- Wait! You can speak Netherlands?
- No. Sorry.
- But you can! I am speaking it!
- No you're not! You're speaking English!
He just blinked and walked off, probably assuming I was playing a trick, but my friend asked what that was all about, and had to convince me that she didn't understand anything he was saying, and wouldn't have said anything to me at all about it except that she heard me insist he was speaking English!
She asked me to try and remember what exactly I was hearing, and I realised I couldn't! I could only remember something like "do you know where [placename that sounded familiar] is?" and maybe that there was a heavy accent, but not exactly how it sounded.
Every now and then I think of this and I wonder if I actually understand English at all, or if I'm just so used to saying that I understand it (in response to something that sounds something like a question) that I started to believe it.
Eventually the first guy tires of being mocked by this guy claiming not to speak English and beats the guy up.
Totally hilarious example of what you experienced taken to an extreme.
Almost everybody understood English and finally when I ran into somebody who didn't and used that Polish phrase, I realized I could have just said in English "I don't understand Polish" and it actually would have been clearer communication.
However, I did not end up with a Polish girlfriend. Your "She was gorgeous", is, I recall, redundant.
Your recollection is accurate
Towards the end I have no chance of understanding it.
Quite a ways in it emerged that they were from an Italian airline and speaking Italian. They were no doubt (we imagine) well used to speakers of Romance languages especially Spanish making themselves understood... she however was quite entertained.
(This being HN I suppose it's de rigeur to cite Richard Feynman's bit about Italian dialectical differences leaving room for him to entertain himself by amiably yelling made-up Italian to people in his neighborhood, who chalked up his unintelligibility to such differences, not realizing they were being trolled as it were...)
A friend who is learning Dutch once complained to me that Dutch speakers will switch to English the moment they hear you are struggling with the language. I suggested she should explicitly ask people to keep the conversation in Dutch.
In one instance, she did that, and the (native Dutch-speaking) person she was talking to agreed to her request, and then proceeded in English anyway! She asked that person multiple times, and they just kept speaking English without addressing her request. Baffling.
In bilingual places you'll see people switching mid-sentence when they have a better expression in the other language for what they are about to say.
Some properties of English's grammar are also more similar to Romance languages than Germanic ones. For example, whereas Germanic languages only mark tense on verbs, English verbs (like Spanish verbs) are marked with aspect in addition to tense: there is a distinction between "I played tennis"/"I have played tennis"/"I was playing tennis".
I'm not saying English is a Romance language. But it's a much more interesting problem to figure out why it's not considered a Romance language than you imply.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_influence_in_English
Are you measuring by fraction of words in a word list, or fraction of words in a typical utterance? Word usage is highly non-uniform, so you'll get very different ratios between the former and latter.
I think he's measuring the first, which gives a skewed picture, the latter is why english is considered a germanic language. The core of the language is all germanic words and you can still get by reasonably well without using any of the french/latin additions. Generally if a word is smaller and less 'fancy' it's of germanic origins, if it's longer and 'fancier' it's probably of romance origins.
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I actually am not sure of the subtleties on this grammatical point.
Even if you want to give this one to German, English also has the prospective aspect, which is missing in German (prospective "I'm going to play tennis", vs. perfective "I will play tennis").
What exactly do you mean by "aspect"?
> there is a distinction between "I played tennis"/"I have played tennis"/"I was playing tennis".
Sure:
-- (I) played (Tennis) ~~ jugué
-- (When I) played (Tennis) ~~ jugaba
-- (When I've) played (Tennis) ~~ jugado
English (like German) might say they need auxiliary words to explain what's going on, and Spanish people might say they're just conjugating the verb differently, but I think this is just because things are written down;
Because, if I say any of these sentences in Spanish or English rapidly enough, someone who does not know the language will not know where each word begins and ends, and it may just sound like English "conjugates" at the beginning of words and Spanish "conjugates" at the end. What's the real difference here?
> But it's a much more interesting problem to figure out why [English is] not considered a Romance language than you imply.
