GalacticCactus Forum
Forums => English & Linguistics => Topic started by: pattyshmack on August 23, 2005, 03:53:27 PM
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One of my teachers enthusiastically believes that the highest form of language, greater than even "American-English" is the English spoken by the royals and upperclass Brits (of today), in fact he even mentions that what these upperclass speak have no accent. Isn't language just determined by culture and geography? I think this sounds kind of ignorant, I mean how do you determine the "most perfect" language?
Any ideas would be helpful.
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If there is a most perfect language in the world, it's certainly not English.
Really, this sounds like class snobbery.
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Yes, language is pretty much arbritrary, and there's no objective measurement of how good a language is. Languages, dialects, and accents are pretty much just like skin color: everyone has one, and there's nothing right or wrong about it. Saying that upper-class British people have no accent is like saying that they also have no skin color.
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Let's all start speaking Esperanto.
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I think it's pretty much impossible to have any objective measurement of how good anything is. "Good" is a pretty subjective term.
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I think it's odd that a supposedly, well-educated professor would make such a general statement.
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Good is subjective, but we may choose particular traits to define "good" for us and rank based on this. For instance, if lots of different ways of expressing yourself, including lots of synonyms with subtle nuances distinguishing them is part of what you consider good, than English is a wonderful language. If logical rules that are followed pretty uniformly, leading, perhaps, to greater ease of learning are what you prefer, then you may prefer Spanish. If "purity" in comparison to an earlier version of a language is valuable to you, then my understanding is British English is not for you, but southern/appalachian American English is.
I find that claim the upper class British accent is "unaccented" absurd. I can imagine two meaningful definitions of "unaccented," neither of which applies. "Unaccented" could refer to an accent that is such a subtle blend of accents that it is not distinctive to any single region. This, as I understand it, is what most national (US) television programming strives for. Alternatively, "unaccented" could refer to least changed, in which case we're back to Appalachian English.
:P
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A good language is one that I can pronounce well.
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My mom for a long time argued that if a language provides you with more opportunities, it can be measured objectively in that sense. And in such a sense, I think American broadcast english affords more opportunties than upper class Royalty English. Opportunities, at least, that I as an American am interested in. If you like rich food, French is probably a better language to know. I have to say, sometimes I think I was meant to be Italian. Except that everyone would think I was :fear:
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My mom for a long time argued that if a language provides you with more opportunities, it can be measured objectively in that sense. And in such a sense, I think American broadcast english affords more opportunties than upper class Royalty English.
Interesting. By this standard, though, I don't know if I agree. At least in this heavily British area, people tend to suck up to people with that accent.
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Well, this same teacher blabbled on and on about how his former college professors wore different types of hats. And the interesting thing is, is this is an American Lit class! It just strikes me odd that he got a degree in this stuff.
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Even purity isn't so easy to define. Appalachian English may be pure in some ways, but not in others. It's kept some older constructions, but the phonology is, contrary to popular belief, not Elizabethan English.
One thing I learned in college is that some professors don't deserve the degrees they have.
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My Latin teacher used to call English the Bastard tongue. It seems to be from the Germanic family, but 60% of the lexical items are of Latin derivation, very often via the French. This is mainly due to the Norman Conquest (was that Charlemagne?) Anyway, agree with what the jerk says to his face and secretly laugh inside yourself.
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This is mainly due to the Norman Conquest (was that Charlemagne?)
No. That was William the Conqueror, previously known as William the Bastard.
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William the Conquerer, not Charlemagne. He was a couple hundred years earlier, I believe.
English is even more bastardized than people realize, though. In addition to the huge influx of French and Latin, we also have a healthy dose of Norse, as well as a smattering of words from all over the world. Even Proto-Germanic was not a "pure" tongue; fully 30 percent of Germanic vocabulary is of unidentified non-Indo-European origin.
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No. That was William the Conqueror, previously known as William the Bastard.
Oh, the irony!
