I get a tad annoyed by this because it's like people kind of want to talk about how bad English is -- how incredibly hard English spelling is etc. -- as another way to make it sound special And it's really not *that* specialhttps://twitter.com/benjanun_s/status/1265209402786590720 …
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I really want to point out every time someone says this that this is entirely a matter of perception *All human beings* adopt words they hear from other languages when it's convenient
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The reason you perceive English as actually "incorporating words into the language" but not vice versa is unconscious imperialism This assumption that because America is the center of the world, if a word gets commonly used by Americans it's "our word now" but not in reverse
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Like look just as an example literally everyone in Taiwan knows the word "okay", there is nowhere you can't say "okay" and not be understood as agreeing to something, but if I said "Well that means okay is a Chinese word now" you'd balk
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Nobody says "Oh the Chinese language mugs other languages for vocabulary in an alleyway" like this charming thing It goes the other way, they say that this is evidence the Chinese language has been adulterated and weakened by English influence, it's less authentic now
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Anyway English has a lot of loanwords from different sources because it's the lingua franca of the American Empire It's not the first such language and it won't be the last It doesn't make English a good language or a bad language, it just is what it is
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It's not some ideally designed perfect language that can meet every human need and it's also not some "beautiful chaotic ugly mess", okay, like both of those takes are annoying You don't need to constantly make everything you do special
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russian has borrowed words from a ton of languages during its history, and while our spelling is a bit more phonetic, instead the difficulty comes from grammar (in which some words, depending on where they come from, inflect differently). so yeah, english is not special.
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example: окно (window) is inflected like this: окно, окна, окну, окно, окном, об окне. пальто (coat) _should_ work in the same way (same ending & stress), but it isn't inflected at all — it's in a group that's mostly, but not entirely, loanwords, tho not all loanwords are in it.
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Every time I see that quote (which is an argument against English purists, anyway) I wanna correct it: "on occasion, English has colonized other languages, stolen choice bits of their vocabularies, and taken them home as trophies." There, fixed it for ya.
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