If this is his thought process, he should take it a step further.
French is just badly pronounced Latin.
My mother (who is french) describes the language as “Latin, but mumbled around a cigarette”
With more phlegm.
So what’s German then? A bunch of that overlaps with English words too from my recollection.
german is just language lego - you just keep building new words from old parts.
Swedish checking in.
I choose to believe French is just ugly Catalan
it’s all PIE
always has been
But in this case French actually is Latin. English isn’t a descendant of French, but French is derived mostly from Latin
Hey, it’s also German with bad syntax.
Or Dutch with less silly spelling.
Looking down on dutch spelling, while writing im English… Wild.
…English is only 30% or so French, and essentially just adjectives. Take out adjectives and we are German babies.
And most of the French has Germanic synonyms.
It’s actually pretty fascinating to sit down with a work translated from Old to Middle to Modern English and see the language drift in action.
I will have to try that sometime. What’s a good piece of literature to look at that a beginner could visually make sense of?
Beowulf is probably the most relevant and easiest to find in various evolutions, you can also find spoken versions in Old, Middle, and modern. Chaucer’s stories are also popular if you find the Old English too dense, Middle English is obviously a lot more approachable.
Thanks for this. I will have to give it a shot.
Forgot we read this in high school
English is just a bunch of bludgeoned languages hiding under a trench coat, acting shady in the alleyway, I swear.
English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
—James D. NicollUnironically linguistic victim blaming, given most of the “loanwords” were French forced onto the language by the Normans. Who were basically just French speaking Vikings anyways.
Then there there was the Renaissance and Enlightenment obsession with the “Classics” and now you have to say “per diem” instead of “by the day” or “daily pay”
Sure, there’s plenty of French in English, but there’s an English equivalent for most French words. We’d be fine eating cow instead of beef or pig instead of pork. It may sound a little strange but English should still be very usable if we removed the French root words.
Don’t show this to the sovereign citizens. They’ll start declaring that any government document with borrowed words from a foreign language means you can’t be court-martialed twice for the same offense due to habeas corpus.
That’s just Frisian with extra steps.
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Le bollocks
Someone tell the Quebec nationalists, maybe then we can concentrate on more important things than english-only trash cans
Well at least the english are able to count properly…
As a German I hate both languages
well yeah German is a lovely language… just flows right off the Zunge.
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🚫🤢fr*nch🤮🚫
Oh my…
““Linguist”” as if French prescriptivists can seriously be called linguists
le haha <eats fromage>
And Dutch and German
Oh no, that’s going to make the mail- reading gammon mad.
