Talk:English language/Archive 6

message: The past participle in the Germanic languages in earlier times was formed with the prefix ge-. Does somebody know, when this prefix was lost in English? And what could have been the reason for the change? --::Slomox:: >< 12:12, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It was never very consistently present in English. Already in Old English there's variation; the "ge-" prefix is there sometimes but not always. In Middle English it starts to drop out even more, and now it's only found in archaic words like "yclept". In North Germanic languages, it had already disappeared by the time of Old Norse, and it's absent from many Low German dialects too, and I think possibly Frisian as well, so losing it is hardly uniquely English. I don't know if any research has been done into the question why it was lost (linguists very rarely ask "why" but only "when" and "how"), but I can speculate some plausible reasons for you: (1) morphologically, it's not necessary, as past participles can often be distinguished from other verb forms even without the ge-, and can always be distinguished from other verb forms on the basis of their syntactic usage. (2) Influence from language contact with Norse speakers and possibly Low German (and Frisian?) speakers may have had an influence. (3) Phonetically it was an unstressed syllable without a real consonant (it was first pronounced /jə/, not /gə/, and later just ), so there wasn't much phonetic "body" there and the syllable could easily be elided in rapid speech. User:Angr 12:28, 3 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  past participle 

message: Further to my comment on 26 July, I have made a minor edit to para 3, where it said that English spread "to the rest of the British Isles... then the to the Republic of Ireland". This is clearly nonsensical for two reasons. Firstly the ROI is part of the British Isles (which is a purely geographical term) and secondly, the adoption of English on the island of Ireland preceeded the creation of the ROI as a nation state.I have therefore deleted the ROI from the list of countries that English has spread to. Nothing against the ROI, and if it is felt that it should be specifically mentioned on the list then the first part of the sentence will need to be changed instead. JeHab 12:35, 12 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think the vast majority of the population of the ROI would deny that the ROI is part of the British Isles. The definition of British Isles is a pretty contentious topic; see British Isles (terminology). User:Angr 19:03, 15 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Duplication 

message: I have removed the following section primarily because it's not really about the English language per se, it's about the usage of individual words in writing. The same comments could be made about the equivalent words in any other language, so there's nothing specifically about English in the section. There are also more policy-oriented reasons to delete the section: it does not cite any reliable sources, making it unverifiable; it seems to be mostly original research. Comments? User:Angr 20:08, 16 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Keywords section 

message: The current opening of the history part is not clear:
"English is an Anglo-Frisian language brought to south-eastern Great Britain (a region now in modern England) in the 5th century AD by Germanic settlers from various parts of northwest Germany (Saxons, Angles) as well as Denmark (Jutes)."
I initially read the first parenthesis as referring to just 'Great Britain', rather than 'south-eastern Great Britain', which was confusing. Also, the second half then implies to me that Saxons and Angles are two parts of Germany, rather than the people (likewise with Denmark/Jutes).
Can't think up a decent way to reword it at the moment though, so hopefully someone else can. --BP 11:28, 22 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  History section 

message: See Template Talk: InterWiki#Use on English language?. —Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley talk contrib 12:20, 3 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Use of [[Template:InterWiki]] 

message: The opening paragraph of the article says often earning it the title 'the language of trade, academia and diplomacy' .
A search on "the language of trade, academia and diplomacy" in Google turns up nothing but the Wikipedia article, and its various clones.
I realise this isn't a Googleocracy, but if this title were "often earned" by English, I think there would be some evidence of this on the internet.
I think we should remove that phrase.
Ordinary Person 07:21, 19 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:   "the language of trade, academia and diplomacy" 

message: I have removed a sentence about other languages spoken in certain US States. I did this because this sentence (albeit fascinating) was UTTERLY IRRELEVANT to the subject of this article (the English Language, lest we forget). A little more rigour would be welcome, folks. in my opinion, this article has decreased in qualitative terms over the last few months - there is a lot of information of tenuous relevance, and it reads in a very staccato way - do we have robots contributing now?JeHab 18:11, 20 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:   "Geographical Location" 

