PSA: It isn't "her's" and "hi's" so it's not "it's"

[chronovore]

The possessive form of "it" is "its" -- there is no apostrophe.

The best way to remember this is we use neither "her's" nor "hi's" for female and male pronoun possessive forms.

That is all.

[Great Rumbler]

Its a mystery.

[chronovore]

I laughed so hard that I had a coughing fit.

Be old and judgmental, brehs.

[Shadow Mod]

english is shit anyway who cares

[zomgee]

<.<

[Madrun Badrun]

to bad dont care

[StealthFan]

some of these threads are flabbynsick

[Kara]

Initialisms should have a period after each letter.

[Shadow Mod]

Initialisms should have a period after each letter.

DIAF

[Dickie Dee]

[chronovore]

to bad dont care

You get a break because we know Canada is basically one big ESL class.

[Madrun Badrun]

We work so hard to fit in and yet everyone still treats us like a bunch of hosers, eh buddy

[Joe Molotov]

God made Adam and Eve, and Adam's and Steve's.

[recursivelyenumerable]

acting like English grammar follows any consistent logic 

[pilonv1]

Have not of

[Joe Molotov]

yaere is th

[toku]

2015
Emoji the only language you should care about

[Kara]

2015
Emoji the only language you should care about

um i think u mean esperanto

[Madrun Badrun]

no

[king of the internet]

2015
Emoji the only language you should care about

👌🔥💯

[Madrun Badrun]

Looks like King want to give you a feminine hand job till you cum fire 100%, says my Emoji as a second language textbook.

[Dickie Dee]

I think it's that as a native speaker being introduced to other languages and their often codified rules, we realized that the first rule of English is that there are barely any rules, and most of these can be turned on a dime if one wants. ( 'i' before 'e' except after 'c', exceptions to the rule being fuck you)

No doubt all language is inherently fluid, but English isn't just dabling in loanwords or whatever, it's a chimera monstrosity from toes to tits.

[CatsCatsCats]

Spanish is pretty alright

[Kara]

I always found it interesting that older languages tend to be more ridiculous than newer ones, by which I mean things like quantity of verb tenses or declension.

[chronovore]

I always found it interesting that older languages tend to be more ridiculous than newer ones, by which I mean things like quantity of verb tenses or declension.

By newer languages, do you mean recently created ones like Esperanto? I'm guessing "no."

[Cerveza mas fina]

english is shit anyway who cares

I don't understand native English speakers saying English is shit. Grammatically it might be average or something, but English is a decent language, I daresay a good language. I mean every language has its (there it is!) quirks. As a non-native English speaker I can tell you Dutch is disastrous in comparison.

I mean if English is shit what do you think is good? German is interesting but it sounds kinda bad and the whole thing das, der and die seems like a pain. In English there's just 'the'. Even in Dutch there's two forms of the, het and de. French is interesting, but sounds too nasally at times. And also with French you have la and le.

English seems pretty alright to me.

Het en de is just archaic as you need a dictionary to look up the gender

I'm learning Danish now (5 hours a week at school) and they have et and en which is basically the same

English is by far my favourite language

[Kara]

I always found it interesting that older languages tend to be more ridiculous than newer ones, by which I mean things like quantity of verb tenses or declension.

By newer languages, do you mean recently created ones like Esperanto? I'm guessing "no."

I meant comparing, say, Classical Latin with Romance languages. The erosion of grammatical case in that familial evolution is quite stark.

[Cerveza mas fina]

Could you write that again in english breh

[Kara]

In older languages you can be a lot more specific in your meaning with particles that modify nouns and verb tenses. In Basque I think a noun can have something like over 400 thousand theoretical permutations.

[Cerveza mas fina]

I guess it made sense to be more specific when society and life was less dynamic

[chronovore]

I guess it made sense to be more specific when society and life was less dynamic

Could you write that again in english breh

[Kara]

I guess it made sense to be more specific when society and life was less dynamic

That's my take on it, with a pinch of religion for certain languages.

