Ironchef:
The Celts had all but scarpered off to Wales and Cornwall to avoid the Romans way before then. I lived in a Roman-founded town which later became Anglo Saxon. There's little to no evidence of Celtic settlement there. Penguin is a good Celtic word in English, it comes from Cornish "penn gwyn" (white head) but that came later, once Cornish seafarers had reached the south seas in the 1700s. But I'm off the point now.

I think there is more to it than that. Conquerors don't usually care about borrowing words from the conquered. To show how dumb the Romans were, whenever they arrived at a new landmark in Britain they would ask the Celts what it was called in order to keep a record. (What do you call that hill? What is this town named? etc)

In most Celtic languages, the word "river" is something akin to "afon". (Still used in modern Welsh, I think???) Anyway, this explains why there are so many "Avon" rivers in Britian. The Romans were trying to get the local name while the natives were trying to teach their language. The winner is obvious.

As another example, consider how many Native American words have entered colloquial American English. For the most part, it involves place names and little else. I find this unfortunate since integrating those languages could have provided our dialect with a great deal of pizzazz!

One of the most interesting things about Latin is that the Latin we learn in school is not at all the Latin spoken by regular people at the time. Rather, it is the book language of learning, the language of official speeches by politicians, not the language of regular people.

Colloquial Latin of the time ("Vulgar Latin") had significant differences. There are some interesting websites on this. In many cases, vocabulary from Romance languages is based on the Vulgar Latin, not on the highfalutin language of the philosophers and politicians. This partially explains why Romance languages are not closer to school Latin than they are. The other part of the explanation involves, of course, natural evolution of the language, influences from other local languages of those who were conquered, and subsequent foreign conquest of previously Latin territories, etc.

Farikos:
You know what'd be really interesting and extremely unlikely? If Latin had survived as a single spoken language instead of evolving into the Romance languages? Well, it'd be an extremely different variety of Latin, but it'd still be Latin.

Well in a way, that's exactly what Italian is.......

erinja:One of the most interesting things about Latin is that the Latin we learn in school is not at all the Latin spoken by regular people at the time.

It depends on the time of "the time"

Vulgar languages (there wasn't just one, of course) have always been there, but they finally went unchecked as the empire collapsed. Modern Italian gradually developed out of one of those.

Your argument can be even applied to calligraphy. There were different ways to render the alphabet; in some cases, the resulting glyphs were quite close to what we would consider now to be a shorthand version.

I agree with earlier posts - grammatical complexity (especially complex conjugation and declination inflections, and irregular words) does not make a language more rich or expressive, it just makes it harder to learn...

A useful analogy might be to programming languages, where every programming language is ultimately equivalently powerful (Turing-complete), but simple elegant languages are often easier to understand and can permit programs to be expressed more clearly and concisely and reliably.

andogigi:

AlanF:
I agree with a point made upthread -- irregularity adds complexity without contributing much usefulness to a language.

If we confined our morphology debate strictly to the subject of verbs, I might have a tendency to agree with you. However, consider the Slavic languages where you frequently find 6-7 noun cases. Couldn't these declensions, although admittedly increasing complexity, be considered a way to avoid ambiguity in the language?

I'm not sure why you think noun inflection helps avoid ambiguity while verb inflection doesn't. The same arguments seem applicable to both. If explicitly representing the noun case is good, wouldn't it also be good to explicitly represent whether the verb is 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person, and even the gender of the verb (as Polish does - but only in the past tense! If having different verb endings based on the subject's gender is useful in the past, why isn't it useful in the present and future?)?

In any case, inflection can eliminate ambiguity theoretically, but in practice there is usually still plenty of ambiguity in real-world languages (e.g. different noun cases having the same ending, or different nouns having identical inflected forms in different cases, e.g. the Polish singular vocative of "man/Mr" is "panie", which happens to also be the Polish plural nominative of "woman/Mrs"!). English, Slavic languages, and Esperanto (like almost all languages) all have ambiguity in the grammatical sense. (As someone struggling to learn Polish, I can assure you on this.

If you want to avoid syntactical ambiguity, you want a language like Lojban.

But reasonable speakers are usually capable of avoiding ambiguity when it should be avoided, whether in English, Slavic languages, or Esperanto.

Ambiguity is often cited as a benefit in language, for purposes of literature, poetry, puns and jokes, ability to politely demur, intentionally provoke, simply avoid committing oneself when one isn't sure, etc.

There is a British novel "Written on the Body" by Jeanette Winterson which is intentionally ambiguous about the main character's gender. That's not possible in Polish. The Polish translator had to ask the author how to handle this, what gender to use in the Polish translation. So much for automatic elimination of ambiguity being useful for expression.

If English was completely grammatically unambiguous, I suppose some people would accuse it of being weak and simple due to the lack of ability to make puns etc.

erinja:Or perhaps like a cross between Frisian and Norwegian, since Old English was also heavily influenced by Old Norse.

