> On Saturday, Dec 13, 2003, at 12:17 US/Pacific, Herbert Graf wrote:
>
> > There are just some things in English that make NO sense at all
>
> A lot of that is because english shameless steals interesting words
> from any other language where they happen to occur.  Whether or not
> they obey the rules from the original language.  So after you've
> imported both rule-following and exceptional words from a dozen
> languages, and applied some fraction of english rules to the results,
> it's not surprising that the result is a mess.

Most human languages are like this. For example, Japanese has borrowed
so much from Chinese (including their writing system) that many words
have two sets of prononciations and rules depending on where it fits.

English is a fairly basic Germanic language with a *lot* of French loan-
words. The grammer is relatively simple, though the spelling could use
a bit of revision. Where there are both French and Germanic words for
the same meaning, the French words have (generally) come to mean the
higher-status version ("mansion" vs "house", "chadelier" vs "light",
"pork" vs "swine"). Of course, there are many other languages that
English has borrowed from.
--
D. Jay Newman           !
jay@sprucegrove.com     ! Xander: Giles, don't make cave-slayer unhappy.
http://enerd.ws/robots/ !

--
http://www.piclist.com hint: PICList Posts must start with ONE topic:
[PIC]:,[SX]:,[AVR]: ->uP ONLY! [EE]:,[OT]: ->Other [BUY]:,[AD]: ->Ads