Out of Pod Experience

'Her thin silk tunic fully revealed the curves of her womanly form." - Robert E. Howard, Conan story from 1930s, published in Weird Tales.*
Some other examples: child, children, juvenile, childish, and child-like, juvie detention, kindergarten, filial, kids, young, adolescent, baby, infant. Each one either proto-English or medieval French. Or worked into old English via Norman Invasion French, or church/science research leet Latin.

*Man, those stories are so bad and so good at the same time. The good stuff in the stories pretty much completely erase the brief weak spots. I'm re-reading the whole series, but it takes some time to collect the old paperbacks. How did that guy in back end of Cowshite, Texas in 1930 imagine that stuff? Unexplainable.

English is a living language, and that should scare you.
It means that today's typos will be tomorrow's grammar.
With the continuing abuse and bastardization English gets over the Internet, I am fully expecting it to become a mere collection of leetspeak, emoticons and dank memes within a few decades...

The Queen is silently weeping...

That list is a great resource of Renaissance festival vendors, actors, and staff. I had to man a booth at one once, and had a hard time dealing with all of the "anon"s and "forsooth"s.

Not that having a single language root necessarily makes things easier.

Swedish is a Germanic language through and through, 17th–19th century French fashions aside, and as mentioned earlier, it simply skips over some grammatical details that are present in other languages (like number in verb conjugation). The evil part is that it still tries to retain a large differentiation of meaning, and rather than use spelling and word forms to convey those differences it uses stress, melody, and umpty-eleven accents that are not spelled out and that only vaguely follow any kind of rule system. You just have to intuitively know the difference.

Going back to the original question of the OP, these are things that native speakers don't really consider all that often — they gain the intuition through their normal language learning (and still get it wrong with some frequency). We all learn about our 8 vowels (including the 3 umlauted ones — å, ä, and ö), but we're not really formally taught about how all of those 8 each have 18 different (meaning-bearing) pronunciations.¹

The classic exampel is how “tomten” (the gnome/Santa) is not the same word as “tomten” (the back yard). Had it been a nice and gentle language like, say, French, the difference would have been obvious since they would have been spelled “tômtèn” and “tómten”, respectively. Similarly, “banan” (banana) is obviously a different word than “banan” (the race track) — hell, one is indefinite, the other is definite — again, spelling out the accents that would make this apparent (bánãn vs. bãnàn).

This is where we Swedes get our characteristic sing-song English accent from: the difference in not just stress and length, but rising and falling tone of vowels carries morphological meaning. In exchange, Swedish has pretty much zero concern for voiced and unvoiced consonants so no-one ever manages to make “ice” sound any different from “eyes” — it's all unvoiced hissing around here.


¹ Coincidentally, the fact that those three umlauted vowels are considered separate letters makes it really confusing when certain countries try to use them to make cool-looking heävy mëtal bånd namës… Sometimes, you get some really funny false friend errors that way.

Yes, sad to think about, but the ignorance (lack of knowledge) steamroller seems to be getting bigger and heavier every day. I sort of understand the confusion with there, their and they're. But I can't understand the strange and growing misuse of capital letters. Example: "On Friday we will be cleaning out the Refrigerator in the break room and defrosting the Freezer. Please remove any food you have there. Any unclaimed food' will be thrown away. Also as a friendly reminder, if you will attend the company Picnic, you must reply by August 14." Why were some nouns chosen to be capitalized, and some not? The reasoning behind it is baffling. It makes me fearful about the reasoning power of the minds behind those sentences. (The people writing them are all managerial/admin types with plenty of corporate world survival and advancement common sense, by the way).

Interesting about Swedish language's use of intonation and pronunciation to convey singular/plural and differentiate between words that would look like homonyms, if spelled out. Japanese language hardly has a syntax for conveying that something is plural. There's a suffix that can be tacked on, but it's used mostly in written language. If the people are communicating orally, they just pick up clues from the context of what's being said. That's enough.

At the other extreme is the language of Yap, a tiny island in the western Pacific. There are singular, dual, and plural tenses. And differentiations, depending on whether the listener is included in the dual/plural group. Examples:
"I am going to go now." Ngu gu wan.
"We (you and I) are going to go now." Darow.
"We (myself and this guy, but not you) are going to go now." Ngwarow. (Shortened form of Ngu gu warow).
"We (everybody present, three or more) are going to go now." Darod.
"We (three or more of us, but not you) are going to go now." Ngwarod. (Shortened form of Ngu gu warod).

Languages are so cool. Amazing how many different techniques humans around the world developed to convey ideas to each other.

I personally like the word "BOLLOXS" myself

This is wildly disputed, one thing is that a lot of German (from trade not conquest) and French has Latin roots so some argue that 60% of English is from Latin.
The more recent event is the Anglo-Saxons and the Normandy invasion, there was a low class and an upper class language, the plebs speaking mostly their Germanic tongue and the ruling Normans their French.
It is why English tends to have two words for many meanings now (incomplete).

I think I see what you are saying, but "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder" is a much more flexible and descriptive term than "Shell Shock". "Shell" kind of limits the term to a military-related problem. Certainly for most people who struggle with PTSD it is related to military things - but not in all cases, such as certain r@pe victims. So I think with that term the evolution of language is well.

Anyway...I'm just amazed those weerd foreign people like know about electricity and stuff. lol

Mate, i tell you, yesterday we invented fire and such a round thingy, we called it a wheel!
We were so happy we decided to eat Grandma!

George Carlin may be funny mmm but that's about it. PTSD has been defined in clinical psychology since 1980. They didn't just rename it, but better defined what it is, as they figured it out anyway. For science! Other things, sure, but the clinical diagnosis of PTSD is pretty accurate and the name fits. I wouldn't even list it as an example. Not even as a 'non-traditional success'...