Conservapedia talk:History of the English Language

Hey all, feel free to refine, add or retract to this. I'm sure it can be improved. -- 10:02, 9 March 2009 (EDT) Moer! 10:14, 9 March 2009 (EDT)
 * It's powerful (how's that for a 19th century term) frightening to think that Andy teaches children. Although, I suppose that it comes into more perspective when you realize that he is actually indoctrinating them.  10:24, 9 March 2009 (EDT)
 * Well, Schlafly is powerful stupid. -- 10:28, 9 March 2009 (EDT)
 * I believe that the whole Latin => good, Anglo Saxon => bad confusion comes from the cultural imperialism of the Norman invaders. From that period we have Romance => Language of the ruling class, Germanic => language of the oppressed. Famously we use the Germanic for food animals in the field and Romance for the food on the plate (cow in the field, beef on the plate for example).
 * Misunderstanding this has let teh assfly to equate Romance, and in particular Latin, with 'superior'.
 * What I can't see is how to put this, if it belongs, in the side-by-side. Silver Sloth 10:35, 9 March 2009 (EDT)
 * You might fit it in in the "Old and Middle English" section, but you'd have to figure a way to prove this has been influential on Assfly's thinking. -- 10:46, 9 March 2009 (EDT)

re: teh "edits": you need section headers (could be === === blank ones)  10:40, 9 March 2009 (EDT)
 * Thanks, I'll add one to try. This is such an annoying AndyArticle(tm).-- 10:44, 9 March 2009 (EDT)
 * My bad. I copied the techy stuff off another side-by-side that didn't follow the usual template. I'll change 'er up if WfG doesn't beat me to the punch. -- 10:46, 9 March 2009 (EDT)
 * Trying something:

 10:55, 9 March 2009 (EDT) How's that now? 11:00, 9 March 2009 (EDT)
 * Yos & Toast, I don't get it, looking at the abortion side/by/side. So i'll learn from what you do here, thanks.  I learn a lot from you guys.  how did you all learn this stuff, or do you do it for a hobby and/or living?-- 11:04, 9 March 2009 (EDT)
 * Re: Toast -- That looks much better. To answer your question, Godot, at least for me, this is the result of spending way too much time on Wikipedia in high school. :) -- 11:07, 9 March 2009 (EDT)
 * We's just geniuses (& I'm a certified antique with nothing better to do. ) 11:10, 9 March 2009 (EDT)
 * Ish true, wot. -- 11:32, 9 March 2009 (EDT)

Welsh
Dunno what it's got to do with anything but "modern" Welsh imports words wholesale from English if there's no archaic equivalent. They had Televisions, just couldn't talk about 'em except as "box in the corner with sound and pictures".  10:51, 9 March 2009 (EDT)
 * Most languages do that now, especially when languages hear english 24/7 on their music, TV, and movies. Some with greater ease than others, some with Academies of old farts and Enfoires who try without success to keep their languages pure of the Evil English.  ;-) -- 10:56, 9 March 2009 (EDT)
 * Must be gaulling (sic: intentional) for the French, to think that once "lingua Franca" (sp?) meant both the French language and the lingua franca which is now a form of English. (Does that make sense?) 11:08, 9 March 2009 (EDT)
 * If French = My husband, he's "gaul"ed daily. I can't tell you how many times he cringes at 1) the ignorance of people about their own language's development, and 2)how they can manage to misuse so many words.  He thinks that if we borrowed it, and changed the meaning *we* are the ones in the wrong.  He also has no patience for TV actors who fake french accents.  ;-)  damn arrogant frenchies, you'd think they invented speech, not just "french".-- 11:40, 9 March 2009 (EDT)

"We cannot even understand Old English today..."
I'm going to be extremely charitable and assume he means that your average Joe on the street English speaker would generally find Old English unintelligible, not that it's untranslatable. I wouldn't be SURPRISED if that's what he actually thought, but considering he provides a translation of an Old English passage only a few paragraphs down, I think he's just phrased it awkwardly. -- 12:25, 9 March 2009 (EDT)

Post Anglo-Saxon
Andy also seems unaware, or ignorant, of the influence of Norman/Old French on English. After all, most the aristocracy spoke Norman/French for centuries after 1066.--PsyGremlinWhut? 12:50, 9 March 2009 (EDT)
 * That's all mentioned in the first section, I believe. It's remarkable that that man can wax poetic on how much Latin improved English without for a moment discussing Norman French. How myopic and intellectually incurious can you get? -- 12:57, 9 March 2009 (EDT)
 * Rant, rant, rant. Greek.  do you know how much greek we use in our daily speech?  and spanish.  There's Norse in there, too.  hate that man.  hate him.  hate him.  the plethora of things he opines upon, things he sets himself off as an 'expert' on... (grrrr). It's just that this is one of the few fields I really can see all his problems, unlike science.  -- 13:19, 9 March 2009 (EDT)
 * Just leave the computer, sip a beer, stay away from caffine and calm down for an hour or so. Reading more will only get you more agitated and make you worse! :p  A rmondiko V  User_Talk:Armondikov 13:34, 9 March 2009 (EDT)


 * By the way, the way he highbrows latin, has me thinking in his head he says "oh, they had such a lovely word for the the good words we say when someone dies. "eulogy" (good-eu /word-logy) or any other myriad ("myriad is such a nice latin word for a mass of things, since it means, 1000") of things we say so awkwardly/poorly in English.  "silly Andy, Trix are for kids".-- 13:42, 9 March 2009 (EDT)

If Anglo-saxons went to our time
They would say : "What is this degenerate tongue with such a distorted pronunciation, no cases nor grammatical gender, and which uses Roman words just because it sounds cool and forgets about the Germanic ones ?" --Antee286 (talk) 12:23, 16 January 2011 (UTC)

Early Modern English
Is it splitting hairs to insist that the final section of the RW article in which Modern English is used be substituted fo Early Modern English (EModE)? Though EModE is quite similar to Modern English it was different in some particulars, such as spelling (viz. multiple spellings for a single word), pronouns (i.e. ye, thou, thee, thine, &c.), verb inflections (i.e. -(e)th, & -en), and vocabulary.
 * Actually, it's wrong. I'm fairly confident that "Modern English as spoken today" is not EmodE. There is some equivocation in the paragraph between contemporary Modern English, and Early Modern English, but not all use in the article of "Modern English" refers to EmodE. It is however reasonable to assert that the article should be altered so that such equivocation isn't occurring anymore. -- 09:41, 25 May 2011 (UTC)