message: The numbers in the total speakers section are way off from any credible sources (ethnologue, CIA world factbook, etc.)  The article cited for the high end figure of over a billion did appear in a newspaper (The Times) but the figures are spurious.  Should this number be changed to reflect academic estimates, rather than wild guesses of newspaper columnists? MrAldrich 21:30, 25 September 2006
:I would prefer academic estimates in the side bar, with some mention in the article which addresses the controversy over estimates. However I personally highly doubt The Times estimate, it seems way over exaggerated. It's also a sort of POV push to try and proclaim English is the 'world language' or most spoken language in the world as is often asserted. It's hard though because some people could just say a few sentences and yet they would be regarded by some as 'able to speak English' but unable by others. The article on list of languages by native speakers claims there are 2 billion English speakers, which I object to but haven't debated it on the talk page or anything. Kyle sb 16:16, 1 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I also disagree with mentioning a highly over-estimated number from a newspaper article in this article. I have now replaced this sentence by a sentence that makes clear that estimates about second language speakers vary greatly, using the numbers already used in the table. Marcoscramer 18:51, 14 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Total speakers 

message: You might be interested that the following articles were recently proposed as articles for deletion:
*List of English words of Bengali origin
*List of English prefixes
Please advertise on other places where editors are interested in lists of words.  --Hroðulf (or Hrothulf) (Talk) 16:59, 2 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Proposed deletions

message: Is English really a non-exclusive de jure official language of Kosovo? Angr 07:20, 9 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Kosovo? 

message: This section makes no distinction between Norman and French!
For example: Catch comes from Norman, Chase from French. Warranty from Norman, Guaranty from French. Castle, Mug, Mutton, Beef (etc.)… all these came from Norman, not French. On the other hand, many other later Latinate borrowings come from French (such as "corps").  While, in some cases, it is impossible to tell which of the two a word came from, in many cases it is fairly easy to tell.  These two languages are quite distinct, and should not be mixed when determining etymology; "catch" and "chase", though the exact same word (being cognates) in Norman and French (cachi and chasser) are hardly identical!  The Jade Knight 20:48, 13 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Word origins 

message: Is English an official language of Israel? On the Israel page it doesn't list English under "official languages". 124.177.19.158 07:32, 30 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  English official of Israel 

message: Going back to Talk:English language/Archive 5#English as Official Language, where it is stated that English is the de facto official language of the United States, shouldn't this be represented in the infobox, such as United States (defacto)? -newkai t-c 19:15, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: OK, I just saw on Languages of the United States that it probably is going to become the official language soon, but still... -newkai t-c 19:18, 31 October 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Status in the United States 

message: On the map South Africa is coloured dark blue as a country where "English is the de facto and official language". Is this right?  There are more Zulu and Afrikaans native speakers in South Africa. English is only the fifth most spoken language of the 11 official languages. 
I understand that as white peoples have a dispraportionate share of wealth in South Africa, the language dominates in the media etc. and that many of the Afrikaans (as well as other language) speakers would also speak English as a lingua franca. But should the country be coloured dark blue, we are pushing a view that English is the language of South Africa. Perhaps it should be light blue?  I have just found that while the language articles on wikipedia are good, they have a tendency to exaggerate the dominance of a language. 124.177.19.158 09:01, 2 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  South Africa 

message: Hi. Is "etiquettical" a english word?
Economy -> Economical. Etiquette -> ? --Striver 13:41, 11 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: No, I don't believe it would be. ~ UBeR 19:46, 11 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It is now.Cameron Nedland 20:49, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: "Etiquettical"? Sounds like something W. S. Gilbert would have made up. Wahkeenah 00:31, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: etiquettical

message: 354 million people, that has to be wrong. I've heard larger figures before and the numbers don't add up.
There are 300 million people in the US, the vast majority speak english, 60 million in england and 30 million in Canada. Aleady we have more then 354 million and there are still 10's of millions of people I havn't counted who live in other countries (Australia, Ireland). TostitosAreGross 15:58, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Of the 300 million people in the USA, not all of them have English as their first language. Same goes for the 60 and 30 million in England and Canada, respectively. I'm not 100% sure on their numbers, but apparently the number comes from the 2006 Guinness World Records, though prooly sourced (simply links to the Wikipedia article on Guinness). ~ UBeR 17:00, 13 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Even if we're assuming rates of 80% in the Anglosphere (which is extremely conservative), it's still more than 354 million. I think it's clear the estimate is off by at least tens of millions.--71.35.109.198 03:30, 14 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Numbers wrong? 

