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 still like the theory that the industrial revolution kicked off in England due to the English language.
English has an amalgam of several different root languages. This gives it an unusual amount of flexibility and granularity. This helps hugely with crystallising newer ideas into words. This, in turn gave English a slight advantage over France, Germany etc.
Like 25% of English words are straight from Latin, and up to 75% have etymological roots in Latin (according to one Latin professor). And the grammatical rules are not divided equally by the "source" languages, either. It is an amalgam, but the flexibility stemming from the roots, is not so simple.
(Also maybe hilariously in this context, as a native Finnish speaker, to me English appears as a very stiff language. In my own, word order does not really matter, you can basically create as many new words as you like, with combining words and switching the endings to change their grammatical role, and most words can be bent, to have a lot of different nuance with just tweaking the endings a bit. The classic funny example being: juoksen, juoksentelisinkohan / I run, I wonder if I should run aimlessly around in short bursts.)
You think German and French don't borrow words?
Oh they do, but the weird multi root nature of English, and it's tendency to aggressively ransack other languages for vocabulary tends to give it a little more wiggle room for describing ideas. The cost being it's evil to learn, compared to a lot of languages. Just try reading the poem "The chaos" aloud.
I speak 7 different european languages and they're all like that.
It's not by chance that "yogurt" is pretty much the same word in just about all languages (different spelling at times, similar sounding), being originally a Turkish word, and similarly for "helicopter" which comes from the Greek, whilst all the ways to say "tea" in the whole wide world pretty much derive from just three root words - tea, cha and chai.
My own native language - Portuguese - seems to have spread around the world for just nautical terms around sailing and pretty much nothing else which kinda makes sense since at one point when Portugal was an empire, that's the technology is developed. (Curiously the word in India for a certain kind of bread - "Pao" - derives from the Portuguese word for bread - "Pão" - probably because the Indian city of Goa was controlled by Portugal for a couple of centuries),
I feel like this hasn't happened as much as people think in the last century or so, it's much more the other way around, almost every language now adds a lot of english vocabulary.
You have a whole smörgåsbord of recent word thefts
Source
You got anything more recent?
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.
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.
There weren't many amateurs desiring to learn English back in eleventh—fifteenth centuries, when it was losing the remaining complexity in the grammar.
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.
Mate we're all amateurs here. Unless you are being paid to learn languages
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pomme comes from latin pomum which could be used for any fruit, apple specifically was malum.
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’.
Not sure what a dish brick is, but yeah, the others make sense 👍
Edit: just figured it out: it's a Lego piece shaped like a dish
I was assuming one of these things: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Detergent_tablet.jpg
Could also be a brick that's designated for smashing dishes.
I'd say it's a plate
My kid calls them “nose holes”.