The British burned down Washington D.C.???? Exactly 200 years ago today????

[belamyi]

Actually I should be. I come from a very diverse area of the U.S. where there are hundreds of other languages spoken and most everyone refers to the food and loanwords of other cultures the way that people from those cultures pronounce them-- and in fact, people will correct you if you do not. America is only regionally guilty of trying to Anglicize the pronunciation of everything they hear from another country... it's not a nationwide practice.

You mean you SHOULD be a pot calling the kettle colo(u)rs
yahyah, I know you are in that hundred-and-thirty-communities-in-search-of-a-city location...

 

[belamyi]

It's extraordinary that there was a secretary on board who knew shorthand and had a goodly supply of ink and quills.

In any case, people until a couple of couple of [sic] generations ago, used to rely more on their ability to retain thoughts than on paper's to retain ink.

 

[belamyi]

Oh, take your snobbery and stuff it. The only people who would get all the references in there these days would be someone deliberately studying the classics. Today's college students don't get even a smattering of what's there.

Of course it also shows just how shallow learning has become these days: out of ten thousand people off the street, maybe one would actually be able to appreciate the references and the fun the author is having with them.

Or those relishing on the stuff the Loeb Classic Library is made of ... you self-satisfied pompous "average" joe



Although in an era in which physicists are still massively employed by banking institutions, or the future will be build by IT engineers who ignore what is the information they are dealing with, that is far being the worse thing you can come about.

 

[JohnnyAnger]

When I hear Brits refer to city names in countries like Spain or Italy, or refer to food words from those languages, I can barely catch the word they're using the first time around. The adding of R's at the end of words that end in vowels doesn't help. Let's boil the pAAAAAster...

We are not that bad! It's just older people that fuck up! And in all fairness it's still responsible recent that we have come across most of this stuff - up until the 70s/80s British people did not have access to this food, nor the money to really travel to these places. Unlike America we did not have many European immigrants until very recently, so linguistically we were not always that mixed.

That's what you get when you try to fit a four-zillion vowel system, with its 7 billion different possible syllables, inside just any other regular phonetic system on Earth

And if you are an American you shouldn't be...

Agreed, I have heard Americans butcher so many words - they really should not consider themselves better!


Can we all agree with one thing - we are all better than the French at saying foreign words?

 

[belamyi]

We are not that bad! It's just older people that fuck up! And in all fairness it's still responsible recent that we have come across most of this stuff - up until the 70s/80s British people did not have access to this food, nor the money to really travel to these places. Unlike America we did not have many European immigrants until very recently, so linguistically we were not always that mixed.




Agreed, I have heard Americans butcher so many words - they really should not consider themselves better!


Can we all agree with one thing - we are all better than the French at saying foreign words?

But the French make no use of foreign words... I was once amazed to learn, from a young Frenchman, that "cool" was a genuinely French word.

 

[JohnnyAnger]

But the French make no use of foreign words... I was once amazed to learn, from a young Frenchman, that "cool" was a genuinely French word.

I meant more so when speaking another language - they get taught such awful English in school.

They can try and claim cool - but it was being used in English way before they got there hands on it! It's used in Beowulf

 

[Kahaih]

... I was once amazed to learn, from a young Frenchman, that "cool" was a genuinely French word.

Did he pronounce the L, or was it silent?

 

[Vitamin]

I meant more so when speaking another language - they get taught such awful English in school.

They can try and claim cool - but it was being used in English way before they got there hands on it! It's used in Beowulf

Unsurprising to hear that about the French. They are friendly to tourists, but extremely xenophobic if you stay.

 

[xbuzzerx]

We are not that bad! It's just older people that fuck up! And in all fairness it's still responsible recent that we have come across most of this stuff - up until the 70s/80s British people did not have access to this food, nor the money to really travel to these places. Unlike America we did not have many European immigrants until very recently, so linguistically we were not always that mixed.

Granted. Although I have also seen/observed in some Brits a certain prideful resistance to it as well, even though that's more stereotypically connotated with the U.S., we have NO monopoly on it. And in many ways we learned from the best.

Agreed, I have heard Americans butcher so many words - they really should not consider themselves better!

