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Le 2014-04-30 12:47, Peter Humphrey a écrit : |
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> On Wednesday 30 Apr 2014 10:21:11 godzil wrote: |
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> |
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>> I suspect that your habits for "regular" or "ordinary" came from |
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>> 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 |
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>> nearby |
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>> European country (mostly France) (i.e: colour vs color, behaviour vs |
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>> behavior, etc.) |
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> |
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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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> |
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|
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Thanks |
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|
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> Countries being adjacent is not the explanation. I haven't seen an |
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> authority |
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> on this, but I believe that a good half of English words come from |
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> French (as |
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> a result of the most recent invasion of these islands in 1066), most of |
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> the |
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> rest coming from Latin and Greek. (That's now largely forgotten in USA, |
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> where |
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> efforts are now directed at absorbing German, Italian and Spanish.) |
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> There's a |
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> smattering of words from India and other parts of the Empire as well. |
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> Hardly |
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> any from Italian or Spanish, which accounts for a lot of differences |
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> between |
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> American and English. |
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> |
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Yes that true, lots of English words came from old French, and funnily |
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some word that were "lost" goes back into French :) |
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But I don't agree, on the origin of "Old English" it is more a |
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germano-celtic language than a latino-greek one. French clearly come |
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from Latin and Old Greek, like Spanish or Italian. On the contrary, the |
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German language have nearly no roots in Latin and Greek. |
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|
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> The spelling differences you mention are I think a result of attempts |
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> to |
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> "simplify" the language by your founding fathers. |
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|
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Wikipedia have a nice article on this: |
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences |
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(I tried to read it, but now my head is hurting!) |
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|
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> Similarly, today, sentence |
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> structure is changing, with a wholesale ditching of previously useful |
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> tenses |
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> and, for instance, an insistence on putting adverbs before their verbs. |
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> Are |
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> those German influences? And why do so many insist on a single word |
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> never being |
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> both a noun and a verb (use, usage)? What do you do with "compact", |
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> which can |
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> be noun, verb or adjective? |
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> |
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> I could go on, but I'd better not :-) |
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