[Cerveza mas fina]

I guess it made sense to be more specific when society and life was less dynamic

Could you write that again in english breh

dobrze zagrane

[Rufus]

English just has to decide on a sensible orthography. The grammar is fine. For a complete inventory of this mess, go here.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

And lookit that beautifully bare HTML. /sniff It was a simpler time. T_T

[close]

- Anglicise all loan words, because you shouldn't have to learn a different language to 'correctly' pronounce your own vocab. This is not unique to English, but you have a pretty bad case of the hoity-toities.
- Un-fuck your vowels. Eye, aye, I, italian. Madness. Vowel shift the fuck back or adapt the spelling. This is particularly bad in English and the reason you're doomed to fuck up most foreign words anyway. See above.
- Shrink consonant clusters to one letter and ditch everything you don't actually pronounce. Knight has three sounds, but twice as many letters.

tl;dc Make like Spanish and actually use the alphabet the away it's supposed to, phonetically.

I guess it made sense to be more specific when society and life was less dynamic

Yup. Native languages in South Africa and Australia can be awfully complicated, from grammar to number of distinct sounds. Something about your life and environment staying the same over milennia seems to make languages grow more and more complicated. Either that, or small population sizes. Or both.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taa_language#Phonology

Taa has at least 58 consonants, 31 vowels, and four tones (Traill 1985, 1994 on East ǃXoon), or at least 87 consonants, 20 vowels, and two tones (DoBeS 2008 on West ǃXoon), by many counts the most of any known language. These include 20 (Traill) or 43 (DoBeS) click consonants and several vowel phonations, though opinions vary as to which of the 130 (Traill) or 164 (DoBeS) consonant sounds are single segments and which are consonant clusters.

[bork]

[Madrun Badrun]

I always found it interesting that older languages tend to be more ridiculous than newer ones, by which I mean things like quantity of verb tenses or declension.

This comes with an increased vocabulary, morphology and syntax though. 

Also I really think you'd like this text book

http://www.amazon.ca/Historical-Linguistics-Introduction-Lyle-Campbell/dp/0262532670/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1439999461&sr=8-2&keywords=historical+linguistics

it was one of my favorites in undergrad.  You need to know IPA and a bit about phonetics though.

[Kara]

Thanks, I'll check it out. I took some linguistics courses in uni (language major) so I'm fairly comfortable with IPA.

[Huff]

[jakefromstatefarm]

I always found it interesting that older languages tend to be more ridiculous than newer ones, by which I mean things like quantity of verb tenses or declension.

By newer languages, do you mean recently created ones like Esperanto? I'm guessing "no."

I meant comparing, say, Classical Latin with Romance languages. The erosion of grammatical case in that familial evolution is quite stark.

it should probably be kept in mind that what we define as "classical latin" is a snapshot of what a concentrated, literate intelligentsia used in their literary culture, not necessarily indicative of how latin was spoken ina variety of different contexts

[team filler]

2015
Emoji the only language you should care about

I can't read emoji. I only see these little squares 👌🔥💯

[Kara]

I always found it interesting that older languages tend to be more ridiculous than newer ones, by which I mean things like quantity of verb tenses or declension.

By newer languages, do you mean recently created ones like Esperanto? I'm guessing "no."

I meant comparing, say, Classical Latin with Romance languages. The erosion of grammatical case in that familial evolution is quite stark.

it should probably be kept in mind that what we define as "classical latin" is a snapshot of what a concentrated, literate intelligentsia used in their literary culture, not necessarily indicative of how latin was spoken ina variety of different contexts

It should also be noted that you're implying that it wasn't much of a living (spoken) language when that wasn't the case.

[T-Short]

In older languages you can be a lot more specific in your meaning with particles that modify nouns and verb tenses. In Basque I think a noun can have something like over 400 thousand theoretical permutations.

Hehe. There's this classic about Finnish: