To note:

FR: concentrer /EN: focus

FR: écureuil /EN: squirrel

FR: pingouin /EN: penguin

FR: câlin /EN: hug

What if the phrase “The end is nigh” is just someone from NI saying “The end is now”?

i wHEeZEd

  this pun is entirely worth breaking my tumblr silence for

FROMIDABLE

@copperbadge

IT’S EVEN BETTER IN FRENCH THAN IN ENGLISH

nICE

why is it humans not humen

bc “human” comes from a latin root (homo > humanus > humaine > human) and “man” (and thus “men”) comes from a germanic root (mann > man) 

so you get humans, not humen, since “humans” doesn’t play by germanic rules

look at that i asked a question and i got an answer THANKS

English isn’t a language, it’s three languages stacked on top of each other wearing a trenchcoat.

im putting together a couple of scottish folk mixes bc that’s what i do and im honestly curious if anyone in my country has ever been unequivocally happy about anything ever

scottish trad music genres:

We have of course the traditional Irish music genres to go with them:

* Everyone I Love Is An Allegorical Representation of Ireland

* The English Stole My Farm And Put Sheep On It

* You Were My Boyfriend But Now You Won’t Even Come To The Window To Look Upon Me And Our Dead Infant Child (In The Rain)

* Whack Fol Too La Roo Umptytiddly Good They’ve Stopped Listening Now Let’s Talk About Revolution

* Something In Irish, I Think It’s About Fairies, Or Maybe A Cow

oooo can I add to this? don’t forget Appalachian folk balladry, the American cousin of Scottish and Irish traditional music and just as uplifting as its Anglo-Saxon highland forbears!!!

genres include:

Don’t forget that old standby “The Mine Collapsed and Everyone Died”!

I think someone needs to put in a word for the English folk tradition though:

Well that’s not even the Weird Folk Traditions either, which includes stuff like

A few important entries often overlooked on this post:

Scottish

Irish

Appalachian

English

Am I the only one that wonders what Ben Whishaw’s natural accent sounded like before he went to drama school and had Received Pronunciation skills pounded into his head?

Some anon answered this question saying that British drama school doesn’t knock RP into their students (anymore) and what Ben has is his natural accent. Dear cantankerousquince we need your help - Does Ben’s accent sound like someone coming from a working class background in Bedfordshire? Do British drama school try to help one with one’s accent? Ben Crystal did say that he tried his first audition with RP but then the director asked him to go Welsh and then he got the job after that. So wonder what really the case is, whether students still get accent training?

Mr W’s got really clear diction though, so I guess at least they try to teach you better enunciation? 

Depends on the school these days. The more traditional school, whilst seeing the benefit of regional accents, do tend to use RP a a baseline for working on older texts but, as far as I know, its not beaten into you. When you audition for Drama school you are asked to do so in your ‘natural voice’ so they don’t go “Oh monstrous! A regional accent! Burn the peasant!” 

Drama schools will work on accents, yes, to give you more scope. Mostly with voice work you are aiming for clarity and projection. No matter your accent you’ve got to be understood. 

I will have a proper listen later for any variations, but to me, he sounds RP. I do not believe you can tell where someone’s from from their accent. I always get pinned as ‘fairly comfortable, middle class upbringing, possibly from London’, when in fact I was raised on a council estate in Cornwall. I hate the idea of assigning background just because of how you speak. It means nothing. 

Her royal leekness cantankerousquince answers we lowly peasants’ (burn! burn! burn!) question :D 

Regional accents give performances a richer flavor methinks, and the Four Yorkshiremen probably would never come about without that (still don’t understand a word of the sketch though;)

beyblade 2002 subs batch #1: episodes 1-10

a.k.a v-force in the dub version.. as you know.

the usual list of things i want to point out about the subs:

that’s probably all, feel free to send me questions or whatever you might have to say… and i hope the download works alright.

Thank you kindly, for all your hard work! :D

But, but, but!

But, no, because there are reasons for all of those seemingly weird English bits.

Like “eggplant” is called “eggplant” because the white-skinned variety (to which the name originally applied) looks very egg-like.

