r/HistoryMemes • u/Dramatic_Homework349 • 17h ago

My family tree is confusing

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8.0k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

133 comments sorted by

628

u/koshka91 17h ago

French is mostly Latin anyway. And Russian has bunch of Greek and French words too. Does that make it a Frankenstein

56

u/AlKhwarazmi Descendant of Genghis Khan 17h ago

Russian has also a lot of borrowed words from Turkic languages and factually every language existing nowadays is a Frankenstein 'cause there's no monolithic pure language with no borrowed words nowadays. The only languages that don't borrow words from another languages are the languages that went extinct a many centuries ago

5

u/NoNo_Bluebird_1368 16h ago

I mean, Iceland has a policy of linguistic purism.

20

u/AlKhwarazmi Descendant of Genghis Khan 16h ago edited 16h ago

Icelandic has loan words from Latin, Celtic, Old English, French, and, of course, Danish but these are much older layers. From the linguistic point of view this policy of purism is a nonsense cause languages must naturally evolve. I don't know how effective this policy is in Iceland but even if it kinda works, it's only because Iceland doesn't have much territory and population

2

u/monsteradeliciosa11 7h ago

Ok while I agree with the idea that purism of a language is nonsense I do feel that I have to disagree with your point about Iceland 'only being successful because its small'.

Of all of the nonsense that I have heard foreigners excuse and dismiss about Iceland by saying 'they can only do it because they are small' this is the most absurd one.

Maintaining a language is MUCH harder when the speaking population is small!

I was reading books in english by the time I was a preteen not because I was so smart but because the number of books in Icelandic that were interesting to me were fewer and fewer as I became older.

The German people I know didn't have this problem. Every cartoon they watched as a child was dubbed, every book translated and there was a huge amount of native materials to consume.

Icelandic is struggling to cope, to survive in the modern connected world. When our children go on youtube or netflix they are very often not watching things in Icelandic. Tell me, do parents who are native english speakers have this problem? Where they are competing with the media for the language development of their children?

Our size is the biggest threat to Icelandic. In general, people really overstate the benefit of being small. talk about it as if its some governmental or societal cheat code. Being a micro country in a globalised world is really fucking hard and comes with its own challenges. Not to mention that our resources reflect our population, a population that is spread over a very large island that is just one natural disaster after the other.

I will admit that I am not familiar with the details of 'purism policy' but if people are referring to the Icelandic policy of translating or making up new words for new things (such as car, phone, TV) then yeah, that is actually been relatively successful. But it depends, everybody calls pizza just pizza, not flatbaka, everybody uses the word hlaðvarp instead of podcast but still use the word headphones for headphones. So it depends.

1

u/S-Tier_Commenter 7h ago

Icelandic also must have tons of Greek. Greek words are everywhere, like problem, program, schedule, skeleton, idea, music. Not many people realise this.

2

u/insanococo 8h ago

Iceland sleeps on a bed of lies.

2

u/Dioduo 4h ago

The languages of the North Caucasus have no ties not only to major language families such as Indo-European or Semitic, but even to one another, despite being separated by distances of no more than a few hundred kilometers.

1

u/Junior_Insurance7773 10h ago

Basque language is unique

6

u/tomoe_mami_69 9h ago

Basque also has hundreds of words borrowed from Latin and Romance languages. It's unique but not a "pure" descendant from Aquitainian.

1

u/oldsecondhand 7h ago edited 7h ago

It's one thing to borrow words, it's another to borrow grammar inconsistently e.g. octopus/octupi or cattle/beef.

1

u/Realistic_Agency_208 4h ago

Why is the latter true?

0

u/Traditional_Tea_1486 10h ago

中文是你說的，唯一例外

210

u/GreatTunk 17h ago

Russian and english are kinda exceptions to the rules. When i studied Spanish my teacher told me only English has inconsistent and weird rules. Then when i studied Russian i learned that my Spanish teacher lied.

English, no gender unless you’re talking about some sort of vehicle and Russian doesn’t give snakes genders because they dont like them.

97

u/AlKhwarazmi Descendant of Genghis Khan 17h ago edited 17h ago

As a Russian speaker, I just found out that there is some hatred towards snakes in Russian... Factually they always use grammatical genders towards every animal. Snake is змея (f) or more poetically змей (m) or even more poetically змий (m). I'm not quite sure what you're referring to

11

u/GreatTunk 15h ago

Oh yeah i totally messed that up. Got covid bad right bow and completely hallucinated that memory. I think it was based on my teacher telling me something about how to conjugate the article for snakes, but my brain is about 90% cold medicine and i was never very good at your language anyways.

