microwavedalastair

[microwavedalastair]

One of many moods I might be in thanks to a laundry list of neurodivergent conditions, disorders, and disabilities:

Not only do I intend to be the whole problem, I intend to be fifteen new problems as well.

[microwavedalastair]

The worst part of ADHD is forgetting that I have things and stuff, or losing things, buying extra, then finding the original thing like, the day after.

[microwavedalastair]

Shoutout to my favorite KSP child, The Porcupine.

[microwavedalastair]

I think one of the things that people often forget (or don't even know) when discussing the quirks of the English language is its really strange history.

Great Britain, Ireland, and everything in that general area used to be a bunch of random islands that no one except the people living there cared about. They didn't speak English back then. Instead, they spoke something called Brythonnic or Brittonic, which was named in reference to the ancient Britons. Then, the Romans decided that they wanted to conquer a sizeable chunk of the known world for a lark and set up fortifications on those "random islands that no one except the people living there cared about." Notably, that also wasn't the advent of the English language because English is a Germanic language, not a Romance language or a Brittonic language.

For that, we need to look to the 5th century CE, when a bunch of guys called the Anglo-Saxons (named Anglo because they were ancient English people, and Saxon because of their swords) showed up. They spoke Old English. The real Old English, not the Middle English of Shakespeare that everyone mistakenly calls Old English. The Roman Empire was on its last legs at that point, but it still had a pretty outsized impact on the development of the English Language.

See, the Anglo-Saxons wrote their language with a system called the runic Futhorc, named so for its first six runes; ᚠ - Feoh, ᚢ - Ur, ᚦ - Thorn, ᚩ - Os, ᚱ - Rad, and ᚳ - Cen. This was a perfectly serviceable way to write Old English, and people did so for centuries. However, the cultural power of Latin and its alphabet was far more than that of the Futhorc or its sister system, Younger Futhark (the Younger Futhark having been used in Scandinavian areas). This means that many of the Old English manuscripts were written with a system completely unsuited to English as a language. Latin G had to pull double duty for ᚷ - Geofu (modern G) and ᛄ - Gear (modern Y) as Y was only considered a vowel at that point, and J (used in many non-English languages for the sound of the modern English Y) didn't exist yet. W, not a sound found in Latin, had to either be transcribed with uu/vv (as U and V were once interchangeable; hence the name Double-U) or with ƿ - Wynn, the latter of which was based on the rune ᚹ - Wyn. The two sounds that are today represented by th also had to have new letters made for them; spawning þ - Thorn from the rune of the same name and ð - Eth (pronounced with the th in that).

Now, about two paragraphs ago, I mentioned Middle English, and how it's a different thing from Old English. How exactly did Old English become Middle English? Was it a long slow process, where slow linguistic shift resulted in a--okay, yeah, you got me. It's not that. It was the French. The Duke of Normandy/William the Conqueror, to be specific, who decided that he wanted to conquer Britain and succeeded. To be clear, there was already some influence from continental Europe and Scandinavia--like with Alcuin of York living it up in the court of Charlemagne in the 8th century and the Danes kinda invading England slightly before the Norman Conquest--but never anything as substantial as The Conquest.

And this isn't even mentioning the fact that there's about seven or eight centuries between the Norman Conquest and the rise of very early examples of what could be recognized as "Modern English"; or the advent of the printing press and how continental European printers didn't have þ in their typesets, leading to its eventual falling out of use in English; or some of the other impacts of Latin on English; or numerous other things that contributed to why English is Like That. I've mostly talked about all this because there's one thing in particular that I want to clear up. People often like to joke that English goes around mugging other languages for spare grammar, but it's a whole lot closer to "other languages used to go around beating up English and then shoving spare grammar into its pockets for shits and giggles."

[microwavedalastair]

my favorite game to play in BotW is Lizalfos Basketball Bokoblin Basketball is a close second