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I'm not even sure what constitues "pure" language anyway. I could be wrong, but it seems to me that language is simply a communicative tool best suited for a particular culture or group, but it is never pure or perfect.
I guess it depends on how close to pure a language is. I mean, how many things has mankind made perfect anyway? I haven't noticed anything yet.
Although I have heard somewhere that Mandarin Chinese is a very pure language (just not sure why).
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I think that trying to define the purity of a language is a pretty fruitless endeavor. What's the standard of purity? The fact that it hasn't changed much over the years? The fact that it hasn't borrowed from other languages? Neither of those has anything to do with the communicative ability of a language. Claims about the purity of a language are at best a misguided endeavor and at worst a form of nationalistic pride.
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it seems to me that language is simply a communicative tool best suited for a particular culture or group, but it is never pure or perfect.
I'm going to disagree with you. It seems that language is not so much engineered according to the needs of the group, but pretty much happens accidentally according to the history of the group.
For example, the uber-bastardization of English didn't happen because of the needs of the English, but because of what happened to the English.
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Charlemagne was the ruler who created the first sizeable kingdom of the Franks. His empire covered much of modern France, but his capital was actually in Aachen, Germany. The Franks were a Germanic tribe, and it is because of their influence that the Latin of the region known as Gaul departed so much farther from the original than Italian and Spanish.
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So there may yet be a link between french fries and frankfurters. Wooo hoo, the world makes sense again.
People who are too into the purity of languages and the power of words in my experience are a little psychotic. The original case was Ben Whorf, who believed that the non-concatenative morphology of the Hebrew Bible held the secret of how the world was created through the words of God. That within each word was a syntax with the letters serving as lexical units themselves. And while there is an extent to which this is true (echoes of this appear in all the generative/binary branching theories) it's not like God is going to leave the red phone to the universe laying around where anyone can dial it.
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I dunno about that. African tribesmen still have the purest versions of their languages, and they have perfect teeth and better health than we do. The facts don't lie.
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The featurette on what later happened with that guy from "The Gods must be Crazy" seemed to run counter to that idea.
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Have you read the article?! Have you followed the links? What about the cats?!?!?!?!?! THese are facts!!!!!1!
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Then there's the other explanation, that the language stayed pure because oftheir idyllic lifestyle and their organic diets,
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I am failing at parody here.
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*pat pat*
I enjoyed it.
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I understood that it was parody, though I wasn't sure of what. Do I do that?
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It's a parody of somone whose posts you have never read.
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She was getting close to the shellfish, though.
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I'm going to disagree with you. It seems that language is not so much engineered according to the needs of the group, but pretty much happens accidentally according to the history of the group.
For example, the uber-bastardization of English didn't happen because of the needs of the English, but because of what happened to the English.
Engineered, no, but need-based, yes. It would seem more accurate to say that the uber-bastardization of English happened because what happened to the English caused them to need different words.
Edit: Actually, I'll modify that. It's probably both. It seems to me that words would change in at least two ways: 1.) for whatever reason--getting conquered, previously unknown phenomena, etc.--the population needs a new word, or 2.) idiosyncracies that unintentionally accumulate over time.
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I still disagree. New words weren't needed.
Seriously -- what use is there to have different words for poultry/chicken, pork/pig, beef/cow? None. It just happened because of the accident of history that made it so that the Romantic-speaking nobles were eating the beef while the Germanic-speaking plebes were raising the cows.
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New words weren't needed because no one had seen or eaten cows before, but the influx of Normans would have caused a need to learn each others' words in order to communicate.
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I don't know about that. Much of the vocabulary of English was added for reasons of fashion, not necessity. We didn't need the word pork—swine worked perfectly well. But the nobility spoke French, and people like to sound like nobility. The French and Latin loanwords in English never filled a gap that English couldn't have filled itself.
Edit: D'oh! Curse your mind-reading and fast fingers, Porter!
I still disagree with that, saxon. The Normans learned French when they migrated from Scandinavia to France. They could've just as easily learned English when they came to England.