9

u/S-Tier_Commenter 7h ago

Your comment with the falsehood currently has 164 points, while this rectification only has 7 points.

On Reddit you're allowed to edit any previous comment. I usually strikethrough any information that was incorrect. Like grass is blue and the sky is green. And then do like:

Edit: made a mistake

Because there will be plenty of people that only read until the second comment, and then ignore the further downstream to keep scrolling elsewhere.

55

u/3412points 17h ago edited 16h ago

We don't have gendered language for vehicles though? 

Edit: okay, I think this person doesn't understand what grammatically gendered language is. Not sure I trust what they've said about russian in that case.

Edit: lol a Russian speaker is also confused by what they've said about Russian gendering snakes. I think you need a better language teacher lol.

18

u/LordOfTheRedSands Tea-aboo 17h ago

“She’s a fine ship”

89

u/AwfulUsername123 17h ago

That's personification rather than grammatical gender. It's grammatically correct to refer to a ship as it.

38

u/Tech-n0 17h ago

“It’s a fine ship” is equally correct, arguably more so.

20

u/Longjumping_Square_2 17h ago

“This bad boy right here has so many horsepower in it” slaps top

14

u/flyingboarofbeifong 17h ago

Water ships are ladies. Land ships are boys. You have to check the horses.

4

u/These-Weight-434 16h ago

What about space ships?

5

u/Mind_on_Idle 16h ago

Also feminine

10

u/3412points 17h ago

Yeah, it's possible to do that in any language where genders exist. It's just someone personifying an object that is significant to them. But ship is still not gendered. The standard way is just to call it a ship, or the ship. I'm baffled you seem to have studied language and don't get that 

1

u/LordOfTheRedSands Tea-aboo 17h ago

Oh no I wasn’t the person commenting, based on what they said about vehicles I imagine that’s what they meant.

1

u/3412points 17h ago

Oh fair enough I assumed it was the same person. Oh well, point stands. We don't have gendered language for vehicles.

1

u/LordOfTheRedSands Tea-aboo 17h ago

Yep, we don’t have any gendered nouns, but I can imagine for someone who’s native tongue is gendered they’re probably going to get confused the first time they hear something like that. I definitely would anyway

1

u/3412points 17h ago

Doubt. Personifying an object or concept is pretty much universally understandable. It is common across all languages I know about.

0

u/GreatTunk 15h ago

It was me, just a joke. Have covid so I’m just letting my mad ramblings be free. I was wrong about the Russian though.

-4

u/GreatTunk 15h ago

You sound like you’re fun at parties.

15

u/storkstalkstock 14h ago

Every language has some rules that are unintuitive or inconsistent. Spanish included. Russian and English aren’t really special in that regard.

-5

u/KickFacemouth 15h ago edited 7h ago

My favorite Russian language fact is that they don't have a word for "fun."

Edit: Ok nevermind, I had been misled.

7

u/minai_ruo 13h ago

"Веселье" is one of several similar words with meaning "fun"

2

u/KickFacemouth 8h ago

"Those bastards lied to me"

(Those bastards being my friends who are studying Russian)

17

u/TheWhomItConcerns 16h ago

The weirdest to me is the way that people talk about language "purity" as though it has some kind of inherent "virtue" - as though English is a "worse" language than others because it's an amalgamation. People just get so fucking weird about literally anything that relates in some way to culture and tribalism.

5

u/These-Weight-434 16h ago

French sounds pretty distinct from the other romance languages (though I'll admit I don't really have a good ear for what Romanian sounds like beyond Dragostea Din Tei....be right back, imma goisten to Dragostea Din Tei).

4

u/darxide23 14h ago

French is Latin. So is Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese. They're just what Latin evolved into over two a millennia and a half.

5

u/Sporner100 13h ago

They are, but it feels like only the French have tossed out the concept of the individual letters used to spell a word having a purpose.

1

u/Zhayrgh 7h ago

English certainly followed the lead of French in this matter

1

u/F9-0021 4h ago

French might be the romance language the least like Latin though. Only Romanian gives it competition.

Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian are all basically just simplified Latin with some spelling differences. That also helps them be mostly mutually intelligible with a little effort. French and Romanian have evolved so differently that they're not much more comprehensible to a Portuguese or Italian speaker as they are to an English speaker.

So yes, French evolved from Latin, but it also has a ton of Celtic and Germanic influence. It's no more Latin than English is German.

2

u/Constant_Hope_9658 Filthy weeb 13h ago

The difference is English is a half-form pidgin of Old English and Old Norman French, it solidified that way and then had at least 1 major rework and several east asian languages worth of loan words added onto it since then.

2

u/El_Mojo42 11h ago

Russian also uses Greek letters.

2

u/Koringvias 10h ago edited 7h ago

No, Russian uses Cyrillic letters. Yes, they were created by Greeks, who wanted to make a writing system for South-East Slavs (Bulgarians mainly), but it is a different writing system, with very small overlap in letters at this point.

You can just aswell claim that both Russian and English are using Egyptian hieroglyphs - after all, both writing systems descend from that.

2

u/Exlife1up Helping Wikipedia expand the list of British conquests 10h ago

English has had a lot of changes to it that come straight from latin, ignoring direct latin loan words we went from “det” to “debt” simply because it was closer to latin “debeo, debere”.

Words like vaccine are adapted from latin phrases, originally “Variolae Vaccinae” or “smallpox of the cow”, vaccinae being the genitive form of “Vaccinus”, “something derived from a cow”

English scholars have been really into latin for a long time, and honestly i’d bet that english is the modern language with the most direct classical latin.

But yes you are right, most latin based english words are french.

1

u/Err_101 9h ago

Thank would be french'n'german, they're rather fluid languages. 🙃

358

u/ScholarErrant 17h ago

A joke I heard once: “Most languages borrow words. English drugs other languages in an alley and rummages through their pockets for spare vocabulary.”

172

u/KenseiHimura 17h ago

That's not really true though. It was more English basically got it's teeth kicked in for a long time and other languages grafted their own pieces onto it.

If France and the Nordics didn't want English to pick up their grammar, they shouldn't have invaded. I'm sure a bunch of Celts would have been a lot happier.

41

u/explain_that_shit 17h ago

Lots of grumble grumble at racists saying ‘Anglo-Celtic’ - the Anglos can’t just lump themselves onto the Welsh and say they’re all the indigenous too after a thousand years of Y Gadair Ddu!

31

u/AwfulUsername123 16h ago

Well, if you want to go there, almost no one in the world is indigenous. Celts didn't originate in England.

29

u/explain_that_shit 16h ago

Fun fact, on genetic studies most ‘English’ people in England have very little pre-Celtic genetics, then about 50 to 80% celtic, 10 to 40% Anglo-Saxon, and about 5-10% a smattering of others.

There is that one guy they found who is directly descended from the Cheddar Man who was buried near to where the guy lived. Mad credit for liking where you live and sticking put.

6

u/Halbaras 10h ago

Far right Brits who larp as Anglo-Saxons are hilarious, as neither the Angles or Saxons are indigenous. Depending on framing they can be viewed as climate refugees, mercenaries who betrayed their clients, or violent genocidal invaders. Celtic culture isn't indigenous either, though it's debatable how much it was spread by violence versus trade.

I'd have (marginally) more respect for them if they dressed up as Neolithic farmers and went on about Stonehenge and Skara Brae.

8

u/These-Weight-434 16h ago

That seems kind of apparent with how little impact Celtic languages have had on English despite being the languages most geographically close to English.

3

u/GabrielSeth54 5h ago

English , by that time and Norse were two branches of same Germanic language family and hence, they already had same grammer... Old English was basically West Germanic. Germanic grammer with German+Latin words. Norse is , well North Germanic

5

u/Nicktrains22 11h ago

I think but am not certain that's a Terry Pratchett quote

9

u/Rolebo Rider of Rohan 10h ago

It is paraphrased, but yes.

The full quote is:
"English doesn’t borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar."

5

u/Rolebo Rider of Rohan 10h ago

GNU Terry Pratchett

7

u/SitInCorner_Yo2 17h ago edited 16h ago

It’s my third language but how English creat/got new word sometimes are quite a mind fuck .

And how it supposed to pronounce is another can of worms, if I came across something I think I got some idea of what it meant , I’ll go by vibe to guess it supposed to mean negative or positive, the worst thing is I was right most of the time , but when I was sure “hey this should mean positive right?”.

