Krapsnart wrote today that "se faire une raison", which is roughly the French equivalent of "to learn to live with something", literally means "to make oneself a reason for it". This may be clearer in French and I suspect it is; in the English, I’m not sure whether she means "to make (for) oneself a reason (that something has happened)" or "to make oneself (into) a reason that (something has happened)". The ambiguity occurs because the verb phrase "make oneself" has at least two meanings, depending on the omitted preposition. but they are so subtly different we never notice, until confuxion hits.
I don’t speak more than a few words in any other language, despite a good ear and 6 years of Hebrew and 7 of Spanish (only in America). I might be able to ask directions to the loo or order dinner, but not much beyond that. (I do better with the written languages than the spoken ones.) But I know my own language better than most other native speakers, because I love it. I enjoy the sort of ambiguities I demonstrated in the previous paragraph.
I love that our irregular verbs and synonyms and related words tell the tale of the history of English. Most irregular verbs derive from Old English, a Germanic language which followed different rules for inflection and conjugation. Most of those rules died out, in favor of simpler forms, during the centuries after the Norman conquest when few educated people spoke English as a daily language. Supposedly, that’s also why we have "beef" from French "boeuf", from the Norman French lords who ate the meat from the "cow" (Old English "cu") raised by the Saxon peasants.
And then there are all those parallel words: "shirt" from Old English is related to "skirt" showing the characteristic ‘sk’ diphthong from Old Norse, both originally having the meaning that survives in "shirt". Celtic and Norse words survive in English place names more than in words, and some contributions from the former actually came in much later -- for example "galore" dates only from the 1600s.
I love that English is flexible enough to borrow or create words wherever needed. (Q: Did you send a facsimile or did you connect over a modulator/demodulator? A: I sent a fax and used a modem. Near the bayou (from Choctaw, I saw a raccoon (from Algonquin) with a banana (Wolof, an African language) and a pawpaw (Spanish).)
I like languages in general; it is fascinating to see how you can learn about what kind of environment the original Indo-European tribes lived in by looking to see which words are similar in all the languages derived from theirs (it had oaks and elms, but not palm trees or papayas). There’s a lot to be seen how human minds work from the fact that the commonest verbs (be, have, do) are most likely to be irregularly conjugated.
But I think English is something special, though I freely admit to a strong bias; I may just not know anything else enough to appreciate it.
Posted by dichroic at June 18, 2001 12:06 PM