And I am adding more commas etc here to make that damn thing more readable too :-)
I suspect you are referring to the British Empire...; words it did import,
but not from Greece...
It was the "original" empire (the Roman that is) that did most of the
importing... words that were imported at that time, have been
incorporated and twisted almost beyond recognition. The words that were
imported during the Enlightment period on the other hand, are still quite recognisable
apart from some changes to bring them to par with what the Erasmian
school, thought was the correct pronounciation at ancient times ....
Besides this, English is not a difficult language to learn at all... It
is extremely simple actually, and compared to German or Dutch it can be
learned quite succesfully and quite fast. I learned English all by
myself :-) (blame it on Black Dog by Led Zeppelin which impressed me so as a
kid that I made it a point to learn English so I would understand what
the song was about :-)
I took issue however, with expressions used, that out of lack of contextual understanding, make no sense :-) The words you may know, but the context is what is foreign. I recently had a conversation with a fellow QLer (not a Brit) that expressed the same idea: that expressions in English sometimes make no sense to other people... he used an example:
xx years old...
What does that mean? If you're 2 years, then you are old as well? Most
languages that I know, do not put the "old" at the end... The reasoning
is that if you are an old person you either say "I am old" or "I am old,
70 years today..." or something to that effect... but attaching the
"old" to everything, especially an expression that has no comparative
effect (ie you're not comparing at the time with an accepted norm of
being old or young), makes absolutely no sense logically :-) -At least to
me :-) - But many expressions like these, foreigners come to
understand... it's expressions that are rarely used, that we don't
understand -especially if they're used in a context that makes no sense to them
at first- it's a cultural thing I guess :-)
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