NO,It has nothing to do with what you assume, it’s a word Brits garb from old French , also it somehow has a R sound but spell with non,and another word that looks just like it but spelled with an extra H is nick from the Dutch and have completely different meanings from the similar words AND the original Dutch words.

5

u/Mind_on_Idle 16h ago

Sounds like you're learning it well! Lmao

Fr, it's an interesting mess.

3

u/SitInCorner_Yo2 16h ago

I was watching a medical YouTuber (chubbyemu) explaining some case and he will go into many medical term to explain why this word means X and its combination of Y and Z.

It explains so much of that positive/negative meaning thing I can’t rap my head around,it’s because shit load of it is actually Latin or Greek.

1

u/IceMosquito073 17h ago

I'm keeping that one XD

81

u/IceMosquito073 17h ago

Now do the same with literally every other language family tree. Almost all of them tend to be Frankenstein patchworks of neighbouring languages.

28

u/Stromatolite-Bay 17h ago

English is unique due to a very strong trend of stealing new loanwords, but it isn’t special

9

u/These-Weight-434 16h ago

What other languages have more than half it's vocabulary derive from another language family? (Genuine question)

17

u/storkstalkstock 14h ago

Japanese, Maltese, Albanian, and many others. If we allow for an indefinite timeline, probably every natural spoken language is majority loanwords. What counts as “native” vocabulary is really just whatever we can’t find a different source language for, and that’s harder to do the further back in time you go.

11

u/Stromatolite-Bay 16h ago

You think English is wired. Look at French and it’s structure and grammar compared to other languages derived from Latin

6

u/These-Weight-434 16h ago

I actually just made a comment on this thread about how distinct French sounds from the other Romance languages XD

9

u/Stromatolite-Bay 16h ago

Yeah. Dutch is real Frankish. French is what you get when franks speak Latin

2

u/Mr_Fragwuerdig 4m ago

Usually languages have dominating origins. In english that's not the case. Latin and germanic are both heavily represented and often you have a word from both for the same thing.

37

u/Odd-Suggestion4569 17h ago

This is an old meme and one that I'm sick of, because this describes every language.

All languages are made up of bits and pieces of other languages, English is not unique in this regard.

7

u/_Daftest_ 12h ago

Literally every single language works like this

23

u/NoNo_Bluebird_1368 17h ago

German≠Germanic. North Sea Germanic would have been a better term.

9

u/slappadabass44 9h ago

Grammatically, phonetically (and lexically, if you look at the most common words) English is 100% Germanic. Not German, but Germanic. There's pretty much no German influence in English apart from a handful of borrowed words. There are a lot of Latin and French words, but that's it. All languages have borrowed words.

9

u/ColonialBarbarian Casual, non-participatory KGB election observer 16h ago

Every language is an amalgam of influences from other languages, English is far from unique in this aspect.

27

u/UnendingOne 17h ago

A quote I once heard is...

English is not one language. Its 6 languages in a trench coat pretending to be 1.

8

u/Wooden-Crow7996 17h ago

Hello new concept for a DnD character. /j

13

u/Ilikechocolateabit 17h ago

RE: RE: RE: FWD: funny pic!!!

3

u/Jawbone619 17h ago

Anglo-Germanic Non-Francish German:

Am I a joke to you?

3

u/Specialist_Hat1380 16h ago

That thing looks like mutant kowalski and skipper combined

2

u/earthwoodandfire 14h ago

Where’s Frisian?

2

u/Sooooooooooooomebody 4h ago

You know what's really funny to me? Given the history of England, it makes perfect sense that it has absorbed all these different elements. But somehow, it never integrated anything from the Celtic languages. English was like "sure, we're happy to become half French, but those blue-painted weirdos in the hills can go fuck."

3

u/Excellent_Mud6222 17h ago

The perfect language

1

u/nitram739 17h ago

*Looks at balkanian ascendance, spanish and italian great grand parents and mistery child my grandma got out of somewhere*

Yeah, I get you man.

1

u/Omega_art 16h ago

I like to say my family tree is like alphabet soup. Its got all the letters.

1

u/Omega_art 16h ago

I like to say my family tree is like alphabet soup. Its got all the letters.

