On Tuesday, 3 May 2016 at 08:53:49 UTC, Claude wrote:
LOL. Well, every language has its quirks - especially with the
commonly used words (they probably get munged the most over
time, because they get used the most), but I've found that
French is far more consistent than English - especially when
get a grammar book that actually explains things rather than
just telling you what to do. English suffers from having a lot
of different sources for its various words. It's consistent in
a lot of ways, but it's a huge mess in others - ...
Several years ago, I read "Frankenstein" of Mary Shelley (in
english), and I was surprised to see that the english used in
that novel had a lot of french sounding words (like "to
continue", "to traverse", "to detest", "the commencement" etc),
which are now seldom used even in litterature. There was very
few verb constructions like "get up", "come on", "carry out"
http://isteve.blogspot.de/2012/07/norman-v-saxon-after-946-years.html?m=1
The reverberations of 1066 have not yet extinguished
themselves... We are in a mass democratic age and the language
reflects that.
