The Ultimate Trivia Thread

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by crich70

They say that English is the hardest language to learn because we have borrowed so many words from other languages.

We've been a host family for foreign language students for some years now. It varies from student to student, and also depends on their native language, but I've found the two things that are most troublesome are

1) The definite and indefinite article. Knowing that one often needs to use 'a' or 'the' and then understanding which of them is needed is very difficult for many of our students.
2) The numerous past, present and future tenses used in English, especially the conditionals.

And then there's non-language, cultural things. Of which the big one is 'please' and 'thank you'. My wife often says to them, that in polite English there are only two answers to a question: "Yes, please" or "No, thank you".

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by crich70

They say that English is the hardest language to learn because we have borrowed so many words from other languages.

Surely the opposite would be true, if English has borrowed so many words from other languages then it must follow that native speakers of the other languages will find a certain familiarity when learning English.

And if English is the hardest language to learn, then why is it the most widely spoken language on earth. You won't find many locals who can speak French or German in Indonesia, but you'll find many native German and French speakers conversing with locals in English.

The notion that English is the hardest language to learn could well be a myth, promoted by Anglosphere elites who like to particularise themselves as being 'exceptional'.

BR

[issybird]

Certainly English is easier than certain other Western languages in at least two respects; nouns don't have genders or cases.

[kacir]

Maria Theresa was the the sovereign of Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Bohemia, Transylvania, Mantua, Milan, Lodomeria and Galicia, the Austrian Netherlands and Parma between 1740 – 1780.

She introduced number of important reforms in the Austrian Hungarian empire. One of those was a school reform.
All children from the age 6 to 12 had to attend school. The reform was not very successful, because it did not provide money for schools.

The lowest level of school in small villages for peasant kids was called Trivial school (Trivialschule in German). They teached Trivia: reading, writing, basic math. Also religion, and basic farming skills, but that did not count in Trivia ;-). The school had only one classroom and one teacher for all attending children. [My grandfather taught in a one-classroom-school in a remote village. He had kids between 1st and 4th grade in the classroom at the same time (that was, of course, much later, in the first half of 20th century).]

The word Trivia is from Latin. The schools from 13th century were founded in that region by Roman Catholic church.
They taught Trivium - [latin] grammar, rhetoric and dialectics.
Higher schools taught also Quadrivium - arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trivium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrivium

[trichobezoar]

Thank you for that, Kacir! That was very informative!


Via Dictionary.com's Everything After Z:

Why Does English Have Borrowed Words From Other Languages?


English is a More Varied (and Delicious) Melting Pot Than You Think

English—is one of the most incredible, flavorfully-complex melting pots of linguistic ingredients from other countries that’s been left to simmer for (in some cases) centuries. These linguistic ingredients are called loanwords that have been borrowed and incorporated into English. The loanwords are oftentimes so common now, the foreign flavor has been completely lost on speakers.

What usually happens is that English speakers find a word in another language to describe something they don’t yet have a word for. So they “borrow” that word. Forever. That said, loanwords fall into two categories: popular loanwords and learned loanwords.

Learned loanwords tend to come from scholarly or specialized fields, like medicine or law. It’s usually easier to see what language these words came from. English, for example, draws from Latin for a lot of medical and legal terms.

[snip]

© 2018 Dictionary.com, LLC.

[pdurrant]

Please don't post entire articles from another site. Thanks.

[Solitaire1]

When it comes to the standard for hardness/darkness of pencil leads, "#2" in the U. S. Standard is equal to "HB" in the European Standard (which sits in the middle of the scale).

[trichobezoar]

More vaquero cafe.


[ Edit: Oops, posted in wrong thread. :3 ]