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c’mon everyone let’s moosen up a little
We all know the plural of moose is “moosen”, come on.
@Frustration in Excelsis
I’m gonna be the first to say it - we need to invent the word “Meese”.
The angry Twilight Sparkles in charge of the dictionaries can fight about it for three hundred years for all I care - we should be able to evolve our language to be more consistent over time.
One addition I’d make is that modern American and Canadian english has a lot of loan-words from Native American languages. A very large portion of state and province names, nearly all the ones that aren’t on the east coast or named in Spanish, come from these languages – Wisconsin, Mississippi, Missouri, Iowa, Wyoming, Minnesota, Quebec and Ontario and Manitoba and Nunavut, etc. The Dakotas, for example, are named after the Dakota Sioux. The you have city names – take a look at Wisconsin alone and you have cities and towns such as Milwaukee, Kewaunee, Manitowoc, Menominee and Waukesha, and likely more if you count minor towns and hamlets that don’t show up on maps. All, of course, originate in the languages of the Neshnabé, Ho-Chunk and Ojibwe people who lived there before the U.S. took over.
One example that does not relate to place names is the word for the largest species of deer, Alces alces. In British English, it was originally called an “elk”, a word of Germanic extraction and cognate to the German “elch”, the Spanish and Italian “alce” and, of course, the Latin “alces”. But when English settlers came to North America, they gave the name to what some of the native peoples called the wapiti, Cervus canadensis, since wapitis are very big animals – in fact, they’re the second-largest deer in the world – and early settlers mistook them for the Alces they knew back home. When they met actual specimens of North American Alces, which are even bigger than the European kind, they needed a new name for them and adopted the word for it from the Algonquian languages spoken by the indigenous people of northeastern NA. That’s why “moose” doesn’t pluralize, although you’d expect it to from how similar words like “goose” do it – it comes from a different language with different rules for singulars and plurals.
English didn’t so much steal other languages’ words, as they were forced on the English. England was a Celtic country that was conquered by Rome. Many higher-class Britons wound up speaking Latin so as to interface more profitably with their conquerors, and it seeded what would later be English with a lot of Latin-derived words. It was then overrun and settled by the Angles and Saxons of Denmark and Germany after the Romans departed. More English today can trace their ancestry to the Anglo-Saxons (where the root of the Anglish language comes from) than the Celts, and the Germanic tribes’ languages almost completely replaced the Latin-influenced Celtic languages in common use (outside of Wales and a few smaller districts) after their arrival, but a lot of older place and native plant and animal names remained.
Then there were several permanent settlement waves of Danish and Norse Vikings who conquered the east coast of England. After the area was re-conquered (and the Vikings assimilated rather than driven out) by the older Anglo-Saxon population, a lot of common English words came from Old Norse.
Then a few hundred years later, the French-speaking Normans (whose French also contained a lot of Old Norse loan words; “Norman” derives from Norse Men because the “knights” (a Norse word) of that era were the descendants mostly of Vikings too, not of French Gauls) conquered the whole of England. French was the official language of England for a greater period of time than any other language, including English. However, the peasants still mostly spoke a Germanic language. That dichotomy is why names for meats in English usually don’t match the animal the meat comes from. Germanic-speaking peasants did the dirty work of raising the animal, but wealthy French nobles ate the meat. So the living animal the nobles never had to deal with was a Kau, but the meat the peasants could almost never afford to eat themselves was Boeuf. Likewise pig/pork, sheep/mutton, deer/venison, etc., the animal name is of Germanic origin while the meat name is French. (Deer is a particularly amusing one, because Dier is just Germanic for “animal.” But it was the only meat-grade wild animal the peasants had any hope of seeing, even if only the nobility were allowed to hunt them. So it was soon misunderstood that a “Dier” was that particular agile forest ungulate with antler-bearing males big enough to notice, rather than whatever animal. Technically the English word for King Aspen and kin is Hirsch. Angel Bunny or a mouse is as much a Deer as King Aspen is. Whereas Venison is not French for deer meat; it’s French for Hunted. It was meat that was obtained from a hunt rather than a farmer. Like how it was the only wild animal the peasants would see, it was the only wild mammal in Great Britain that was really worth hunting for the table. So the nobility messed up too, and eventually mistook that “meat that came from a hunt” really meant “Deer meat.”) And of course the grammar of the two languages was very different, so that words of French origin may be used according to different rules than words of Anglo origin.
