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Lost in translation
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2026
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I have been saying it for years, English is a very informal and open language, have fun with it. Sky water is not technically a wrong way to refer to rain, liquid laundry soup is absolutely a sauce for your laundry, dish bricks, day star, the list goes on
I think this is one of the reasons why English (or it's descendants) will forever be the international language of trade. If it's not your first language, it's damn difficult to make yourself sound like a native speaker, but it's damn easy to make yourself understood.
I think you're confusing a reasonably short period in recent history with "forever".
In History there were quite a lot of "international languages of trade" other than English. It seems to depend very much on which nations were the top empire of the age and because the last two top empires were English-speaking countries (first Britain, then after that the United States), the English language has been dominant as a second language for a over a century now, but before that the English language already existed in a form very similar to the modern form and yet it wasn't at all an "international language of trade" (in fact, at least in Europe, before English it was French that was the dominant language of trade).
I bet that the next "international language of trade" will be Chinese.
By saying forever they're talking about the future, not the past.
A forecast not backed by anything other than wishful thinking and which runs counter everything that has always happened.
Claiming that English will forever be the "international language of trade" is like putting up a statue and under it the message: "My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!""
More in general, nothing lasts forever.
You can't really look at past examples now that globalization is a thing. An ubiquitous language wasn't really possible before then.
You see, I don't even have to show any evidence of anything, it's those who are claiming that "This time is different" and that this specific trading language, right now specifically (by an amazing coincidence, right when they live and make said claim, never before and - given that claim being "forever" and "global" - logically never again for a different one) will, unlike all trade languages before hold that position and endure, not just 100 years, not just 1000 years, but "forever".
Such a huge, massive, gigantic forecast needs equally huge, massive, gigantic proof.
So far, against that theory we have History, not just of trading languages but of languages themselves and nations showing that until none of those things lasts forever. On the side in favor of it we have ... *crickets*
That whole forecast stinks of jingoism and ignorance.
Words ordering with grammar can be unimportant to being known.
On the flip side, a lot of other languages have retained structures which require a detailed knowing of grammar in part because they haven't needed to be learned by amateurs.
Mate we're all amateurs here. Unless you are being paid to learn languages
I'm not paid specifically to speak English, but I feel like meetings would go a lot longer without it
I speak several languages, most of which are Romance languages (such as French and Italian) which have a specific word order which pretty close to english (though adjective come after nouns rather than before, plus there are some additional verbal times though those are uncommon to use).
Amongst those I also speak Dutch and German, which have quite a different word order (though, curiously, Dutch from Belgium has a similar word order to French) and I constantly fuck it up (especially in German, which is the one of the two I speak worse) and the natives always understand me.
In my experience learning two of those languages just by living there (and with people that are learning my own native language), it's using the wrong words that confuses people, then using the wrong accent (mainly by putting the emphasis in the wrong syllable) and only as a far third is word order and even that only in specific cases such expressions (where it's the whole expression as is that has a meaning, rather the meaning being a composition of the meaning of the individual words in it).
In my experience there really is no special quality of the English language that makes it easier to understand when people use a wrong word order.
True, though I would personally count that as a bad thing. Purity of language, to me is irrelevant. That opinion may be coloured by the fact that I'm a native English speaker, and there hasn't been anything resembling purity in this language for thousands of years. To me, the point of language is open communication. Any impediment to that is a negative.
I lik your way of doyng byzness
They're talking about English, not Welsh
I just fixed your dumb spelling >:(
Here he is, fuckin get em
Whereas English has adopted so many idioms from other languages with different grammar that we're entirely comfortable with the exotic phrasing, or if it's ambiguous we make puns and/or poetry from it.
There weren't many amateurs desiring to learn English back in eleventh—fifteenth centuries, when it was losing the remaining complexity in the grammar.
There were a lot of native French speakers in England at that time, so a bunch of normalizing like what happened a couple hundred years earlier with the Norse meeting Anglo-Saxons
Idk about Vikings, but to my knowledge Normans didn't give a crap about English, speaking their language among the ruling class, and all documents were in French. This is evidenced by the fact that there's little written record of how English developed at the time. On the other hand, French was perceived as prestigious, since people had to deal with the ruling class and bureaucracy in French, thus many 'high-society' words were borrowed into English — hence typically when talking about everyday matters, the words are mostly of Germanic or Norse origin, and grandiose abstract ideas or upper-class life are French/Latin.
It's not like trade with Normans started only after the conquest, after all.
Yes, and because of that there was a lot of interaction and blending, right up to the point where trials were required to be performed in English in the mid-14th century, then in the 15th everything was switched to English. The Peterborough Chronicle perfectly demonstrates the transition from Old English to Middle. It was written over about a hundred years (11th to 12th Century) and gradually starts incorporating French vocabulary and dropping old Germanic grammar.
Ah. I misremembered about the Peterborough Chronicle being the one switching to French because of a new French abbot.
Still not seeing how much of it was informed by the Frenchmen wanting to learn English, though. Englishmen for sure did borrow French vocabulary, not sure about the other way around. I'm yet to learn about switching the trials to English, as I'm right at the point of Norman conquest in the 'History of English Language' podcast. =)
Seems so far that said history was in large part dictated by political happenings.
Well, the aristocracy didn't just learn English overnight. The transition of official use over about 200 years shows them becoming more and more accepting and comfortable with it.
I remember an interview with Lisa Kudrow in which she described her French boyfriend's failure to remember the English word for toes, and said they were foot fingers.
English: if the people you're talking to understand what you're saying, you're ok. Even if the people you're talking to don't understand what you're saying, you're still ok. Just be fancy with your words, and everyone will like it.
Same in Russian: пальцы ног (fingers of the foot).
And in German, Dutch and Afrikaans (at least), we call gloves hand-shoes (Handschuhe / handschoenen / handskoene)
I would think gloves would be hand socks, but then I don't know what hand shoes would be.
In french, that's really the name that is given to them, colloquially : doigts de pied (foot fingers)
The real term is orteils (toes)
They're really good at it, too. Sometimes it's even charming. For example, potatoes are "earth apples."
It's the same in Dutch - "aardapple" - but using the Dutch words for earth and apple rather than the French ones.
And don't get me started on French numbering - for example 98 is "four twenties eigtheen".
One doesn't get it for one's own language because all the weird stuff is "normal" but when you're learning other languages you discovered they're all riddled with funny constructs like this (and then there are expressions, which are often hilarious - for example on of the Dutch expression for wasting time on small details literally translates to "fucking ants")
I wonder if the meaning of pomme was broader in Old French, like how meat (from mete) used to mean food in Old English.
Yes it was the case, broadly pomme meant fruit.
Originally tomatoes were called pommes d'amour. There is pommes de terre (potatoes) pommes de pin (pinecones). If we would translate literally pomme de pin it would give us pineapple.
There were also other fruits beginning with pomme originally but I can't seem to recall them.
I vaguely heard that ‘berry’ and iirc ‘apple’ were used the same way in English, one for small fruits and the other for larger ones.
Pomme comes from latin pomum which could be used for any fruit, apple specifically was malum.
In Québec, we don't say that and I didn't even know French people say that.
I knew someone who used the term "bird leaves" which I find hilarious.
Laundry soup, yumm
kennings are great
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenning
Apparently a lot of Old English poetry was written with ample use of kennings, e.g. ‘Beowulf’.