English has always been that way. When Germanic tribes invaded the British Isles, they mixed with the Celts and Gaels, creating what we now call Old English. In 1066, William the Bastard (afterward self-named "the Conqueror") took over England. He was effectively an Old French-speaking Viking and forced French on all "official" government and public educational institutions. By the time of The Canterbury Tales, Middle English was a mess of Germanic, Celtic/Gaelic, and French words. The Renaissance and Enlightenment imported a bunch of Greek and Latin. Migration / colonialization imported a bunch of terms from other languages. Adjacency of the United States to Mexico resulted in a fair amount of Spanish importing. 20th- and 21st-century business and computer technology brought in words from all sorts of other languages.
The result: mass confusion in the package of the Modern English language. I never envy anyone from a non-English place trying to learn the hows (and especially the whys) of ModE. Anyway, the point of all of this was that English is complicated enough that you can almost always tell when someone is a native English speaker. The writing team for Rebirth absolutely is, or else they have extremely effectively learned to speak English like native speakers do. But again, that does not mean we've got Pulitzer-prize-winning text or anything.
thats interesting but English is from the main languages the easiest to learn!
only class B language in the Germanic languages is German itself... surprisingly even Dutch is a class A as in easy to learn!
spoken English needs as little as 400 words to get the message across while something like French needs 12.000 words...
Spanish requires 2.000 words to get the message across!
only part were English could be complicated would be on the higher levels going from 75.000 to 150.000 words depending on the type of English you are using!
its actually the only language with such a wide disparity of vocabulary, for instance in Portuguese it goes from 100.000 to 120.000 words but several African and South Asian words are not considered as part of the Portuguese vocabulary while several south american words are due to Brazil´s influence!
most of the top 20 languages in the world have less then 30.000 words range from the highform to the absolute form
not sure i explained myself properly!
but if you are an highspeaker as to speak Australian American UK English South African and the rest your vocabulary should be close to 150.000 words but since most are just synonyms the average english user even natives go by with just 20.000 meaning even native speakers suck at speaking their own language, yes even a native speaker has to read a shitload of books from several other anglophone countries to get to an average level!
even worse if you are american since in reality you have 8 different English speakers or sub languages in the states...
if you combine them all yeah you should have 35% of the vocabulary but if you only lived and spoke in Louisiana or Missouri you are the poorest English native speaker in the world... as an example!
only other such language situation is Spanish but its not that bad, a native should speak 1/3 of its entire vocabulary by just being a native speaker... but if you do not put in the work, you suck at your own language!
So no do not pity those foreigners that must learn English, easy er then most other languages actually try Hungarian Polish or European Portuguese to have a go at really complex languages!
Actually at least 50%, probably more of the few hundreds of thousands who can speak the English high form with all the proper grammar and wide vocabulary are non native speakers, they just read alot and put in the work!
but that is also why english is in trufh the lingua franca of the world, its the easyest to learn but complex enough that if you are linguist or a gramatician you will have a long way to go before you get bored!
or in other words a language for the idiots and the conceited cunts...
No one is saying basic English is hard to learn. But to learn English and sound like a native speaker, it's much, much more difficult. That is specifically what I was talking about. In my experience, most (all?) languages are very easy to learn in their most basic forms. There also is much, much more to a language than just the number of words you know. For instance, when you see someone in an AVN have "Are you going?" and the answer is "Yes, I'm", that is immediately a flag that the writer is not a native English speaker. No person born learning English would ever end a sentence that way (except by way of example of what not to do, as I did here).
or a redneck from south Sussex or a scounser from Liverpool or a high Scot from Aberdeen or a cornwallians or a... plenty of exceptions to that rule!
just because its basic for you, Trinidad and Tobago, or Jamaica are native English spears and they use those grammar forms or others non intuitive!
the most interesting part is that redneck and the new "black urban" in the states are actually the same language...
fuck i am pretty decent at English and i can not for the life of me understand east londoners...
1st time i watched scrubs with the original Manchester accent i had a hard time, and do not get me about the English jersey shore with those dudes from newcastle!
and since half of the examples i gave actually come from Angle Land it can not be considered nothing else except English!
You're actually veering off into
completely unrelated territory. We were discussing
standard English, as spoken with consistency by the vast majority of native English speakers.
Obviously dialects will cause exceptions and variations; those prove absolutely nothing contrary to what I already said. What a silly point to bring up.
I
specifically pointed out the problem with clitics because it's standard across almost all native versions of English. If there are exceptions, they are few and far between and are irrelevant to what I was saying. Additionally,
every time I've seen clitics misused, there are none of the accompanying other English variants from those dialects that should be expected. So again, there are clear indications when someone is a native English speaker.
