as stated English is weird because of the way it was formed. The Angle and Seax (aka Anglo-Saxon) tribes started forming English when they conquered Briton after the Roman empire faded away from the area. Latin was of course the language of the Romans and they tried to spread it everywhere. The ppl mostly living in Briton (central of what is now England) are of Celtic decent and that language is somewhat preserved by the Welsh and Scottish. And of course the Angles and Seax where speakers of early Germanic... as why its considered of Germanic decent.
English is effectively a
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but its structure and roots are solidly Germanic, that's not up to debate by any stretch of imagination. (Incidentally, it was pretty easy for Celtic subjects of Rome to transition to Vulgar Latin in part because the Celtic and Italic language families were quite closely related.)
The Written part IS based mainly on Latin characters, which in its self, incorporated Greek and even some Arabic characters. Tho Arabic Numbers came in around the time of the Moorish conquests of now Spain and southwest France.
"Mainly" my ass, try
exclusively. Also might wanna read up a bit on the
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- the ancient Greeks readily owed up to the Phoenician origin in the legend of
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.
Arabic (or more properly Hindu-Arabic; originally developed in India, refined by various Muslim scholars who eg. added fractions and the decimal point) numerals actually only began to be adopted in "Latin" Europe after
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when influential scholars like Pope Sylvester II and Leonardo Fibonacci, who had studied in Moorish Spain and North Africa respectively, started actively promoting them.
As for the various Japanese written languages (yes plural, and in fact can be extended to most Asian languages) yes the symbols are compressed versions of meanings. In earlier post you stated where destroyers had the kaze or wind... well in English its a suffix. I.E. kamikaze means divine wind and can be compressed from 10 characters (not including a space) to 2. Certainly the spoken part will almost always be polysyllable.
Try
compound word. Eg. the experimental
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famous for being
fast as fucc boii (though beaten by the large interwar French "super-destroyers" of the
Le Fantasque and
Mogador classes... but I digress).
Anyways, comparatively speaking what the logographic and syllabic scripts gain in density they lose by wide margin in versatility and economy. This is made
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- college-educated people need to know about
four thousand characters for ex. Unsurprisingly there has been a somewhat dire need to develop simplified forms in modern times. Japanese isn't as bad - syllabic systems are more economic in number of characters - but complicated by their weird use of
three parallel writing systems at once, one of them a copypaste of Chinese which took some Percussive Maintenance to make fit the rather different structural logic of the language itself...
By comparison the economy of characters in alphabetic writing systems is almost surreal. The largest count in the world is found in the Khmer alphabet... and adds up to a mere 74.
It's probably worth noting here that Chinese writing originated in freaking oracle bone squiggles while the West/Southwest Eurasian alphabetic systems ultimately have their roots in the cuneiform that evolved for practical administrative record-keeping in ancient Near East. Kind of shows I'd say...
