The Foreign Language Thread | Page 5 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

I swear this is the last of my posts at 3am…

I fell in love with a French comedy series called ‘Bref’- it roughly means ‘In Few Words’, whenever you want to say something without really going into massive detail of it you say ‘bref’. It’s little shorts between 1-2 minutes long about a middle-aged man coming to terms with life and all of the events that occur in between birth and death. It’s very funny, I think. It would work really well in English during ad breaks so I wonder why it was never brought over but anyways.

The narrator speaks very fast so especially if you’re only a beginner French speaker, I wouldn’t worry about not picking up everything he says. In this episode he goes to see a psychiatrist

Starr Shine? said
applescruffjunior, what would happen if I combined, French, Irish and German in a blender? What would the new combined language look like?

It would probably be pretty guttural if you combined German and Irish together, then French would smooth it out a bit so it wouldn’t be as thick as Russian, there would still be quite a bit of hocking required though.

It would have about 20 tenses and you would only ever need about 6 of them but there would be 20 that you would have to learn because f**k you (thanks French).

Spelling would be all over the place and there would be a lot of silent letters that make no sense as to why they are there (Irish and French).

All nouns would have genders (from the three of them), only masculine and feminine though (no neutral sorry German) but thanks to German it’d be easier to identify what gender each noun is just from the look of it.

Word order would be completely different from the English word order. The verb would always come first in the sentences (German and Irish) and adjectives would always follows the noun (Irish and the majority-of-the-time French).

It would be a very popular language (French and German) but barely anyone from outside of its home country would want to learn it (Irish).

Think of it as like Italian (even though I plan on learning Italian in college ).

^The vast majority of European languages have been influenced by another language, it’s inevitable.

Even Irish which has only ever been spoken predominately on one large island and a few minor languages has been influenced by French, stealing ‘garcon’, ‘boy’ and changing it to ‘gasúr/garsún’ in Irish, ‘chambre’ for ‘room’ into ‘seomra’ in Irish etc.

Hell, Irish has even put words into the English language like ‘boreen’, ‘bog’, ‘banshee’, ‘brogue’, ‘slogan’ and ‘whiskey’ to name but a few.

Language is continuously evolving and being changed by external influences, it’s what makes it so damn interesting.

^ Definitely but it is still pretty damn interesting, how language evolves over time.

This was English 500 years ago:

Since what I am to say must be but that
Which contradicts my accusation and
The testimony on my part no other
But what comes from myself, it shall scarce boot me
To say ‘not guilty:’ mine integrity
Being counted falsehood, shall, as I express it,
Be so received. But thus: if powers divine
Behold our human actions, as they do,
I doubt not then but innocence shall make
False accusation blush and tyranny
Tremble at patience. You, my lord, best know,

This was English just over a 1000 years ago

HWÆT, WE GAR-DEna in geardagum,
þeodcyninga þrym gefrunon,
hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon!
oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,
monegum mægþum meodosetla ofteah,
egsode eorlas, syððanærest wearð
feasceaft funden; he þæs frofre gebad,
weox under wolcnum weorðmyndum þah,
oð þæt him æghwylc ymbsittendra
ofer hronrade hyran scolde,
gomban gyldan; þæt wæs god cyning!
Ðæm eafera wæs æfter cenned
geong in geardum, þone God sende
folce to frofre; fyrenðearfe ongeat,
þe hie ær drugon aldorlease
lange hwile; him þæs Liffrea,
wuldres Wealdend woroldare forgeaf,
Beowulf wæs breme — blæd wide sprang—
Scyldes eafera Scedelandum in.
Swa sceal geong guma gode gewyrcean,
fromum feohgiftumon fæder bearme,

To understand the 500 year old text, you would need a good standard of English, patience and a reasonable vocabulary, whereas looking at the 1000 year old text well….it speaks for itself I think.

Even just looking at the two, the jump in 500 years between Beowulf and ‘The Winter’s Tale’ is incredible!

A thousand years isn’t that long when you look at how long the earth has been here so it’s amazing how much we’ve progressed between Now And Then !

Starr Shine? said

AppleScruffJunior said
^ Definitely but it is still pretty damn interesting, how language evolves over time.

Is language evolution speeding up or slowing down?

I wouldn’t be qualified to answer that but I think it definitely is evolving at quite a rapid rate.

Just look at ‘slang’ words now ‘lol’, ‘bae’, ‘u mad bro?’ and ‘noob’, new verbs like ‘to troll’ and ‘to G/google’, they have all become part of the today’s vernacular.

Every couple of weeks you hear of new words being picked up like ‘on fleek’ last year and sometimes they die a sad death (like ‘on fleek’) or they get picked up and continue to thrive in daily-speech.

If anything in the future, English, will probably become more ‘txt-spk’ like than it is now cutting out unnecessary characters ‘night’ becoming ‘nite’ etc. to make it easier to pronounce and to learn for foreign-speakers.

Something I find interesting is the idea of ‘Cut Spelling’ i.e. taking out unnecessary extra letters- generally vowels and silent letters out of words to make it easier to spell. Here are some examples:

Th Space Race was th competition between th United States and th Soviet Union, rufly from 1957 to 1975. It involvd th efrts by each of these nations to explor outr space with satlites, to be th 1st to send there a human being and to send mand and unmand missions on th Moon with a safe return of th humans to Erth.

Tho its roots lie in erly roket tecnolojy and in th intrnationl tensions foloing World War II, th Space Race efectivly began with th soviet launch of Sputnik 1 on 4 october 1957. Th term orijnated as an analojy to th arms race. Th Space Race became an importnt part of th cultrl and tecnolojicl rivalry between th USSR and th U.S. during th Cold War. Space tecnolojy became a particularly importnt arena in this conflict, both because of its military applications and du to th sycolojicl benefit of rasing morale.

English is well overdue for a spelling-reform so we’ll have to see if it ever happens and if so what’ll change in the language.