DIY

[Richard Hed]

When we lived in the Philippines back in the 60's, we used to call it "halo-halo" (half & half) - but really it was probably more like 1/3 each of original Tagalog, Spanish, and English

Har, har, that is very funny. Halo-halo in Cebuano is a desert (half and half) made from ice cream, jelatine, something like cream and some other stuff. Yes, some of the language in the Phils is easy to recognize as Spanish in origin (e.g., kumosta -- como esta?) and some is not, but in the world today, it is absolutely necessary to have a much larger language than what anybody had even 100 years ago. We have to invent new words just to keep up with what is invented every day.

 

[terryd]

Seems odd that you tell us that our language does not have latin origins in paragraph No 1. Then spend paragraphs 2 & 3 telling us how it effectively does, through roundabout sources.
All I know is that I still hate, to this day, our latin teacher with his damned "Amo, Amas, Amat", (or whatever it was) & I certainly did not love him.

Hi,

I thought that I made my point clearly that English is not a Romance language. As I said, the base of the language is Low Germanic from the Frisian German Angles, Saxons, Jutes and was later reinforced by the Viking invasion who spoke Scandinavian languages which are derived from German. The Normans at the time of the invasion spoke a variety of French tempered by their Scandinavian heritage, hence not true French (a Romance language) and as I said they forced the language for transactional purposes (trade, law etc) for the elite. The Old English of the time was still spoken by the vast majority of the population. Of course, many Frech words entered our language but so did many Hindu words when we had an empire (e.g. Bungalow, pyjamas, shampoo, kedgeree and yoga etc.) but we don't claim that English is Hindi derived. English has absorbed words from many cultures which is one of its strengths but that doesn't alter its origin.

By the way, your example of your hated Latin 'Amo' - 'love' entered Romance languages (amour, amor, amore etc) while our word for it is 'love' derived from Low German rather goes to prove my point. ('Love' Etymologiy _ " Old English lufu "feeling of love; romantic sexual attraction; affection; friendliness; the love of God; Love as an abstraction or personification," from Proto-Germanic "), and while we eat beef (derived from Latin bovine) it's source animal name 'cow' comes from proto German and so on and on and on.......

Many Regards

TerryD

 

[terryd]

ONe of m;y ex-girl friends was whining to me about how "You white people" enslaved her race, in which I tried to explain how my grandfather, a white man, had been enslaved int the late 1890s. she simply would not listen, but my point is that every single person in the world has slavery in their ancestry. Likewise, every single person on earth has royalty in their ancestry. So when I hear someone say about their "royal" blood, I just want to slash it all out (that is their "blue" blood.) No one in the world is "pure" anything except for me: my wife assures me I am pure A**HOLE.

It is very interesting, however, to learn about all those invasions and how they add or subtract from a language. I have always been fascinated (genius is always fascinated by what others consider petty things--Einstein got his Nobel for something others might consider too small to notice), by what happened to the Engrish language after the invasion of 1066--before that, Pork had been the Engrish version of "pig", Beef had been some version of cow, cattle or what ever, but after that, the Engrish royalty spoke "bloo-blud" and so on and so on.

In the Philippines, the people had about 15,000 words in their vocabulary before the Spanish onslaught (it was far worse than an invasion and involved almost total enslavement), but the language added another 5-15 thou words. After the American "liberation" (LOL) the number of words added is uncountable. The original languages (44 languages and 160 dialects) were mostly nouns of physical objects. Go thru one of their dictionaries and you'll be surprised at virtually no "concepts", ideas, etc. If you watch a movie in Philippino language, they dart in and out of Engrish just because, they do not have the words for what they wish to express in their native language. The Engrish is now part of their accepted language.

I was working on a Cebuano (Visayan) language tutorial and was using a goo quality dictionary. But my niece told me she didn't know what a lot of those words were becasue they are from a long time ago, no longer used! So much for learning a foreign language.

Hi Richard,

You're right on about slavery, (not to belittle the problem of African slaves taken by Europeans) the Roman population was approximately 60% slaves taken from all of their conquests and many Briton at the time became slaves, later the Vikings took many English slaves and of course the Normans introduced the feudal system which made virtual slaves of most of the population of England. My DNA analysis tells me I'm Northern European with some South European (probably Roman) DNA but also my %Britsh means that I am almost certainly the descendent of slaves.

TerryD