What English expression do you hate the most?

[Drago]

Indeed. Yet none, or very few, of us today would look at text from back then and understand it, so is it English?

Yes. Nonny nonny.

 

[ebikeerwidnes]

My German teacher used to say, "English is really a dialect of German, and French laid over Latin and Greek". It's probably the most European of languages, a sort of pre-modern Esperanto.

As a side note, that was the teacher that got me so enthused by German from day one that I'm here today, bless her. I wish I could find her and say thank you.

SO the people pushing Brexit should have also pushed moving away from English as a national language??
The Welsh Language Society would be please
(if, indeed, they are ever actually pleased by anything - my experience of talking to proper Welsh people (in North Wales) suggest they never are)

 

[Andy in Germany]

SO the people pushing Brexit should have also pushed moving away from English as a national language??
The Welsh Language Society would be please
(if, indeed, they are ever actually pleased by anything - my experience of talking to proper Welsh people (in North Wales) suggest they never are)

I certainly found it funny when they said, "We're not European; we're British, and we speak English" or some such.

 

[DaveReading]

So does that mean that GERMAN is the most spoken language in the world??

Germany is, of course, widely spoken (or at least understood) across Europe, particularly by the older generations in countries that were, er, visited by Germany in the last century.

 

[Andy in Germany]

Germany is, of course, widely spoken (or at least understood) across Europe, particularly by the older generations in countries that were, er, visited by Germany in the last century.

Not really. The period you are referring to was less than a decade, which is shorter than the French wars of conquest the previous century. It is because German settlers moved to what is now Poland, Ukraine, Hungary, Romania and many other places, long before the modern or current German state existed. There are still some German speakers in these countries.

Also, languages changing abruptly at borders is a fairly new thing; German, or at least German dialects were and are sometimes still spoken in other countries, (apart from Austria and Switzerland). This is also because there were many semi-independent German states in other parts of Europe which predate the modern German state, and indeed were never part of "Germany", just as the town I live in, near the French border, was part of the Austrian Empire.

The most local dialect outside of Germany is Elsässich in the West of the Rhine, which is very close to the dialect spoken in Baden on the Eastern bank. People there have names like "Schmidt" or "Zimmerer" but they are most certainly French.

English, on the other hand, is widely spoken because...

 

[Drago]

The world was a better place during the heyday of the British Empire - people did as they were told or they shot 'em!

 

[ebikeerwidnes]

SO the people pushing Brexit should have also pushed moving away from English as a national language??
The Welsh Language Society would be please
(if, indeed, they are ever actually pleased by anything - my experience of talking to proper Welsh people (in North Wales) suggest they never are)

Just re-read that

WHen I said the last bit I meant that "proper Welsh people" think the WLS is never pleased by anything
no "proper Welsh people" - wo generally I found to be decent people - or at least a greater percentage of decent people than some other groups I could mention!!!!!

Who - apparently sometime do strange things "up in the hills"
or so I have heard hinted at
(and seen strange things in the hills well away from the places tourists would go!)

 

[glasgowcyclist]

German, or at least German dialects were and are sometimes still spoken in other countries, (apart from Austria and Switzerland).

In Alto Adige, the region of the north of Italy, German is the language of education in schools and Italian is learned as a second language. Both are offical languages of the region.
Most residents feel themselves to be Austrian rather than Italian, since it used to be part of the Austro-Hungarian empire.

 

[Andy in Germany]

WHen I said the last bit I meant that "proper Welsh people" think the WLS is never pleased by anything
no "proper Welsh people" - wo generally I found to be decent people - or at least a greater percentage of decent people than some other groups I could mention!!!!!

Extremists rarely are, regardless of their "cause": they need an enemy.

 

[stephec]

I got stopped for speeding once in Mississippi by an honest-to-god Justice T. Buford clone.

I went to public school for a short while so ratcheted up the plummy accent to MAX (the Americans seem to like that, especially the chicks) and the slack jawed Sheriff was most impressed.

Suddenly we were best mates, and he slapped the roof of the car and told me to be on my way but be careful because, "...these days the place is crawling with Jews, n***********, hippies, all sorts." This was nearly 30 years ago, and even by the standards of the 90s it seemed a bit neanderthal to me.

I could suddenly feel the anger radiating from my Jewish aunt in the passenger seat (I'm of Jewish heritage too) so I quickly thanked the slack jawed tobacco chewer and zipped off before my aunt exploded and got us both nicked.

Sounds like the experience my cousin had in the early nineties.

He was a jockey and worked for a few years in the south, one day there's a few of them driving into a strange town when a cop stops them and asks where they are going. Expecting a Rambo style episode one of them says that they're off to the pictures, to which Brian Dehnney replies, 'no, that's the ni.... picture house, white man's is over that way.'

He lives in South Carolina now and says it's still not uncommon to see people walking round with placards declaring, 'god hates fags.' 😂

 

[Drago]

My Aunt couldn't hack that sort of thing in Mississippi and moved up to Pennsylvania to escape it, although when I worked there for a spell in the early oooooo's it was apparent you didn't have to scratch far below the surface to find attitudes here and there that would be distinctly 1950s in tone.

 

[ebikeerwidnes]

Sounds like the experience my cousin had in the early nineties.

He was a jockey and worked for a few years in the south, one day there's a few of them driving into a strange town when a cop stops them and asks where they are going. Expecting a Rambo style episode one of them says that they're off to the pictures, to which Brian Dehnney replies, 'no, that's the ni.... picture house, white man's is over that way.'

He lives in South Carolina now and says it's still not uncommon to see people walking round with placards declaring, 'god hates fags.' 😂

I'm not to keen on them
They cause cancer and if my asthma is a bit on edge walking near someone smoking one basically stops me breathing

My wife gave up ages ago and now sees my point!

One of these days I will look for someone like you say carrying that sign and smoking a cigarette!!

 

[Andy in Germany]

I'm not to keen on them
They cause cancer and if my asthma is a bit on edge walking near someone smoking one basically stops me breathing

My wife gave up ages ago and now sees my point!

One of these days I will look for someone like you say carrying that sign and smoking a cigarette!!

You beat me to it.

 

[bobzmyunkle]

'god hates fags.'

Which reminds me of the old joke about asking for 20 fags in San Francisco and getting them. It wasn't very funny even 40 years ago.

 

[Conrad_K]

My German teacher used to say, "English is really a dialect of German, and French laid over Latin and Greek". It's probably the most European of languages, a sort of pre-modern Esperanto.

For those who remember usenet and netnews, before the Web existed:

"English doesn't borrow from other languages. It follows other languages down dark alleys, clubs them over the head and rummages through their pockets for spare grammar."

-- James Nicoll, rec.arts.sf-lovers, May 15, 1990