YOU ARE BRAINWASHING OUR CHILDREN!!!

[noremaC]

Yeah, there are many German words that are spelled that same as English words, they also mean the same thing. Pronunciation can be different, though. (such as information, that immediately comes to mind)

As for Snow Storm, good point.

cognates i think, a word that is spelled the same and means the same thing in another language but pronounced differently.

[Der Kommissar]

Did you not read my post?

EVERY. LANGUAGE. IS. LATIN. WITH. A. LITTLE. TWIST. EVEN. IF. WE. CHANGED. LANGUAGES. NO. MATTER. WHAT. MOST. OF. THE. WORDS. WOULD. BE. SIMILAR.

Actually, English is a Germanic language. It's not derived from Latin. Oops.

Edited January 18, 2009 by Der Kommissar

[Fox]

Me and Destiny Hero speak French. The language of love!

Bonjour sexy

I can speak French, too. Just mumble into your shirt collar.

[Rei]

well since we started off as an english colony, we started with the language. Especially since many American ancestors were either english native or forced to learn English. Wist you're funny :o

[Blacken]

What became the United States was colonized and founded by those who were so strange that they were shunned by the entirety of Europe.

The Puritans colonized Plymouth, sure--but, uh, last I checked, the first permanent English settlement was built by shareholding and hired businessmen by the fucking Virginia Company of London, not some religious nuts.

The idea that America was primarily founded by "persecuted" people is a myth that has very little real basis in reality; most of the religious crazies sprouted up after getting here (hello, Rhode Island, hello, Johnathan Edwards, hello, Calvinists in general).

EVERY. LANGUAGE. IS. LATIN. WITH. A. LITTLE. TWIST. EVEN. IF. WE. CHANGED. LANGUAGES. NO. MATTER. WHAT. MOST. OF. THE. WORDS. WOULD. BE. SIMILAR.

Basque sure as hell isn't, and it's a fucking European language. Shit, neither is English; the majority of our vocabulary is Germanic in origin, like Der Kommissar said.

Basque, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, Finnish, Welsh, Irish, Scots Gaelic, Cornish, Dutch, German, Afrikaans, Yiddish, Faroese, Russian, Ukrainian, Czech, Polish, Belarusian, all of the Slavic-ish languages (Slovakian, Bosnian, etc.), and the Grecian languages (Macedonian, which could be argued as either South Slavic or Grecian, would go here).

Those are European-based languages that are not descended from Latin. You fail. Get a clue.

How can one language be better than another? It's just a language, a particular culture's way of speech.

Quite easily, actually. Setting aside the silly moral relativism you posit, some languages are simply better. Consider the following attributes (excuse me while I pull out my "GOD DAMN THAT GUY IS SMART" hat):

Learnability: How hard is it to learn the language? This matters as far as spreading the language economically goes. Chinese might be spoken by a hell of a lot of people, but it's a stupid backwards language (as far as linguistics go) and so relatively few people learn it; it also doesn't help that the Chinese speakers who matter generally also know English. English is difficult for foreign speakers to master, but its status as a composited language makes it relatively easy to pick up to a working extent.

Clarity: How ambiguous is the grammar and the word structure? English is actually not terribly good at clarity, at least until you look at many of the alternatives. The Asian languages become clear only after learning the structure absolutely cold (ref. learnability) and, at least in the case of Japanese, rely occasionally on tone to change the meaning of a word. (Take the word hashi for example--the word's inflection changes its meaning. When the same word is used for bridge, edge, and chopsticks, there might be a problem.)

Writing, too, depends on clarity. Yes, the Asian languages convey a lot of information in a small space in the form of ideographs, but the number of ideographs somebody has to learn (ref. learnability) reduces its usefulness due to the need to either expect someone to learn new ideographs on-the-fly or, in Japanese, resort to kana to express the idea.

Information Density: How much information can you get across in a sentence? There's a reason most scientific professions use either English or German to discuss scientific phenomena, even when the native tongues of the discussion participants are in common--it's easier. Spanish, for example, is not informationally dense: it takes a lot of words to describe an idea where German or English can do it in fewer. Latin is also not informationally dense, at least by the standards of today, though that's because English and German have evolved to pack a lot into a sentence when needed.

Extensibility: Can the language seamlessly incorporate new concepts and vocabulary? English is particularly good at this; everything from cowboy to hamburger is imported from somewhere or other. Most of the European languages are generally good at this, in fact, and assimilate an idea to the point where it "seems natural" to speak it in a, culturally speaking, short time. The Asian languages, not so much--loanwords remain loanwords for a long time and often fly in the face of the established system of pronunciation. IIRC, Japanese actually has two syllabic sets that are only used for loanwords--I want to say the j set and the z set, but I'm not sure.

This is not always the language's fault, and in many cases is not. The French have a massive cultural inertia against "new things," as do the majority of Chinese--doesn't help matters much. Or Arabic--yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh.

Languages can be better than others. English had help in establishing linguistic dominance thanks to the British Empire, but as far as languages go it's among the most informationally dense, extendible, and learnable languages; where it lacks in clarity it gains in the ability to shoehorn in specificity if needed (and that's truly rare if you actually understand the language). The Germanic family in general is very good at conveying information effectively--the German language does it by allowing for very long constructions to encourage specificity and the Dutch language does it, to a slightly lesser extent, by following the English path and subsuming vocabulary when necessary. Then take the Chinese language--mostly static, slow to expand with new concepts and new ideas, difficult to write, difficult to read, and relatively ineffective for communication's sake when you go beyond the vocabulary necessary to handle your rice paddy. (Russian's the same way, though it's exceptional at snarfing up bits from other languages. Anything more complex than potato vodka was probably stolen from French, English, or German.)

It should be noted that English was not as "good" at these qualities, say, four hundred years ago--the language has been trending consistently over that time toward being ever more of a lingua franca (did you see what I did there) for international and intercultural communication. Sort of like Swahili or Arabic, only among countries that actually have money and actually matter.

Edited January 18, 2009 by Blacken

[Rei]

Hi Blacken ^_^

[Malexis]

*Reads Destiny Hero's posts*

...

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.