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Seems like the kind of thing that would be difficult at best to really know. But you know more about this than I do.
Edit: See, I didn't know that.
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It is often very difficult to say which language changes are driven by need and which ones are driven by mere chance or other factors. But I believe that when two groups come into contact, there's no reason why one language has to borrow words from another. If one group learns the other's language, then the language gap is removed.
And anyway, the French words that we borrowed didn't even fill any sort of language gap. They just added a French flavor to one's speech—"Look at me! I know French words!"
Most Latin borrowings did fill a need, but there was no reason why it had to be Latin. It was just a convenient language to coin new words from.
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Seems like the kind of thing that would be difficult at best to really know. But you know more about this than I do.
Edit: See, I didn't know that.
Yup. Norman = Norseman.
It's something that's always perplexed me, to be honest. Why would they abandon Old Norse for Old French when moving to France, but then take French with them when moving to England? It must've been that French was a step up from Norse, socially speaking, while English was a step down from French.
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When they moved to France, did they come as conquerors or just immigrants? And were the French more or less advanced than they were when they arrived?
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Edit: D'oh! Curse your mind-reading and fast fingers, Porter!
Wow. We really are on the same wave-length today.
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When they moved to France, did they come as conquerors or just immigrants? And were the French more or less advanced than they were when they arrived?
Conquerors.
William the Conqueror (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_I_of_England)
Norman Conquest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Conquest)
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When they moved to France, did they come as conquerors or just immigrants? And were the French more or less advanced than they were when they arrived?
Aha! I just checked Wikipedia, and it was enlightening. They invaded Normandy and then swore allegiance to the French king, so it was efficacious for them to learn French. In England, they conquered the entire country, so they could do what they darn well pleased at that point.
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That makes a lot of sense. :cool:
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When they moved to France, did they come as conquerors or just immigrants? And were the French more or less advanced than they were when they arrived?
Conquerors.
William the Conqueror (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_I_of_England)
Norman Conquest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_Conquest)
Those both refer to the conquest of England, not the original invasion of Normandy.
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Porter, your links both have to do with the Norman conquest of England, but I was asking about their move from Scandinavia to France, not from France to England.
Edit: Or, you know, what he said.
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Woah.
Norman == Northmen == Norsemen.
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Porter, your links both have to do with the Norman conquest of England, but I was asking about their move from Scandinavia to France, not from France to England.
From my second link:
Normandy is a region in northwest France which at the time had experienced extensive Viking settlement. Beginning about 150 years earlier in a French Carolingian ruler Charles the Simple had allowed a group of Vikings, under their leader Rollo, to settle in northern France with the intention they would provide protection along the coast against further Viking invaders. This proved successful and the Vikings, who were known as the Northmen from which Normandy is derived, held off further Viking invaders. The Normans quickly adapted to the indigenous culture, renouncing paganism and converting to Christianity, adopting the langue d'oïl of their new subjects and, through the introduction of Norse features, transforming it into the Norman language, and intermarrying with the local populations.
:P
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Woah.
Norman == Northmen == Norsemen.
Yes. Good job, Porter.
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Are they still conquerors if they're allowed in?
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Beginning about 150 years earlier in a French Carolingian ruler Charles the Simple had allowed a group of Vikings, under their leader Rollo, to settle in northern France with the intention they would provide protection along the coast against further Viking invaders. This proved successful and the Vikings, who were known as the Northmen from which Normandy is derived, held off further Viking invaders.
This seems like such an odd strategy. I guess it worked for the French, but it certainly didn't work for the Britons when they invited the Anglo-Saxons to come over.
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Did the Greeks conquer Troy?
'Cuz they were accidentally allowed in.
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This seems like such an odd strategy. I guess it worked for the French, but it certainly didn't work for the Britons when they invited the Anglo-Saxons to come over.
I wonder if the time period had anything to do with it. Didn't the Britons try it about 500 years before the French tried it? Maybe the Vikings got soft as time went on.
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OK, fine. Do they still count as conquerors if they were intentionally allowed in? :rolleyes:
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They are conquerors if they conquered.
