ScanLangThang
ScanLangThang
So, I was Teaching Myself Danish yesterday, as threatened. It's a strange experience, if you know a little Swedish; it looks familiar, but strangely spelled. Of course, I am not the first person to think this:
Swedish, Norwegian and Danish are actually the same language. It's just that the Norwegians can't spell it, and the Danes can't pronounce it. --Chlewey
Which makes you wonder how other people see English. Maybe something like this:
Conversely, English is essentially the Old Frisian of a sea-sick Old Saxon speaker, as mangled by an obtuse Francophonified Danish mercenary who took Latin and Greek in school and is currently on an around-the-world cruise. --B. Philip Jonsson/Matt Pearson
Both of these are from the essentialist explanation page, and I'm willing to bet that your favourite language is featured, too.
But my favouritest quote ever on the English language, the one that always springs to mind when I hear some imbecile decrying the decline in the language of Milton and Shakespeare and the King James' Bible is this (which Google could only find on a grotty Geocities page):
The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that the English language is as pure as a crib-house whore. It not only borrows words from other languages; it has on occasion chased other languages down dark alley-ways, clubbed them unconscious and rifled their pockets for new vocabulary. --James Nicoll
We feel obliged, however, to remind our Reader that while a diverse and varied language is a Good Thing, conquest of an extensive empire for this or any other purpose is a Bad Thing. Is that quite clear?