Diners, cafeterias, automatsā¦and delis!
Itās a messy mix of german, french, academic latin, spanish, arabic, celtic, greek, hindi, and a dozen other sources of loanwords and grammars. Itās absolutely a creole.
Yep, thatās the conclusion of the video.
āThe problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse {lady of negotiable virtues}. We donāt just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.ā
ā James D. Nicoll (maybe, also attributed in various forms to many others)
FYI: The Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution will not be televised!
ā¦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 donāt often, but at times I so wish Iād 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.)
I often say if I had it to do over again, I would go into paleontology. But thatās only in retrospect. I guess weāll see if there is a second time around!
There are creoles and creoles.
Germanic in general had started using auxiliary verbs where other Indo-European languages used different endings. Thatās why Germanic verbs donāt have future forms, and donāt 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.
Definitely James Davis Nichol. Heās on Dreamwidth, and has posted about it, noting the exact date and location of the Usenet post, and apologizing because he originally spelled it āriffledā.
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 heās the guy who said that one.
It also sounds like something Sir Terry Pratchett might have written.
Yeah, itās definitely from James Nicoll.
Heās also the person who first proposed the Nicoll-Dyson beam, or using a Dyson swarmās elements as emitters in a phased-array laser you can use to burn planets into cinders across interstellar distances!
Thatās funny, the section I found it under was āQuotes misattributed to Terry Pratchett!ā
Itās the tea.