But the nobles and peasants had to interface to get the food onto the nobles’ tables or raise an army, so within a century the nobility generally spoke both languages fluently, and the peasants picked up a lot of higher-class words and phrases of French origin mixed in with their English. Though it would be several hundred years before English would be spoken in official government matters. And of course, more Latin crept in too as the French conquerors’ Catholicism became the dominant religion. Eventually sheer weight of numbers re-established the legitimacy of English (now heavily mixed with several centuries of French) as the dominant, and eventually even official, language.
Then as England became a major maritime and colonial power around the world, it picked up native words from all over its empire, when there was nothing in native English for that thing. Like Raccoon and Opossum are Algonquin for Hand Washer and White Dog, respectively. Tobacco was adopted from Spanish traders in the New World, who had themselves adopted it from the Arawak word for the pipe used to smoke it. Etc.
The last change of significance was a direct result of the American Revolution. As the English wanted to show their separation from (and superiority over) their upstart colonists, they heavily formalized both the grammar and pronunciation, while the colonists stuck with the English they grew up speaking in the wilds of the New World. Rarity actually speaks closer to pre-Revolutionary English than the modern English upper class.
American English for its part picked up a lot of Spanish after the Mexican-American War. Especially in the words for the cattle ranching system the Spanish had worked out long before Anglo Americans moved west and copied it. A cowboy’s lasso (lazo, or knot) or lariat (la reata, or the rope), his pinto (painted) horse, his ten-gallon hat (actually ten galóns, or decorative silver hatband medallions; in other words, a really fancy and expensive hat, not one that’s big enough to hold 100 pounds of water), etc., all Spanish. And then more recently it picked up a lot more Scandinavian words from Swedes and Norse who settled in the midwest. And to an even greater extent, a lot of Swedish grammar and pronunciation that’s driving changes in longstanding English words. A lot of what we’re seeing now with English devolving is attempts to make English words easier to pronounce for people who grew up with Swedish-accented English.
Another thing to consider is the English language is basically made fun of/hated by all the other languages for being an obnoxious jumble up of a bunch of words rules and spellings that are stolen from all over the world. The way we even talk is very backwards to some cultures and, if you look hard enough, the way we spell our words or arrange them in one single sentence can sometimes have its roots in like 15 different languages. I feel English does this more than most other languages. We’re often described as a hard language to learn because we take so many things and rules from others but then only half-use them or, mix them up with other rules or just break them entirely to make our own style, and that’s very confusing to some people.
Flammable isn’t a real word either. The real word is inflammable, from “able to be inflamed.” There’s no such thing as “able to be flamed.” But people mistook the “in” for a negation, as in “inviolate” (not able to be violated) or “inaccessible” (not able to be accessed), despite the fact that inflammable came from a root word in an entirely different language that didn’t use “in” as a negation, and thought that if something was inflammable it couldn’t catch fire, so if something could catch fire it was flammable. Again, the mistake was so common among the ignorant (though in this case enough people did continue to use the real word too) that we recognize “flammable” today as a synonym of “inflammable”. That’s largely what we’re seeing with “literally.”
To be completely fair though I’m not sure if this line in the show actually counts as a true grammatical error or if you’re just interpreting it wrong. The line is “I could care less about the dress, I won’t partake in any cake”. It’s not too incorrect to stretch the meaning of the song of “lol I don’t care I’m just evil” to this line, but imo when I first heard it I imagined she was just saying she’s vain and still cares about the dress but she knows it’s not important because it doesn’t mean anything, and after reflecting on that she won’t bother to put up the show for much longer. She’s an impostor, and there can be many parallels between her character and traditional “lol I’m a witch I will steal your beauty and become beautiful myself cuz I’m really into vanity like that” trope
Edited
And “flammable” and “inflammable” mean the exact same thing.
Exactly. I believe the original expression was something like “I could care less, but I would have to try”.
Its even worse when the dictionary now states that literally also means not literally.
I imagine it must’ve been a pretty expensive dress, what with all the “royal wedding” thing and all.
I hope you can tell
If you’re doing good or doing well.
You’d better figure out the difference:
Irony is not coincidence.
And I thought that you’d gotten it through your skull
About what’s figurative and what’s literal.
Oh, but just now, you said
You “literally couldn’t get out of bed”.
That really makes me want to literally
Smack a crowbar upside your stupid head!
Edited
You’d better slow down
And use the right pronoun
Show the world you’re no clown