Recent questions tagged english language

Description : Which phrase do you use?

Last Answer : I could not care less.

Description : How might have the English language been different had king Harold's forces won the Battle of Hastings?

Last Answer : French and Latin had words and terms that Germanic/Danish languages didn’t have, so eventually Romance words would have been adopted by the English. But certainly we would be much closer to Germanic than to Norman. We would be eating roast cow, not roast beef.

Description : What "King" is "King's English" attributed to?

Last Answer : All I can contribute is a guess. I am thinking it may be a general term attributing the formality to the highest level. The term has been used a long time, and without sense of gender neutrality. If this is the case, it could easily become the crown’s English. People still say motherland also.

Description : If English is superior to other languages, what makes it so?

Last Answer : answer:The question does not make sense Did you mean, In what way is English superior to other languages? And do you mean the written or the spoken language? Or both? I ... transliterated) foreign borrowings. Neither language, therefore, comes across as very confident' about new technology.

Description : Is English a flexible language in word choice?

Last Answer : Very. Especially the slang.

Description : If you grew up in the 60's or 70's; what phrase do you find you use that other people don't understand?

Last Answer : Don’t have a cow – said to someone pitching a fit Slug Bug – slang for a Volkswagen Beetle car (and if you spotted one on the road, you’d punch the arm of the person next to you and yell, “Slug Bug!”)

Description : Whence came the construction, "Why do you think ...?" as in "Why do you think that American English is different from British English?"?

Last Answer : It’s idiomatic speaking in place of “why do you think the differences arose between American English and British English?” Notice that everyone understood the question.

Description : Does anyone know why in the English language,they found it necessary to come up with a different name for each group of animals species?

Last Answer : It is a bit more specific than “them there”.

Description : Why is the alphabet in that order?

Last Answer : No, the song came later. Here. is some wonderful information. look under History'. :) In the year 1011, a writer named Byrhtferð ordered the Old English alphabet for numerological purposes. He listed the 24 letters of the Latin ... X Y Z & ⁊ Ƿ Þ Ð Æ Sorry, that's a bit wonky. I'm on my phone.

Description : Why isn't "phonetics" spelled phonetically?

Last Answer : The same sort of miserable cruelty that puts an “s” in lisp. (Also phonemes)