re: #373 Wendell Zurkowitz ((slave to the waffle light))

ours is a mongrel language which started with a child’s vocabulary of three hundred words, and now consists of two hundred and twenty-five thousand; the whole lot, with the exception of the original and legitimate three hundred, borrowed, stolen, smouched from every unwatched language under the sun, the spelling of each individual word of the lot locating the source of the theft and preserving the memory of the revered crime.

Yes, I read a description of how English does not so much borrow words from other languages as it chases them down a dark alley, beats them up and rifles their pockets

English has changed so much in the last 1,000 years, that few of us today could understand Anglo-Saxon. Its “mongrelization” started in a small way with the Viking occupation, but really got into swing with the Norman Conquest. It accelerated with the Age of Exploration and colonialism.

Meanwhile, Chinese has changed so little in that same time span that most educated Chinese can read poems from 1,000 years ago.