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On Wednesday 30 Apr 2014 10:21:11 godzil wrote: |
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> I suspect that your habits for "regular" or "ordinary" came from French, |
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> where the first translation of regular is "régulier", "habituel" which |
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> mean that it is something is a habits. |
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> |
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> And "ordinary" will be translate to "ordinaire" that have the means of |
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> "common", "standard". |
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> |
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> I know that some difference from UK and US English come from the nearby |
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> European country (monstly France) (i.e: colour vs color, behaviour vs |
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> behavior, etc.) |
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Yes, true, except that "habits" is not the right word: "usage" would be |
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better, which in this context in English means "custom". |
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Countries being adjacent is not the explanation. I haven't seen an authority |
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on this, but I believe that a good half of English words come from French (as |
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a result of the most recent invasion of these islands in 1066), most of the |
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rest coming from Latin and Greek. (That's now largely forgotten in USA, where |
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efforts are now directed at absorbing German, Italian and Spanish.) There's a |
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smattering of words from India and other parts of the Empire as well. Hardly |
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any from Italian or Spanish, which accounts for a lot of differences between |
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American and English. |
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The spelling differences you mention are I think a result of attempts to |
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"simplify" the language by your founding fathers. Similarly, today, sentence |
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structure is changing, with a wholesale ditching of previously useful tenses |
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and, for instance, an insistence on putting adverbs before their verbs. Are |
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those German influences? And why do so many insist on a single word never being |
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both a noun and a verb (use, usage)? What do you do with "compact", which can |
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be noun, verb or adjective? |
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I could go on, but I'd better not :-) |
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-- |
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Regards |
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Peter |