message: This article claims that the Chinese language has 700 million mother tongue speakers. This is clearly wrong. Mainland China alone has a population of 1.3 billion, the vast majority of whom speak Chinese. There are also hundreds of millions of Chinese scattered across the globe, who speak Chinese as their first language.
:It says Modern Standard Chinese, also called Standard Mandarin. This is not the native language of the vast majority of people in mainland China, and actually relatively few people outside China. —Angr 05:17, 15 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Chinese Mother Tongue Speakers 

message: I have read in this article that English is the de facto and exclusive official language in Australia. I need someone to clear this out, because I understand that a number of indigenous languages are spoken (see Australian Aboriginal languages). Please specify this, as I am no expert in the matter, but just thought that this had to be pointed.Archael Tzaraath 12:52, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: As I understand it "de facto exclusive official language" means it's the only language actually used for official purposes, not that it's the only language spoken at all. —Angr 12:54, 21 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Australia 

message: On the linguistic map, Reunion is highlighted instead of Mauritius as an English-speaking country.
correct.--Darrendeng 07:23, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wrong country 

message: Would it be fair to say that English speakers hugely bastardize loanwords? Take debut for instance, in French it is  so an appropriate Anglicization would be something like  considering we do not have the  phoneme but a lot of people end up saying . City names are the worse. Los Angeles does not sound even remotely similar to what the original Spanish. Food for thought.Cameron Nedland 04:56, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: "Fair"? It certainly wouldn't be NPOV to use a loaded word like "bastardize". It also wouldn't be NPOV to suggest that English is the only language to adapt loanwords to native phonology. Japanese, after all, manages to turn strike into a four-syllable word, and when German borrows words from English, the  and  contrasts are completely lost while the  contrast is tenuous at best. I don't think this article would be improved by discussing the issue here, although an article Loanword phonology discussing the issue from a cross-linguistic perspective might be very interesting, if properly researched and sourced. —Angr 10:06, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, but we have most of the phonemes of Spanish and a lot of the languages we borrow from (French we are significantly lacking in vowels) so something like  Los Angeles,  for Volkswagon, etc. would seem a lot less bastardized to me. I am definitely a noob when it comes to linguistics though, so I suppose I ought to keep quiet.Cameron Nedland 02:38, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, the Spanish pronunciation of "los angeles" is not all that far from the way English speakers say it. The guttural Spanish "g" is not that far removed from the English soft "g" (or "j"). Wahkeenah 05:42, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, there's still a pretty big difference between [x] (or [h] in the variety of Spanish spoken near L.A.) and . But that isn't sound substitution anyway, it's a spelling pronunciation. My parents grew up in L.A. and said when they were young some people (a minority) pronounced it , which I suppose is as close to the Spanish as you can get while still obeying the rules of English phonology, where /h/ can't stand before an unstressed vowel in the middle of a word, and certainly not after another consonant. —Angr 06:06, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bastardization 

message: Appreciating the fact that India has largest pool of English speaking people, How come English language features in India project??--Darrendeng 13:20, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Because some WikiProjects are very aggressive about commandeering articles. (The same reason why Irish phonology is listed as belonging to Wikipedia:WikiProject Northern Ireland even though it discusses dialects exclusively from the Republic of Ireland.) —Angr 13:46, 4 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  India Project?? 

message: I don't think the US should be listed as an natively English speaking country, they speak 'American English' which I think is almost completely different to normal-english.
*I speak American English natively, yet I understood almost every word you wrote. Wahkeenah 23:54, 9 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Confusion 

message: England and the English are not so different in their "ethnogenetic" composition (Greco-Roman, Celto-Germanic and even Phoenician) and histories from the French, having been intertwined by more than geographical proximity.  I'm afraid that calling the English character as Dutch or German is ignorance of the common people, who are not descended from or related to the House of Orange-Nassau or the House of Hanover--or even the Saxon House of Windsor, for that matter.  Dear French person, please try to see beyond the present state of affairs, to the days in which I am right and political correctness of a Protestant England was not.  You and I probably share Norman, Capetian and Plantagenet, as well as Levantine and Byzantine ancestors together, which would probably be harder to find in the Netherlands and especially Germany.  I'm appalled at the sad state of education, which relies on nationalist stereotypes of a circumstantial nature.  Rhode Islander 04:54, 18 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: The real point of it is