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Old 06-11-2012, 12:37 PM   #16
QuantumIguana
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I often see people complaining about two words being made into one word. Then I read old books with words like "whithersoever", which is three words made into one word.
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Old 06-11-2012, 12:44 PM   #17
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Words do tend to get joined with time. Eg, if you read late 18th/early 19th c novels you'll generally see "to night". By the mid 19th c it's become "to-night", and by the early 20th c the modern "tonight".
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Old 06-11-2012, 01:04 PM   #18
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And of course, the change isn't overnight, no one turns a switch and suddenly everyone switches from "to-night" to "tonight". It takes time, in the early phase, people are starting to use "tonight", while others shake their fists that the error. And then towards the end, you have the last hangers-on using "to-night" and fists are shaken at them for their "error".

Of course, not every deviation is an evolution in language, some things really are mistakes. Language tends to change when the new version is clearer or simpler than the old version. "I'm going to the movies to night" could be read as going to the movies to perform some action called "night", if someone thought that night was intended as a verb. Adding the hypen adds clarity, but it was only an intermediate phase.
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Old 06-11-2012, 02:43 PM   #19
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It's quite possible that "lead" and "read" always rhymed at one time, before the Great Vowel Shift.
http://www.h2g2.com/approved_entry/A980624
Pronunciation is still evolving centuries after spelling was fixed.
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Old 06-11-2012, 03:28 PM   #20
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Quote:
Originally Posted by 5thWiggle View Post
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And you know what English is? The result of the efforts of Norman men-at-arms to make dates with Saxon barmaids in the Ninth Century Pre-Atomic, and no more legitimate than any of the other results.
H. Beam Piper, Little Fuzzy
Two of my favorite quotes on English.
Actually, that quote is from "Fuzzy Sapiens," chapter 9, when Dr. Mallin complains about the linguistic makeup of the word "Fuzzyologist", at which point Victor Grego makes Mallin's official title "Chief Fuzzyologist." (Yes, I have read all three books once or twice a year for the last 15 or so. Why do you ask? :P)
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Old 06-11-2012, 07:10 PM   #21
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Originally Posted by 5thWiggle View Post

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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 Nicoll
Quote:
And you know what English is? The result of the efforts of Norman men-at-arms to make dates with Saxon barmaids in the Ninth Century Pre-Atomic, and no more legitimate than any of the other results.
H. Beam Piper, Little Fuzzy
Two of my favorite quotes on English.
Preceded by Saxon men-at-arms trying to make dates with Celtic barmaids.

To my knowledge there isn't any definitive tome on the size of the English vocabulary compared to other languages. However, to quote the OED

Quote:
the circle of the English language has a well-defined centre but no discernible circumference.
with the end result that English is considered to have the largest vocabulary in the world, and enables shades of meaning that are difficult to encompass in other languages.

Last edited by plib; 06-12-2012 at 08:23 AM.
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Old 06-12-2012, 03:07 AM   #22
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Originally Posted by plib View Post
To my knowledge there isn't any definitive tome on the size the English vocabulary compared to other languages.
I read a journal rticle recently which estimated that English had something like 700,000 "root words" in its vocabulary, compared with an estimated 120,000 in French, and 150,000 in German. As you say, though, it's the kind of thing that's very difficult to quantify.

In everyday life, most people use fewer than 2,000 different words.
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Old 06-12-2012, 06:20 AM   #23
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Just be glad that we do not have a written language like Japanese. You have to know1,006 Kanji by the end of the sixth grade. When writing Kanji you have to know stroke order and direction. Makes learning your ABCs a piece of cake.
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Old 06-12-2012, 07:23 AM   #24
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Quote:
Originally Posted by JD Gumby View Post
Actually, that quote is from "Fuzzy Sapiens," chapter 9, when Dr. Mallin complains about the linguistic makeup of the word "Fuzzyologist", at which point Victor Grego makes Mallin's official title "Chief Fuzzyologist." (Yes, I have read all three books once or twice a year for the last 15 or so. Why do you ask? :P)
You win all the free Estefee you can eat for life and the title of Chief Fuzzyologist.
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Old 06-12-2012, 08:06 AM   #25
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When I was young, single and happy

The plural of roof was rooves, now it's roofs (either is correct according to Wikipedia)

and the plural of hoof, hooves, now it's hoofs

English is changing all the time

In the future we may be writing, not just m8t but l8t and f8t etc.

With millions of Asians learning English we're sure to have lots of Asian words becoming part of English !
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Old 06-12-2012, 08:09 AM   #26
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So true.
Apache
Tut tut! 11th century.
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Old 06-12-2012, 08:21 AM   #27
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Just be glad that we do not have a written language like Japanese. You have to know1,006 Kanji by the end of the sixth grade. When writing Kanji you have to know stroke order and direction. Makes learning your ABCs a piece of cake.
Apache
Do they have a rhyming song for it?

"Now I know my 1,006 Kanji's......."
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Old 06-12-2012, 09:03 AM   #28
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Originally Posted by Conor View Post
It's quite possible that "lead" and "read" always rhymed at one time, before the Great Vowel Shift.
http://www.h2g2.com/approved_entry/A980624
Pronunciation is still evolving centuries after spelling was fixed.
They were somewhat different in Old English. rædan was a strong verb and lædan a weak one, so their conjugations were originally different.

This sort of thing does sometimes happen in language evolution. For a long time I was puzzled by the words "poire" (="pear") and "poireau" (="leek") in French. I couldn't see any obvious connections between pears and leeks. Then I found out that "poire" was descended from the Latin word "pira"and "poireau" from the Latin word "porrum". They had therefore converged to something similar in modern French.
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Old 06-12-2012, 09:05 AM   #29
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Quelch View Post
When I was young, single and happy

The plural of roof was rooves, now it's roofs (either is correct according to Wikipedia)

and the plural of hoof, hooves, now it's hoofs

English is changing all the time

In the future we may be writing, not just m8t but l8t and f8t etc.

With millions of Asians learning English we're sure to have lots of Asian words becoming part of English !
And dwarves.
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Old 06-12-2012, 09:31 AM   #30
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Quelch View Post
When I was young, single and happy

The plural of roof was rooves, now it's roofs (either is correct according to Wikipedia)

and the plural of hoof, hooves, now it's hoofs

English is changing all the time

In the future we may be writing, not just m8t but l8t and f8t etc.

With millions of Asians learning English we're sure to have lots of Asian words becoming part of English !
"Hooves" feels more natural to me than "hoofs", the transition between the v sound and the s sound feels smoother. But that may just be from having learned the language that way.

Foreign words tend to enter the language when they will a gap in our language. "Mansion" is useful, it easily distingusihes between an ordinary house and a very large expensive house. Maybe it would be better if we didn't feel the need to make such a distinction, maybe not. But the word would fade if users of the language didn't think it was a useful distinction.

Words relating to food - types of food or methods of cooking - come over to English the easiest.
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