). I quite often place it elsewhere...

My word power in Finnish is from another planet compared with my English vocabulary. I would never dare to proofread a legal document written in English, for example. But since I don't make many mistakes in what I consider English grammar and I have a good ear that helps me avoid doubtful expressions, I often make an unwarrantedly favourable impression on the reader.

Cheers
CB

Re: How the English language was born?

paco2004 — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 00:10:58 GMT

In my opinion, current English has its root in the language spoken by the children whose father was a settler from Scandinavia and whose mother was an Anglo-Saxon. If you take 1000 English words most frequently used in everyday speech, they are either of Anglo-Saxon origin or of Old Norse origin. The influence of the French language is rather minor. It is true that English vocabulary contains many words of French origin but most of them are words that are used only in speech or writing of higher registers.

It is also true that the conquest by the French Norman greatly impacted on the English language. But the impact was rather an indirect one. The French conquerors paid no attention to the English language for 300 years after the conquest, and as the result, English was rapidly vulgarized. During that time all of the official documents were written in French and there was no school where English was taught. English at that time remained a language spoken only by uneducated people of the lower class who were descendants of the Scandinavians and Anglo-Saxon mixed children. It was that three centuries when the English language drastically changed in the grammar. Old Norse (the language spoken by their father) and Old English (the language spoken by their mother) were similar in vocabulary, but the case declensions and the verb inflections were a bit different. So the children of the mixed race dropped the case declensions and simplified the verb inflexions in order to communicate with both their parents. Thus the basic grammar frame was renewed into the one close to the current English's.

I am interested in the fact that similar simplifications took place in vulgarizing classic Latin to Romance Languages (French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and etc.). I have an opinion that massive immigration and massive intermarriages tend to accelerate simplification of languages.

paco