On Wednesday 30 Apr 2014 10:21:11 godzil wrote: > I suspect that your habits for "regular" or "ordinary" came from French, > where the first translation of regular is "régulier", "habituel" which > mean that it is something is a habits. > > And "ordinary" will be translate to "ordinaire" that have the means of > "common", "standard". > > I know that some difference from UK and US English come from the nearby > European country (monstly France) (i.e: colour vs color, behaviour vs > behavior, etc.)
Yes, true, except that "habits" is not the right word: "usage" would be better, which in this context in English means "custom". Countries being adjacent is not the explanation. I haven't seen an authority on this, but I believe that a good half of English words come from French (as a result of the most recent invasion of these islands in 1066), most of the rest coming from Latin and Greek. (That's now largely forgotten in USA, where efforts are now directed at absorbing German, Italian and Spanish.) There's a smattering of words from India and other parts of the Empire as well. Hardly any from Italian or Spanish, which accounts for a lot of differences between American and English. The spelling differences you mention are I think a result of attempts to "simplify" the language by your founding fathers. Similarly, today, sentence structure is changing, with a wholesale ditching of previously useful tenses and, for instance, an insistence on putting adverbs before their verbs. Are those German influences? And why do so many insist on a single word never being both a noun and a verb (use, usage)? What do you do with "compact", which can be noun, verb or adjective? I could go on, but I'd better not :-) -- Regards Peter