I name today the day of the tautology.
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Can a group of alleged conquerors be accurately considered to have conquered if they were intentionally allowed in?
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Of course, if they were first let in, and then they proceeded to conquer.
Who are you talking about? The Anglo-Saxons?
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I'm talking about the Vikings who settled in Normandy.
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I wouldn't say they really conquered Normandy.
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I wonder if the time period had anything to do with it. Didn't the Britons try it about 500 years before the French tried it? Maybe the Vikings got soft as time went on.
Yeah, the Anglo-Saxons started invading about the year 500. But they probably went on to conquer because there was no one to stop them, whereas the Norman Vikings probably didn't have the resources or the desire to take over all of France.
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I wouldn't say they really conquered Normandy.
Neither would I.
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Wouldn't it suck to be known for all of history as "Charles the Simple"?
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At least history knows him.
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Wouldn't it suck to be known for all of history as "Charles the Simple"?
Or how about Ethelred the Unready?
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/a1/EthelUn.jpg)
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According to William of Malmesbury, Ethelred defecated in the baptismal font as a child, which led St. Dunstan to prophesy that the English monarchy would be overthrown during Ethelred's reign.
:lol:
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This story is, however, almost certainly a fabrication.
That's too bad. And his name wasn't even "unready"! It simply meant "unadvised." History is so much more fun through the rose-colored glasses of ignorance.
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When they moved to France, did they come as conquerors or just immigrants?
Conquerors.
Porter, your links both have to do with the Norman conquest of England, but I was asking about their move from Scandinavia to France, not from France to England.
From my second link:
Normandy is a region in northwest France which at the time had experienced extensive Viking settlement. Beginning about 150 years earlier in a French Carolingian ruler Charles the Simple had allowed a group of Vikings, under their leader Rollo, to settle in northern France with the intention they would provide protection along the coast against further Viking invaders. This proved successful and the Vikings, who were known as the Northmen from which Normandy is derived, held off further Viking invaders. The Normans quickly adapted to the indigenous culture, renouncing paganism and converting to Christianity, adopting the langue d'oïl of their new subjects and, through the introduction of Norse features, transforming it into the Norman language, and intermarrying with the local populations.
Can a group of alleged conquerors be accurately considered to have conquered if they were intentionally allowed in?
Of course, if they were first let in, and then they proceeded to conquer.
Who are you talking about? The Anglo-Saxons?
I'm talking about the Vikings who settled in Normandy.
I wouldn't say they really conquered Normandy.
Neither would I.
OK, then. Thanks.
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:lol:
That's a lot of work to go to just to show someone the inconsistency in their argument.
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OH!!!! I get it now!!!!
I mis-read your question When they moved to France, did they come as conquerors or just immigrants?
, substituting England for France.
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It must've been that French was a step up from Norse, socially speaking, while English was a step down from French.
This makes the most sense to me so far. French was a better language than Norse, but English was a worse language than French. I get it.
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More prestigious, not better. :pirate:
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And that's not why they did it anyway. :pirate:
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The only question remaining, then, would be whether English was better or worse than Norse. When the Danes moved into Britain, it was pretty much a draw. I don't think we really satisfactorily answered that question until 1976, when ABBA started recording in English.
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History is so much more fun through the rose-colored glasses of ignorance.
:lol:
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The only question remaining, then, would be whether English was better or worse than Norse. When the Danes moved into Britain, it was pretty much a draw. I don't think we really satisfactorily answered that question until 1976, when ABBA started recording in English.
I think you answered your own question. The Danes spoke a dialect of Old Norse. However, I don't think ABBA helps your case.
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Of course it does. Had ABBA just recorded in Swedish, the Danes would have won.
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Actually, I guess you're right. The English would've been too busy stabbing icepicks into their ears.
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"Pffffft, English! Who needs that? I'm never going to England!"
--Homer Simpson
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Nice touch Scott
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What can I say? I can kill a thread with the best of 'em.