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Diners, cafeterias, automats…and delis!
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It’s a messy mix of german, french, academic latin, spanish, arabic, celtic, greek, hindi, and a dozen other sources of loanwords and grammars. It’s absolutely a creole.
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Yep, that’s the conclusion of the video.
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“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse {lady of negotiable virtues}. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
― James D. Nicoll (maybe, also attributed in various forms to many others)
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FYI: The Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution will not be televised!
…nor will that of the Angiosperms, apparently.
And this sort of thing is the best of humans + tech. Using it to find out the past so we can figure out how we got to the present, and how all this can help us plan for, perhaps, a better future.
I don’t often, but at times I so wish I’d been encouraged from the age of 5 or 6 to pursue my dream of being an archeologist or a paleontologist. ok, time to not think about it again for a decade or so.)
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I often say if I had it to do over again, I would go into paleontology. But that’s only in retrospect. I guess we’ll see if there is a second time around!
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There are creoles and creoles.
Germanic in general had started using auxiliary verbs where other Indo-European languages used different endings. That’s why Germanic verbs don’t have future forms, and don’t usually have passive forms. Creoles also tend to use more auxiliary verbs.
English and Gullah-Geechee have kept most of the Germanic verb system.
Tok Pisin has made its own verb system.
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Definitely James Davis Nichol. He’s on Dreamwidth, and has posted about it, noting the exact date and location of the Usenet post, and apologizing because he originally spelled it ‘riffled’.
The general sentiment was not new even then, of course, and other ways of saying basically the same thing have been going around for a while. But he’s the guy who said that one.
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It also sounds like something Sir Terry Pratchett might have written.
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Yeah, it’s definitely from James Nicoll.
He’s also the person who first proposed the Nicoll-Dyson beam, or using a Dyson swarm’s elements as emitters in a phased-array laser you can use to burn planets into cinders across interstellar distances!
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That’s funny, the section I found it under was “Quotes misattributed to Terry Pratchett!”
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It’s the tea.
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