2012/6/15 Andrew Jarrette <[log in to unmask]>

> I am a native speaker of English.  I often wish I was a native speaker of
> another language.  I am ashamed of English and envious of other languages.
>

While I am not fond of English, I'm not ashamed of it. My issue is that (to
me) English is not particularly beautiful, or "grammatically elegant" --
but these are both my opinion.


>
> I am ashamed of English because primarily of its extreme reliance on
> borrowed words to make up its vocabulary.  It has lost most of its original
> native Germanic vocabulary, and has borrowed so thoroughly from Latin and
> French and other languages, that now less than 20% of its vocabulary is
> native, and 60% is Romance.  How can we continue to call it "English" if it
> is now mostly French and Latin?  I envy the other Germanic languages, who
> have kept far more of their native vocabulary, and have relied on native
> roots much more to build new vocabulary.  I also envy, among European
> languages, the Slavic languages for their purity as well.  The Romance
> languages have borrowed heavily from Latin, which is their ancestral
> language, so they are a different case, but nevertheless their vocabulary
> is by far mostly within the Romance family, including ancestral Latin.
>

James Nicoll is said to have said that «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» - but I was
(ashamedly) kinda grateful for that when I stared learning French, Latin
(and German, to some extent).


>
> I am also ashamed of English because of its abysmal spelling and
> pronunciation system.  It is so extremely inconsistent and unpredictable, I
> would say probably the world's worst.  This is something that could be
> fixed if we wanted to.  I envy other languages that have more phonetic and
> more regular spelling systems, which are practically every other language
> on Earth.  But especially regular and near-phonetic are Finnish, the Slavic
> languages, Italian, and Spanish.  English should aspire to be like them.
>

Once you look into (not even in depth, necessarily) English Etymology, the
spelling is not that bad. And some World dialects are difficult enough to
follow when spoken - imagine trying to read them!


>
> The only things about English that I am proud of are: a) that it is almost
> alone in having preserved ancestral Indo-European /w/ in initial position
> -- Dari (Afghan Persian) as far as I know is the only other Indo-European
> language that preserves this sound in its standard dialect (and even here
> it may actually be the bilabial approximant, I'm not sure); b) that it
> generally preserves the Germanic sounds /θ/ and /ð/, a feature which it
> shares with Icelandic, but Icelandic preserves a far greater number of
> words with these phonemes than does English; c) that it has no grammatical
> gender, which I believe is a completely needless feature of many languages
> which only makes them unnecessarily more difficult to learn (kind of like
> English spelling) -- Finnish and Hungarian as far as I know are the only
> other European languages without grammatical gender; d) that it is so
> widely spoken as a second language.
>

Afrikaans has no grammatical gender either. Although it's not European, it
*is* Indo-European.


>
> My shame about English has led me to create a hypothetical English that
> could have evolved if it had retained its Germanic vocabulary and used it
> to form new words.  Of course, its spelling is phonetic, and like modern
> English, it has lost grammatical gender.  It's my fantasy of what I wish
> modern English had been.  I'm working on a dictionary of this language,
> I've got 687 pages so far, still a long way to go.
>

I love these projects, I find them so interesting! If you ever post
something online: please do make the link available.


>
> How about speakers of other languages?  Are you mostly proud of your
> native languages?  Why?  Are there any things about your native languages
> that you are ashamed of or at least discontent about?
>

I'm a Native-Bilingual of English and Afrikaans.
Afrikaans has "borrowed" from its ancestral Dutch, but also from Xhoi-San,
Xhosa, Zulu, Malay(sian), Arabic, Portuguese, French, German and A LOT
*from English*! It may even be 'worse' than English - but I'm not at all
qualified to make an assessment.

At least the spelling is completely regular - but there are only about
three major dialects including the Literary Standard. English has many all
over the world.


2012/6/15 Patrick Dunn <[log in to unmask]>

> On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 7:46 PM, Andrew Jarrette <[log in to unmask]
> >wrote:
>
> Good luck!  I wonder how much it looks like (or sounds like) Frisian?


Unfortunately, Frisian has become more and more like Dutch, especially in
terms of newer vocabulary.