I think most of the time people talk about the "rules" of a language, we're not really talking about something that will help acquire the language (or be better understood): we're really just yapping about geography and time.
So what do you think would be different if English was more widely considered a Romance language?
I'm honestly getting a lot of responses here from people who clearly don't have a good grasp of linguistics, but you take the cake by composing a long-form response without at least bothering to Google the terms I have used.
I think most of the time
people talk about the
"rules" of a language, we're
not really talking about
something that will help
acquire the language (or be
better understood): we're
really just yapping about
geography and time.
I think that's complicated by the fact that many english words of latin origin were inherited from a germanic source and thus from an intelligibility standpoint the overlap between english and dutch or german is partially additive with latin. e.g. [1]
Unfortunately the source is dead, but at one point a study ranked english/german as 60% lexical similarity compared to english/french at 27% [2]. Anecdotally, I think dutch and german are easier for an english speaker because of comparatively more overlap in simple words. Heavy use of compound words in dutch/german also gives an english listener a better chance of recognizing part of the word and inferring the meaning from context.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_Latinates_of_G...
Where is the verb marking you speak of? Because I don't see any difference between played and played. Your example of how English uses auxiliary verbs to convey different verb aspects is a Germanic construct. I don't really understand how you use this as an example of Romance lineage in English.
And it's different in that "have" implies some sort of connection to the present. You wouldn't say "When I was a kid, I have played a lot of video games." You'd say "When I was a kid, I played a lot of video games."
I don't think this should imply a Romance connection, though, as Germanic languages do it, too. Using "have" and a participle seems like more of an areal feature to languages from Western Europe.
In German, this doesn't happen. Imperfect tense is often formed by using a "-te" ending to the verb (so "spiel(en)" -> "spielte"), while the past participle prepends "ge-" and appends "t" or "en" (so "gespielt" - (I have) "played"). The form "... was playing" would also exist, "... war spielen", and again with a difference how the infinitive is formed (-ing vs. -en).
To me, grammar of temporal forms in English is more Romance-language than German language. The fact that English lost any form of case, and most of gender, is neither German nor Romance though.
I sometimes used to joke with English friends that the language is the least common denominator of all the people overrunning the Island in the last 3000 years. Use a bit of everything, leave all the hard stuff out, and write it in a nonphonetic way like Irish.
In English, in contrast, there is a clear difference in usage between, say, "I was playing tennis while my kids were in school", and "I have played tennis while my kids were in school".
That's the % in the dictionary. More than half of Japanese vocabulary in the dictionary is based on Chinese but no one argues Japanese is a Chinese creole. I forget by whom but it was once pointed out to me that in some genres - ranging from drinking songs to nursery rhymes - the words that come from Old English often make up more than 90% of the words. Similarly, if you sample the dialog in a kitchen or office while people gossip the ratio is also going to skew heavily like 70 - 80% Germanic. (Japanese shows a similar effect with all its Chinese vocabulary.)
Indeed, it's not tricky to write about everyday grounded things with nothing but straight Anglo-Saxon roots. (I've been doing it so far this whole paragraph -- oh that's Greek.) Difficult to achieve similar results utilizing exclusively Latinate vocabulary.
Of course, a history book or engineering manual will be different, and Graeco-Latin vocabulary might well be in the majority there.
the language backbone is still Germanic
Although, because I'm looking at it, I get semantic satiation.
Creoles are defined as languages emerging from pidgins, which themselves are often simplified forms of speech that allow linguistically separate groups to communicate. English is not that. It has an unbroken line of native speakers whose usage gradually evolved, while maintaining a system of complex syntactic rules as well as a literature.
In two short paragraphs I learned a ton about the distinctions between pidgins, creoles, and ("full"?) languages, in addition to how languages evolve in both subcultures and ("dominant"?) cultures.
I can now apply this knowledge in the context of the Louisiana Creole population, the name of which has previously served to confuse me as to the definition of "creole", as well as other creole languages and populations in the Caribbean.
As a Norwegian speaker, I can also pick up much of that dialogue without the subtitles (though I have the advantage of also speaking passable German)