h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I think we have to cofine areselfs to standard english, if we get into regional dialects it could all get very silly ( if you go back in the postings you will see what I mean).

I'm sure I read somewhere that 70% of words used in modern english have latin roots ? I also belive (could someone confirm this) that english has retained a scandanavian grammer structure.

By 70% do you mean 70% of what's in the dictionary, in which case it would be the same for any European language except Finnish and Hungarian and even they are using scientific vocabulary that sounds very much like ours?
Or do you mean 70% of the words we use, in which case I have to disagree strongly? The commonsest words are nearly all Anglo-Saxon, or Danish, thus from Germanic roots. I think I could get through a day witthout using any Latin roots - and I'm an English teacher

(There's no such word as commonsest - sorry)

There is now !

I belive the comment read in use as opposed to used.

The grammar structure of old english was Germanic, rather than Scandinavian, but the two are very similar. The grammar structure of modern English is much simpler, but it certainly corresponds closer to German and Scandinavian than to the other main language families of Europe, namely Greek, Romance (Latin-based), Slavic, Celtic.

Up to about the 17th century, there were very few latin-based words in English. These were introduced by the educated upper classes. Some of them caught on. The general rule is, long words tend to be latin based, short words come from old English. So town is from Old English, conurbation is from Latin. There are also plenty of English words which came from French, which itself came from Latin much earlier. Beef in English can from boeuf in French, but it the latin word bos.

Leof, ic þe þancas do.

Is that old English?

Yes, it means s/he's thanking you.
How do you do the thorns?

On a PC, you can hold down Alt and type 0222 on the numeric keypad to get capital thorn Þ. You can hold down Alt and type 0254 to get lowercase thorn þ. The Num Lock must be switched on for this to work.

Thanx. And what about the one that's a d with a line through the upright?

I think the D with a line through it is called an Edh. The capital has ANSI code 0208 while the lower case version is 0240.

You can see all these characters using the Character Map program. On my computer:

Start / Run / charmap

or:

Start / Programs / Accessories / Character Map

I don't think the Edh was used in Old English. I think they use the thorn for both "th" and "dh", hence the sound of "th" in "thin" and "this".

I think it was sometimes used as lower case, but that may have been Middle English - it's a helluva time since I did this stuff

Yes, Old English & I used Character map.
Modern English version is 'Friend, you write well'.

Been trawlin' again...

>Part of my research is on how Chinese students learn English and we don't start teaching until 23rd . It includes music/language links and maths/language ditto. Also do Chinese people who've made a start with Japanese do better at English or is it too different (and too similar to Chinese)?<

Wand'rin Star,

Don't suppose you could give me a little info on your findings?

Jack

Hi Jack! (which is what you've done to the thread)
1. My Ss are all Cantonese mother tongue. Not enough speakers of other Chinese languages to comment on their experiences - yes I know the Chinese say their languages are dialects but us linguists (boast smiley inserted) know different.
2. Definitely learn better with soft classical music (with no words)playing in background.Piano concertos particularly good. HK Ss have been exposed to a lot of this, though. Other regions of China may have different feelings about western music. It would be worth trying in Peking, I think. The Ss liked classical Chinese music, but many said it was distracting. Yo Yo Ma's stuff for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon seems(surprisingly to me) to help with learning English vocab.
3. Statistically, learning another non Indo European language does not make English any easier, but my sample is too small here.
4. Also, I was not able to find any abnsolute beginners.
5. People who are good at Maths are significantly better at languages than those who aren't.
6. There doesn't seem to be any correlation between those who play music well and those who are good at English (whatever sort of music they play)but good singers are better at spoken English.
Incidentally, you might expect speakers of tone languages to be really good at speaking English, but they aren't. I think this is because they make tone shifts on words and we make more on phrases or sentences than they do. (I do know that Chinese questions sound slightly different from statements)As you will unfortunately soon discover the Beijing English accent is flat and boring - very r coloured
This research wasn't published - it evolved into my massive independent learning project that took a couple of years - as indeed this thread seems to have been subsumed into Brit Eng. Interesting that a thread started a couple of weeks ago contains the same old misconceptions about the roots of English.

Oh come on, that wasn't a hijack, just a little

Thanks very much Wand'rin . I shall hunt out some Chinese classical music when I get out there...