English is three* languages in a trenchcoat, all languages borrow but English in particular is a cobbled together mess. Like a salors' pidgin language except instead of sailors, driven by the ruling class of Britain at the boundary of several language families who kept conquering each other.

*(or 7 or whatever number makes you feel best)

▲

ianburrell 7 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

English is a West Germanic language with vocabulary from other languages, primarily French and Latin. But most of the core words are Germanic. It is not a pidgin whose defining feature is simplified grammar.

▲

yellowapple 17 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Good languages borrow, great languages steal?

▲

dataflow 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Might be a mess linguistically, but it's sure nice to have only 26 letters with no accents on a keyboard.

▲

pocksuppet 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

long s and thorn would like to have a word with you, but they can't because they were removed from the keyboard

In Unicode, that's ſ and þ. Both historical English letters that are no longer used.

	▲	colechristensen an hour ago \| parent [-]
		"Ye Olde Mill" or whatever archaic silliness you'll find at fairs and whatnot was the result of the printing press dropping þ (as in þe, þ is just th-) and was never supposed to be pronounced with a "y" sound. "Ye Olde" ye was not the same word as "Hear ye, hear ye!", that ye is a plural 'you' basically the same word as "y'all" and never had a thorn.

▲

mootothemax 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It’s great compression: Y sometimes a vowel, sometimes a consonant.

And while not encoded on a keyboard, it still blows my mind that English has a crazy number of past tenses - and a such a bad hack of a future tense that it’s hard to classify as such.

Linguistics is fun. The accents are alright.

▲

colechristensen 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>only 26 letters with no accents on a keyboard

This was caused by the printing press and the typewriter (keyboard) both of which forced simplifications in the written English language.

	▲	ummonk an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		You just press backspace and hit the accent mark key or for a printing press stack the accent mark on top of the letter. People ditched accents because they were rarely used in English writing (only really being used for some loanwords), not because simplifications were forced by typewriters or the printing press (which handle non-English languages just fine).
	▲	lmm an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		And yet other languages have managed to resist those simplifications. So it's clearly not 100% forced.