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6 likes
rbuchanan 5 months ago

It's redolent of its age, but drives me nuts. Personally, I'm thankful for orthoepic reforms.

4 likes
rbuchanan 5 months ago

English is certainly less wild and wooly than it was, but the French would rightly sneer at this notion that our (frankly demented) orthography is especially consistent.

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cidoku 5 months ago

Oh it drives me nuts too. Maybe that's why I dig it. It's an intellectual exercise. Is that a long s or an f? Yeah.

4 likes
rbuchanan 5 months ago

I tried to read Canterbury Tales in its (semi-reconstructed) Middle English years ago. Your longanimity exceeds mine by leagues.

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ongezell 5 months ago

It's really interesting to compare the evolution of our languages across the ages, I think the earliest de facto Portuguese text I found was from the twelfth-century and it's completely readable, especially if you also know a bit of Spanish. I would say that Galician it's pretty close to what Portuguese was at that time, I mean, we were Galician-Portuguese after all

5 likes
ongezell 5 months ago

and even before that we had vulgar Latin which is also surprisingly understandable

4 likes
rbuchanan 5 months ago

What's also remarkable is the persisting mutual intelligibility of those, along with Fala and Eonavian. Then compare them (and esp. their grammar) to Catalan....!

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rbuchanan 5 months ago

Considering that its incomparably immane lexicon eventuated mostly from amalgamation and agglutination, the convoluted developments of English diachrony seem almost modest. After the slow merger of Anglo-Saxon with Anglo-Norman, vast lexical influxions from 20+ languages over not quite a millennium resulted in less inflectional reduction than that of simpler languages (as Mandarin) over half that span.

3 likes
ongezell 5 months ago

All latin based languages are in a certain way highly mutually intelligible, at least textual form. with the exception of Romanian I think, that became a Slavic romance language of sorts. I was reading about this interesting constructed language called Romance Neolatino, It sounds soooooooo good and it's highly intelligible for romance speakers. I hope it gets some attention

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rbuchanan 5 months ago

Admittedly, Neolatin is appealing and agreeably dulcet -- much better than Esperanto! Romanian's grammar (notwithstanding enclitic definite articles) and verbal vocabulary are impeccably romance, but that Slavic influence in its nominal vocab. and phonology is unshakable. Nota bene: Romanians only fully jettisoned Cyrillic a century ago.

3 likes
rbuchanan 5 months ago

Your mention of mutual intelligibility reminded me of an amusing moment from "Sleuth," which I recently reviewed. Late in the third act, Michael Caine proffers a clue in Italian to frantic Laurence Olivier, who despises Italians but is conversant in Latin, by which he fenziedly deciphers the hinting epigram by tracing its cognates. >:P

3 likes

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