You're
also taking what I said and trying to cram that into a point you're trying to make, something I never argued. First, you talk about how English is super easy because "as little as 400 words" are needed "to get the message across". This is
basic English. This — and only this — is what I meant by using the word
basic. Then, you apply the term
basic to mean "easy". That was never what I was saying. So congratulations on winning an argument against no one about nothing.
I don't know why you've chosen to read into my last posts something I never ever said, but I'm done now. I am not going to keep this back-and-forth going. This is completely off-topic at this point and just asinine.
herm what? we are exchanging information as far as i am aware!
the required vocabulary is just a quantitative way to evaluate the complexity of a language on its different forms!
you need the standard that if my memory doesn´t fail me is around 40.000 words,
it might be more considering the evolution that as been happening in so many different fields
yeah my information is old at least 2 decades!
anyway clearly my post as been miss understood so why bother!
"Redneck" is NOT a language. "Redneck" is a type of person from a certain upbringing, usually "from the country" in the states.
Rednecks speak English. They just have crazy accents, and misunderstandings of words, due to lack of education from their ancestors, that make it sound like a different dialect. I promise you, as I was born in Southern America, and 95% of my family is Southern rednecks. My grandma pronounces "siren" like "sireen" and "diabetes" like "die beat us", and my dad can't pronounce "boulevard" properly. He says "booty bard." lol
I know very little about other English speaking nations, but know plenty of people who now live in the states, and are from other nations like Australia, Britain, Canada, etc, who speak almost exactly the same way as Americans, aside from accent, and a very small amount of words that are used differently. I.E.: "Elevator" vs "lift", or "fuck it" vs "fuck all", or "dude" vs "bloke."
Very small differences.
redneck is a culture or a sub culture of a sub culture!
just ask any anthropologist! and they are British transported into the states(or the culture is at least!)
the original rednecks still exist in England to this day!
as for their lack of education from their ancestors...
the standard language only came about during the nationalist movements of the 19th century!
until then they spoke a dialect of English that was neither better or worse then the rest!
this sub culture group exists at least since the 13th century and probably dates back to much further back!
from my best understanding of what happened they are a mix between the Saxons and the Britons culturally speaking!
they adopted the language as a middle ground but the culture is far more intermixed then what the grammar would suppose!
actually the reason why i got interested in this was that they are the template
George rr martin used for the 1st man culture in the ice and fire books!
Not sure exactly what you were trying to mean with "a language for the idiots and the conceited cunts... ", but if you're saying English speakers are idiots and conceited cunts, then you effectively insulted literally every person who can understand this.
And, for someone trying to sound like they know a lot about everything, your grammar is pretty horrid. I felt like I was taking a real linguistic adventure by just attempting to decipher some of that. lmao
All that aside, I doubt anyone in here truly cares about who spoke what words first, or how many words each language actually has. The whole point of the conversation was that many devs in here will claim their game was written in English, when the dialogue makes it brutally obvious they do not speak English very well.
my point was that the "very well" is only actually spoken by a few hundred thousands
from amongst the almost 1.5 billions that speak it as their native or 2nd language!
as for the idiots and conceited its a barb mainly against everyone that thinks that they dominate the language!
the basic form is so basic that almost everyone that puts a moderate effort into it can learn it!
but to truly dominate the language its something quite different and very few can!
yes me included, the most relevant part is that my grammar took a massive hit once i started using the internet...
ofc that might be because i started to learn several other languages and some times there are contamination from other languages
since i also speak french and German many times i have found myself using German or french grammatical forms while speaking English!
so if i insulted anyone i was also including myself in that bunch... a bit counter intuitive but it is what it is!
because what for Australians or Uk English might see as bad English
can actually be supported in the spoken form in other parts of the globe that also have English as their native tongue!
Also the grammatical "rules" have only been set in the 19th century if its anything like French or German
but several of those dialects have existed for hundreds of years before those rules were set!
the redneck example or the cornwallian dialect are perfect examples of attested dialects that existed before that
nowadays we recognize them as the "southern american" but they existed even before the colonization period
like the Anglo Irish form that colonized a bit north from the south of the united states! mainly the Appalachians
so telling people that their English is bad, when they and their ancestors actually spoke it before there were any rules
is what seems a bit conceited, even to this day we do not know how much comes from Saxon Jute Angle or Briton for that matter into the formation of the language!
we do know that 50% of the written form mostly comes from french, but that is another particularity of the English language
in the written form is 50% french but when its spoken it tends to be 80% Germanic
and depending on the English region it originates it can be mainly Scandinavian dutch or Deutsche
so no i am hardly an expert in the language but i do have some snipets of knowledge here and there!