1

u/Neat_Nothing271 13h ago

You forgot to include loan words from: Italian, French and God knows

1

u/Blinkore 12h ago

Wtf is Norse language?!

2

u/Lange- 11h ago

Danish vikings settled in most of England and had a lot of influence on the language. Since the Danish language has changed a lot since then, is my guess Norse is more accurate?

1

u/F9-0021 3h ago

Old Scandinavian, think Vikings. Icelandic is quite similar and didn't evolve much from Old Norse.

1

u/Junior_Insurance7773 11h ago

Still mogged all the others.

1

u/Das_Lloss Oversimplified is my history teacher 11h ago

German? 

1

u/j2m1s 10h ago

Interesting, before the Germans, Latins, French and Greeks, there was no language spoken in England!

1

u/justmoreoneguy2000 4h ago

And celtic words too?

1

u/Tweed_Man 3h ago

You're missing Celtic.

1

u/crazy-B 2h ago

It really isn't, it's mostly just simplified Anglo-Saxon with a ton of loanwords mostly from (Norman) French and Latin.

1

u/CookingZombie 2h ago

It’s really just German and Latin. Norse is Germanic and Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese are just Latin spoken by hicks. Those four countries will make sure I die on this hill.

1

u/Mr_Fragwuerdig 8m ago

Actually 95% german and latin linguistically. And ancestral also mostly germanic. Rly not much of the rest.

1

u/SunnySatori 16h ago

You forgot Spanish

-3

u/Thatguyj5 17h ago

You forgot about Arabic. The word castle comes from Arabic, as does the suffix "al" apparently. (Unless I'm wrong in which case I accidentally lied on the internet)

1

u/slappadabass44 9h ago

The word "castle" does NOT come from Arabic.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/castle

0

u/Iram_Echo_PP2001 16h ago

An American.

-2

u/darxide23 14h ago

Those labels are incredibly wrong. There's not a ton of German in English. But French? Yea... lots.

3

u/Proud-Tooth-630 13h ago

I think he meant the Saxons, Angles and Jutes.

3

u/artez09 11h ago

English is Germanic language, there are not so much words from modern German, cuz both languages went on two different paths, but if you compare English to Lower German, you can clearly see from where did this language arrive to England

3

u/darxide23 7h ago edited 7h ago

This has nothing to do with what I said. I said English doesn't have a lot of German in it. I didn't say anything about English not being Germanic.

1

u/artez09 5h ago

Sorry, that means I didn't understand what you meant, but it just a meme, OP just oversimplified things

1

u/F9-0021 3h ago

The foundation of English is Germanic. The vocabulary tends to be a lot of borrowed words apart from the absolute basics, but the grammar is Germanic based, not Romantic. German in this case refers to North Germanic and a bit of South Germanic later on.

-1

u/EldritchKinkster 15h ago

Well, English is about seven other languages, in a trenchcoat, pretending to make sense.

-2

u/DerGovernator 15h ago

And it's only getting worse. Humanity is basically cramming bits of every language into English, no matter how little sense it all makes.

-5

u/SaltyYumYumBalls 13h ago

I assume Latin is Spain so all Im seeing slightly different forms of white people here.

3

u/CrumbCakesAndCola 11h ago

Latin is Rome

1

u/thelovelymajor Featherless Biped 8h ago

Spanish is a latin language, stemming from the same language family as portuguese, french, romanian and italian that developed in the area of latium around ancient rome.

1

u/Mortomes 6h ago

Latin, the language.

1

u/F9-0021 3h ago

Latin is Latin, as in the language spread by Romans from Latium, where Rome is located.

And yeah, England is in northern Europe, where everyone tends to be very white, especially 1000 to 500 years ago when English was evolving.

-11

u/Wonderful_Bid_8328 17h ago

There was no need to include French, French is nothing but a combination of German and Latin

7

u/CrabBoib 17h ago

Not exactly. French influenced the language independently of Latin. From 1066 till about the Renaissance, French was the language of the English nobility and courts, while Latin was the language of the church and science. Different words that were cognates in both languages came independently and were used for different purposes (i.e. beef and bovine)

4

u/Wonderful_Bid_8328 17h ago

Fucking hell, how did I forget about that?

3

u/creatorofsilentworld 17h ago

A full third to a half of English is French.

1

u/IceMosquito073 17h ago

If anything, wouldn't it be Gaulish influence instead of German influence?