Le 2014-04-30 12:47, Peter Humphrey a écrit :
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 (mostly 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".
Thanks
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.
Yes that true, lots of English words came from old French, and funnily
some word that were "lost" goes back into French :)
But I don't agree, on the origin of "Old English" it is more a
germano-celtic language than a latino-greek one. French clearly come
from Latin and Old Greek, like Spanish or Italian. On the contrary, the
German language have nearly no roots in Latin and Greek.
The spelling differences you mention are I think a result of attempts
to
"simplify" the language by your founding fathers.
Wikipedia have a nice article on this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences
(I tried to read it, but now my head is hurting!)
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 :-)
