this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2026
1227 points (99.0% liked)
Microblog Memes
12179 readers
2355 users here now
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
RULES:
- Your post must be a screen capture of a microblog-type post that includes the UI of the site it came from, preferably also including the avatar and username of the original poster. Including relevant comments made to the original post is encouraged.
- Your post, included comments, or your title/comment should include some kind of commentary or remark on the subject of the screen capture. Your title must include at least one word relevant to your post.
- You are encouraged to provide a link back to the source of your screen capture in the body of your post.
- Current politics and news are allowed, but discouraged. There MUST be some kind of human commentary/reaction included (either by the original poster or you). Just news articles or headlines will be deleted.
- Doctored posts/images and AI are allowed, but discouraged. You MUST indicate this in your post (even if you didn't originally know). If an image is found to be fabricated or edited in any way and it is not properly labeled, it will be deleted.
- Absolutely no NSFL content.
- Be nice. Don't take anything personally. Take political debates to the appropriate communities. Take personal disagreements & arguments to private messages.
- No advertising, brand promotion, or guerrilla marketing.
RELATED COMMUNITIES:
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.)
My favourite examples of English rigidity are adjectival hierarchy and ablaut reduplication. Very few native English speakers realise they apply either of these rules and yet they are applied almost without exception.
English grammar is the opposite of flexible, since it relies on word order where other languages use inflections. In Russian, you can often jumble the word order, and the meaning wouldn't change. Vocabulary of Russian was extensively borrowed from Greek, Arabic and Turkic languages in middle ages, German and French during the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries, and English in the twentieth, particularly in regard to trade, new technology, or societal developments. If you pay attention, you'll notice that a language borrows or invents words when there's a shade of meaning missing in the existing vocabulary, that is precisely represented by the new word. None of that has anything to do with the initiative in industrial development, as you may have noticed from the fact that Russia was an agrarian country into early twentieth century.
Your idea is a form of linguistic relativity, which has only some evidence for a small subset of it.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Swedish_origin
Moped
Arguably ombudsman also counts
German uses these two words as well, and until 5 minutes ago I didn't even know they were of Swedish origin. And it connects nicely to my original comment in this thread where I said that it's not just english that takes words from other languages and it's not something that makes english particularly special.