That's kind of what I was thinking, only more Danish than Norwegian (because English and Danish did share some sound changes that Norwegian didn't quite pick up on, in particular the short 'a'). And also if English was still some Scandinavian/Frisian hybrid, it would still probably have preserved some features that Frisian and the Scandinavian languages (minus icelandic) didn't, e.g. 'th' instead of 'd'.

And in regards to what someone was saying on the topic of the Great Vowel shift, wikipedia have an article on it too with a nice chart and also talking about the same changes in other Germanic languages.

And in regards to mnlg's comment, maybe the whole 'vulgarisation' is slowly occuring to English?

vejktoro:English has way more words (by a couple hundred thousand) then any other tongue on earth, which means speakers can be very precise, subtle, or just plain vague.

The downside is that words which are near-synonyms come to be used synonymously... over time the little differences tend to be ignored, so we end up with a huge vocabulary that is mostly unnecessary duplication, no added benefit!

Ailanto:

vejktoro:English has way more words (by a couple hundred thousand) then any other tongue on earth, which means speakers can be very precise, subtle, or just plain vague.

The downside is that words which are near-synonyms come to be used synonymously... over time the little differences tend to be ignored, so we end up with a huge vocabulary that is mostly unnecessary duplication, no added benefit!

Not necessarily - in writing (and speaking too) it helps cut down repetitiveness and also helps English speakers with cognates in other languages. Overall having synonyms is a good thing in my opinion - even synonyms for pronouns in other languages is useful, like in Japanese where they can basically use a wide range of pronouns (or none at all) to refer to themselves, and that is quite a rich feature IMHO.

ceigered:

Ailanto:

vejktoro:English has way more words (by a couple hundred thousand) then any other tongue on earth, which means speakers can be very precise, subtle, or just plain vague.

The downside is that words which are near-synonyms come to be used synonymously... over time the little differences tend to be ignored, so we end up with a huge vocabulary that is mostly unnecessary duplication, no added benefit!

Not necessarily - in writing (and speaking too) it helps cut down repetitiveness and also helps English speakers with cognates in other languages. Overall having synonyms is a good thing in my opinion - even synonyms for pronouns in other languages is useful, like in Japanese where they can basically use a wide range of pronouns (or none at all) to refer to themselves, and that is quite a rich feature IMHO.

why is repetitiveness such a bad thing anyways? I think this is mostly just a mental thing. It probably started out by people trying to show how educated they are by showing off how many words they know (still happening today). Unfortunately do to that attitude, people now sound stupid if they repeat words to often, even though the words they are saying basically mean the same thing. Like someone used the example (somewhere in the lernu form) big, large, and grand, which i can't see the differences between them in quantity, and therefore find its a shame we're academically forced to not repeat them.

Don't get me wrong, as a native speaker, i love the ways i can manipulate my language in order to try to sound intelligent and confuse people, but as an international language,.. easy, simple, and clear communication is needed (which English has not).

kind of off topic, but here's a link of one of my favorite poems (i normally hate poetry, and i usually find Shakespeare quite boring, but in this case not.)

http://www.albionmich.com/valentine.html

i really love how he uses abnormal grammer and word order (at least for modern times). And the way he puts "not" after the verbs instead of before. Shows how creative you can be with language, or atleast in poetry.

Senlando:why is repetitiveness such a bad thing anyways?

I see your point amiko, but for the sake of starting a debate :

I wouldn't call it bad, just it's seen as boring if the speaker mentions the same key word multiple times in a short time, especially in an essay IMHO. Also, it can confuse others if they end up associating the same word with multiple sentences etc, just as using different words could confuse someone if they don't know the vocabulary being used. It could also create a feeling within the reader/listener that the author does not have good command of the language he/she is writing in (even if that is not the case). And it's fun to mix it up (like you were saying )

And just because English has many synonyms, doesn't mean it can't be used for international communication, as most educated or native speakers of the language can freely change the vocabulary they are using to suit others. For example, I'm not speaking quite as I normally would, but that's because others might not understand my Australian vernacular (or find it appropriate).

And this isn't just English's issue - Most other Germanic languages now have many french/latin loan words, or just native synonyms which are used like we do in English. In fact, just about any culture that's had some experience of invasion or a language imposed on them probably has a debate like this too.

And I wouldn't say people sound stupid, however if a native speaker continuously repeated the same words without adding adjectives or changing the sentence structure every now and then, I would feel like I was rereading the same piece of information over and over

MI REDAKTIS:
I thought putting 'not' after verbs is the proper way to do it in English? only we use the modal verb 'do' all the time, which in my opinion shouldn't be used to replace the original method, dammit I love saying "I eat not these vegetables thou speakest of"