Many midwesterners are useless in this regard. I can repeat my last name 3 times and their mouths and brains simply cannot connect up and make a change out of comfortable sound patterns. However, Americans also have a lot more to butcher. In places some of our place names will be Native (of many different languages), French, Spanish or English, often side by side. I live on a street where Korean, Hindi, Japanese, Dutch and Spanish are all spoken alongside English. I certainly don't claim all Americans are good at it but I think we get the reputation as somehow being awful at it when I can turn on a cooking show with a British chef and not understand incredibly basic words he's using like pasta or tapas or marzipan because they can manage to force the word to sound British, complete with rampant omissions and insertions of the letter R.

 

[chrisrobin]

He has a point, though. Several books, such as Lies My Teacher Told Me, demonstrate that it isn't just things missing in what's taught to school children, but heaps of things that are just flat-out false.

Check out this book: classic for learning what's not standard history books!



Recently passed away. We could use his wisdom.

 

[belamyi]

I meant more so when speaking another language - they get taught such awful English in school.

Like people are any better South of the Pyrenees...

Does Beowulf make use of the expression "c'est cool"?

 

[belamyi]

Did he pronounce the L, or was it silent?

The same "L" as in "pool"... the French word, that is, not the Norman "poule"

 

[JohnnyAnger]

Like people are any better South of the Pyrenees...

Does Beowulf make use of the expression "c'est cool"?

No, but by the 16th Cent. it was used to mean good reasoning . Then in the 19th cent. the Americans (specifically Black Americans) started to use it in the modern way. http://www.slate.com/articles/life/cool_story/2013/10/cool_the_etymology_and_history_of_the_concept_of_coolness.html

I find the Spanish try a lot more than the French, who won't give up on their system of pronunciation out of boneheadedness!

 

[gsdx]

But the French make no use of foreign words

How do you explain 'le shampooing' or 'le parking'?

 

[belamyi]

How do you explain 'le shampooing' or 'le parking'?

They are, obviously, French words: and, please, don't kill the messenger.

 

[Vitamin]

They are, obviously, French words: and, please, don't kill the messenger.

Google has the orgin of "shampoo" as Hindi.

https://www.google.com/search?ie=UT...rking#q=etymology+of+the+word+shampoo&spell=1

 

[JohnnyAnger]

I live on a street where Korean, Hindi, Japanese, Dutch and Spanish are all spoken alongside English. I certainly don't claim all Americans are good at it but I think we get the reputation as somehow being awful at it when I can turn on a cooking show with a British chef and not understand incredibly basic words he's using like pasta or tapas or marzipan because they can manage to force the word to sound British, complete with rampant omissions and insertions of the letter R.

The amount of languages being spoken in America is certainly the case in most of the UK! I mean London is a crazy mix of everything on earth, and I don't bat an eyelid of hearing tonnes of languages everyday. There are silly little things about it like more French people live in London than in Bordeaux, Nantes or Strasbourg and some now regard it as France's sixth biggest city in terms of population. One in nine English schools now has a majority of pupils who do not speak English as a first language.

British chefs on TV are pretty bad on the whole with words, which is why we import our chefs from the continent when we want continental food on television!

 

[belamyi]

Google has the orgin of "shampoo" as Hindi.

https://www.google.com/search?ie=UT...rking#q=etymology+of+the+word+shampoo&spell=1

Not in a French world.

 

[belamyi]

Check out this book: classic for learning what's not standard history books!



Recently passed away. We could use his wisdom.

It's among the hundreds of digital archives that my brother gave me from the scanning of his library: thanks for the heads-up, indirectly allowing me to know from where to start reading all that stuff

 

[Alnitak]

Constitution was designed and built deliberately to be able to run from those -- though one of her captains once stood fast facing a supposed ship of the line and was ready to take it on.

Which it did famously outrunning even other lighter frigates, but by the clever use of anchors in a technique called kedging.

On a side note we had one of the original six frigates here in Maryland, the USS Constellation, but sadly it was broken up before its historic value was appreciated though the timbers were reused in the current ship from 1854. Some proud locals say it is still the original frigate by virtue of the materials, but not by form (still a great controversy among historians). Either way, these historic ships are priceless national treasures.