Proper use of the English language

[300bar]

Nah, Latin is only good for picking up chicks at the monthly chess club meeting.

If you really want to understand English better you should learn Danish, Dutch or German. These are the languages with the same common ancestor and they still retain a surprising amount of the grammatical construction that you see in Middle-English writing.

For me, learning Dutch was like time travel, going back 800 years.

R..

Does that come from Middle-earth. aka Tolkin aka the Lord of the Rings.

You guys DO sound like Hobbits some times/

 

[burna]

@burna: If you check out the Global Language Monitor (GLM) website you'll learn that the company calls itself a global media analytics organization for the WWW (actually that's how GLM's President describes the company on his LinkedIn.com resume profile). Using a proprietary algorithm called the Predictive Quantities Indicator (PQI), GLM tracks words and phrases as they are added to the English language.

I was just going off the info presented in the article which didn't mention phrases. I did look up the GLM website but lost interest in about the same time as it took me to find it. I did notice though that most of the information presented in the article came almost verbatim from the front page of the GLM website. Sad really as the ABC here is Government owned and classed as the premier news reporting agency.

In case you think I'm being a little too harsh, ...

No, you are probably spot on. You have obviously spent a great deal more time investigating it than I did. I just saw the article and thought it had some link to what was being discussed here.

 

[Diver0001]

Does that come from Middle-earth. aka Tolkin aka the Lord of the Rings.

No, it's the English that was dominant from ... I guess after the Norman invasion in 1066 to about the beginning of the 15th century. There are a few surviving texts that university students are forced to study in Canada (actually now that I say that it might have been an elective... but whatever). The point is that it resembles Dutch in some ways. I bet you could even decode some of it faster than most English speakers can.

Tolkien was, BTW as professor of English literature and very knowledgeable about these things. In fact, he was the guy who made the "definitive" translation of at least one of the middle english texts I was referring to... so middle-earth and middle-english might be close cousins after all...

You guys DO sound like Hobbits some times/

Wait until you hear me talking Dutch... I hate my accent but enough ... well ... women have told me that it's endearing that I guess I can live with it... I guess.

R..

 

[Hoomi]

Nah, Latin is only good for picking up chicks at the monthly chess club meeting.

Et tu, Cutie?