Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
colechristensen | on: Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee
English is three* languages in a trenchcoat, all languages borrow but English in particular is a cobbled together mess. Like a salors' pidgin language except instead of sailors, driven by the ruling class of Britain at the boundary of several language families who kept conquering each other.

*(or 7 or whatever number makes you feel best)

ianburrell | parent | next
English is a West Germanic language with vocabulary from other languages, primarily French and Latin. But most of the core words are Germanic. It is not a pidgin whose defining feature is simplified grammar.
mcswell | root | parent
English has sometimes been called a creole, i.e. what was a pidgin language but after it has been spoken by several generations of native speakers. One thing it lost some time around the Norman Conquest was the case marking phonology (apart from some pronouns).
loading story #48490973
dataflow | parent | next
Might be a mess linguistically, but it's sure nice to have only 26 letters with no accents on a keyboard.
pocksuppet | root | parent | next
long s and thorn would like to have a word with you, but they can't because they were removed from the keyboard

In Unicode, that's ſ and þ. Both historical English letters that are no longer used.

colechristensen | root | parent
"Ye Olde Mill" or whatever archaic silliness you'll find at fairs and whatnot was the result of the printing press dropping þ (as in þe, þ is just th-) and was never supposed to be pronounced with a "y" sound.

"Ye Olde" ye was not the same word as "Hear ye, hear ye!", that ye is a plural 'you' basically the same word as "y'all" and never had a thorn.

tengwar2 | root | parent | next
This happened with more than one letter. For instance the Scots language had a letter yogh (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yogh), which was written somewhat like a rounded "3" but lower on the line. Early printers had only the characters of the English language, and since this character looked like a hand-written z, that is what they used in its place. Hence the name "Menzies" is pronounced "Ming-is", since that isn't actually a z.

Welsh suffered more: it used to be full of "k"s. When the first Welsh Bible was printed, the English printer did not have enough "k"s, and substituted "c", and the language now does not use "k" at all. Apparently the printer's note on the matter still exists.

cguess | root | parent
Just to expand on this:

"ye" in "ye Olde mill" is actually just "the" but originally "þe"/"þee". The first printing presses to England were imported from Germany, which never used þ, so printers used something that looked sorta similar, thus "y".

"Ye" was a different word, the 2nd person non-formal version of "you" (which was historically formal: see-Shakespeare and how he played with "ye" and "you"). Thorn was on its way out along with "ð" both of which were in Middle English. The sounds didn't leave English, but we merged it into one letter cluster "th" (think "that" and "the", which have different th sounds).

Dylan16807 | root | parent | next
The pronunciation is so bad though. The consonants are mostly fine, but the way we write vowels is a total mess. We'd need at least a dozen vowel letters to sanely represent English. And we could cut a couple consonant letters to help make room, for maybe 30 letters total, still no accents.
mcswell | root | parent | next
Blame that on Latin, which had only five vowels (not counting the long and short vowels separately).
krapp | root | parent
Come now. English can be understood well enough through tough thorough thought.
loading story #48491952
loading story #48491963
mootothemax | root | parent | next
It’s great compression: Y sometimes a vowel, sometimes a consonant.

And while not encoded on a keyboard, it still blows my mind that English has a crazy number of past tenses - and a such a bad hack of a future tense that it’s hard to classify as such.

Linguistics is fun. The accents are alright.

tengwar2 | root | parent
Or English has only two tenses (present and past perfect) and everything else is done with modifiers.
colechristensen | root | parent
>only 26 letters with no accents on a keyboard

This was caused by the printing press and the typewriter (keyboard) both of which forced simplifications in the written English language.

ummonk | root | parent | next
You just press backspace and hit the accent mark key or for a printing press stack the accent mark on top of the letter. People ditched accents because they were rarely used in English writing (only really being used for some loanwords), not because simplifications were forced by typewriters or the printing press (which handle non-English languages just fine).
colechristensen | root | parent
For printing presses we're talking about the influence of the first printing presses hundreds of years before industrialization which were imported from Germany and even when they started making their own in England they were more like clones and used imported designs and parts. The early machines had a heavy influence on the written language particularly at times when under 1 in 10 people could write, and with the advent of movable type the people who learned to write were heavily influenced by what they read... books printed on German-design machines. You really only need one generation in a situation like that to dramatically change the language. Losing þ, æ, and ð
lmm | root | parent
And yet other languages have managed to resist those simplifications. So it's clearly not 100% forced.
colechristensen | root | parent
Who says other languages haven't undergone significant changes?
yellowapple | parent
Good languages borrow, great languages steal?
colechristensen | root | parent
More like the repressed underclasses who kept getting conquered by foreign powers didn't overthrow their new masters but assimilated them and part of their language instead. Many times. Romans, early German-ish people, early norwegians, early french, early french who had been conquered by early norwegians, etc. (historical sticklers give me a break, it's two sentences not a doctoral thesis)