The “hamburger” is named after the city of Hamburg.

The name “pineapple” originally (in Middle English) applied to pine cones (ie. the fruit of pines - the word “apple” at the time often being used more generically than it is now), and because the tropical pineapple bears a strong resemblance to pine cones, the name transferred.

The “English” muffin was not invented in England, no, but it was invented by an Englishman, Samuel Bath Thomas, in New York in 1894. The name differentiates the “English-style” savoury muffin from “American” muffins which are commonly sweet.

“French fries” are not named for their country of origin (Belgium or Spain, depending who you ask), but for their preparation. They are French-cut fried potatoes - ie. French fries.

“Sweetmeats” originally referred to candied fruits or nuts, and given that we still use the term “nutmeat” to describe the edible part of a nut and “flesh” to describe the edible part of a fruit, that makes sense.

“Sweetbread” has nothing whatsoever to do with bread, but comes from the Middle English “brede”, meaning “roasted meat”. “Sweet” refers not to being sugary, but to being rich in flavour.

Similarly, “quicksand” means not “fast sand”, but “living sand” (from the Old English “cwicu” - “alive”).

The term boxing “ring” is a holdover from the time when the “ring” would have been just that - a circle marked on the ground. The first square boxing ring did not appear until 1838. In the rules of the sport itself, there is also a ring - real or imagined - drawn within the now square arena in which the boxers meet at the beginning of each round.

The etymology of “guinea pig” is disputed, but one suggestion has been that the sounds the animals make are similar to the grunting of a pig. Also, as with the “apple” that caused confusion in “pineapple”, “Guinea” used to be the catch-all name for any unspecified far away place. Another suggestion is that the animal was named after the sailors - the “Guinea-men” - who first brought it to England from its native South America.

As for the discrepancies between verb and noun forms, between plurals, and conjugations, these are always the result of differing word derivation.

Writers write because the meaning of the word “writer” is “one who writes”, but fingers never fing because “finger” is not a noun derived from a verb. Hammers don’t ham because the noun “hammer”, derived from the Old Norse “hamarr”, meaning “stone” and/or “tool with a stone head”, is how we derive the verb “to hammer” - ie. to use such a tool. But grocers, in a certain sense, DO “groce”, given that the word “grocer” means “one who buys and sells in gross” (from the Latin “grossarius”, meaning “wholesaler”).

“Tooth” and “teeth” is the legacy of the Old English “toð” and “teð”, whereas “booth” comes from the Old Danish “boþ”. “Goose” and “geese”, from the Old English “gōs” and “gēs”, follow the same pattern, but “moose” is an Algonquian word (Abenaki: “moz”, Ojibwe: “mooz”, Delaware: “mo:s”). “Index” is a Latin loanword, and forms its plural quite predictably by the Latin model (ex: matrix -> matrices, vertex -> vertices, helix -> helices).

One can “make amends” - which is to say, to amend what needs amending - and, case by case, can “amend” or “make an amendment”. No conflict there.

“Odds and ends” is not a word, but a phrase. It is, necessarily, by its very meaning, plural, given that it refers to a collection of miscellany. A single object can’t be described in the same terms as a group.

“Teach” and “taught” go back to Old English “tæcan” and “tæhte”, but “preach” comes from Latin “predician” (“præ” + “dicare” - “to proclaim”).

“Vegetarian” comes of “vegetable” and “agrarian” - put into common use in 1847 by the Vegetarian Society in Britain.

“Humanitarian”, on the other hand, is a portmanteau of “humanity” and “Unitarian”, coined in 1794 to described a Christian philosophical position - “One who affirms the humanity of Christ but denies his pre-existence and divinity”. It didn’t take on its current meaning of “ethical benevolence” until 1838. The meaning of “philanthropist” or “one who advocates or practices human action to solve social problems” didn’t come into use until 1842.

We recite a play because the word comes from the Latin “recitare” - “to read aloud, to repeat from memory”. “Recital” is “the act of reciting”. Even this usage makes sense if you consider that the Latin “cite” comes from the Greek “cieo” - “to move, to stir, to rouse , to excite, to call upon, to summon”. Music “rouses” an emotional response. One plays at a recital for an audience one has “called upon” to listen.

The verb “to ship” is obviously a holdover from when the primary means of moving goods was by ship, but “cargo” comes from the Spanish “cargar”, meaning “to load, to burden, to impose taxes”, via the Latin “carricare” - “to load on a cart”.

“Run” (moving fast) and “run” (flowing) are homonyms with different roots in Old English: “ærnan” - “to ride, to reach, to run to, to gain by running”, and “rinnan” - “to flow, to run together”. Noses flow in the second sense, while feet run in the first. Simillarly, “to smell” has both the meaning “to emit” or “to perceive” odor. Feet, naturally, may do the former, but not the latter.

“Fat chance” is an intentionally sarcastic expression of the sentiment “slim chance” in the same way that “Yeah, right” expresses doubt - by saying the opposite.

“Wise guy” vs. “wise man” is a result of two different uses of the word “wise”. Originally, from Old English “wis”, it meant “to know, to see”. It is closely related to Old English “wit” - “knowledge, understanding, intelligence, mind”. From German, we get “Witz”, meaning “joke, witticism”. So, a wise man knows, sees, and understands. A wise guy cracks jokes.

The seemingly contradictory “burn up” and “burn down” aren’t really contradictory at all, but relative. A thing which burns up is consumed by fire. A house burns down because, as it burns, it collapses.

“Fill in” and “fill out” are phrasal verbs with a difference of meaning so slight as to be largely interchangeable, but there is a difference of meaning. To use the example in the post, you fill OUT a form by filling it IN, not the other way around. That is because “fill in” means “to supply what is missing” - in the example, that would be information, but by the same token, one can “fill in” an outline to make a solid shape, and one can “fill in” for a missing person by taking his/her place. “Fill out”, on the other hand, means “to complete by supplying what is missing”, so that form we mentioned will not be filled OUT into we fill IN all the missing information.

An alarm may “go off” and it may be turned on (ie. armed), but it does not “go on”. That is because the verb “to go off” means “to become active suddenly, to trigger” (which is why bombs and guns also go off, but do not go on).

YES THANK YOUUUUU. The mystery isn’t “why is English so weird and nonsensical,” it’s ‘where do all these words come from, how/when did we start using them, and how did their usage change over time?’

^^^^ English may seem arbitrary and weird at times but it’s really not. It stands out from other language like this, probably, because of the relative amount of historical conquest, trading etc etc that went on during the formation of Modern English

Sid on Geno’s English.

Ad for an English language institute in South Korea (X) We all know that the whole South Korea is so in love with Sherlock.

Reactions of people when you’re speaking their language. Is this true for you? http://is.gd/memrise

WITH SWEDISH IT GOES THE SAME AS WITH GERMAN

Italian people love you learning the language so plz do

what happened in roughly 1870 though

why was there temporary internet

with a few people searching for pokemon?

It’s a search of Google books, but the question still stands, what the Fuck happened in 1870

I CAN ANSWER THIS!!

In the Cornish dialect of English, Pokemon meant ‘clumsy’ (pure coincidence).

In the mid 1800s there was a surge of writing about the Cornish language and dialect in an attempt to preserve them with glossaries and dictionaries being written. I wrote about it HERE.

I just love that this post happened to find the ONE HUMAN ON THE INTERNET who had the answer to this question

You’re welcome

This is the most useful thing I’ve ever reblogged.

i used to think when people said my cousin twice removed that their cousin must’ve did some fucked up shit to get kicked out of the family twice

When I found this the first thing I thought was “now I can find out how Count Olaf is related to the Baudelaire children.”

what’s up @ geno’s english

This isn’t in response to anything I’ve seen in the last day or so, but it’s something I’ve been noticing for awhile in this fandom, and because writing errors propagate by starting to look normal to people, I wanted to point one out.

Here’s the basic rule, followed by some...

The gif could not be more perfect in describing what just happened.

yay historical linguistics!

FUCK YEAH LINGUISTICS