I immediately wanted to close the tab. But I decided to not judge an article by the first sentence.
So I read on and it's just talking about how English has words with similar meanings but different etymological origins, plus some English grammar trivia.
Title:
> Every American is bilingual.
is completely unjustified. In the same vein every Japanese is bilingual or more. But the author is selling a book about marketing & copywriting so that's it.
(By the way, in the AI example the article shows, Claude thinks "ever again" can be replaced with "perpetually subsequently." Whether it's a joke is left to the reader.)
Or just as stupidly, so many of us are just mono-lingual, we just speak proto-Indo-European.
We have synonyms for, sure, each word in most/all of the spoken languages (except the functional, deterministic and immutable one's lol) - I just think of Chinese "就" (jiu) which has rndabt 90 different meanings or the twenty-what-so-ever different ways of saying I love you. Can a Chinese speaker now say he/she/it is a polyglot and me 20-languaged??
What about Russian which is (heavily) relying on imported or lend words? So many words used in Russian can be linked back to French, German and other languages. Example: saray in Turkish, saray in Russian. One translates to a (king's) palace, the other to an wooden stall for animals. Kindergarten in English/German.. "cosmos" in English, Russian, German, ...
The other thing is.. English is accounted to be the language with the most words of round about 900k. This much words is the result of different ethnic influences that are being taken over into English. It's a mix of a lot of languages today. Like Russian, German too. I'm sure this is true for every still spoken language. But no one sayed bilingual until now.. ;)
This blog post claims to make you never see things the same way again, but for me that book actually did accomplish that lofty claim. Mainly because I'll never really look at "mistakes" the same way again. Mistakes in language are just signs of change.
Example: It's slowly become standard to drop the -g off gerund tense verbs in English. It's still a mistake in writing, but if you say "I've been runnin' around all day," literally nobody would ever say "excuse me I think you mean RUNNING, with a G" - because it isn't considered a mistake anymore orally, even if it wouldn't be _written_ that way in formal writing. But in text messages you might spell it that way - casual writing. And change always starts orally and casually before eventually becoming the correct way to say something. In another 500 years, runnin might be the correct way to say it in whatever English is called by then, and running might sound the same way runneth sounds to us today.
Or, another possibility is the ending G will remain in writing, and it will just become fully silent, such that pronouncing it aloud at all sounds bizarre. That's how we got modern French! All those silent consonants used to be pronounced a long long time ago, but the written system remained the same even as the spoken version evolved.
Not to nitpick but those are Greek, not Latin
But it made me discover https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Latin
In fact, English has it less than a lot of languages. In Japanese, you not only use different words when in a more formal register, you also conjugate verbs differently and use different honorific suffixes to refer to people. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honorific_speech_in_Japanese
I guess people who speak japanese can speak 4 languages (casual speech, normal polite desu/masu speech, humble speech, and keigo). They all have different word-choices and conjugations, and there's also similarly a dual-origin story of "some words came from ancient chinese, some from ancient japanese".
The assumption might be that they tend toward shorter, simpler Germanic words, but, I wonder if the location where it’s spoken has an effect on this. For example do English speakers in Romance countries use more Latin-origin words in English, even though they are “more difficult”?
From the research I browsed, a few things seem to be true: speakers tend to choose words that resemble cognates in their native language; Germanic speakers seem to prefer Germanic words; the educational method and exposure to English has an effect, in the sense that Northern Europeans often have more informal exposure (and thus Germanic preference) whereas Southern Europeans have more exposure to English in an academic, Latin-preferred context.
Shoutout to those who survived Ovid through the Aeneid in HS Latin I-IV.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncleftish_Beholding
From the link:
The title phrase uncleftish beholding calques "atomic theory."
To illustrate, the text begins:
> For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess. With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.
It goes on to define firststuffs (chemical elements), such as waterstuff (hydrogen), sourstuff (oxygen), and ymirstuff (uranium), as well as bulkbits (molecules), bindings (compounds), and several other terms important to uncleftish worldken (atomic science). Wasserstoff and Sauerstoff are the modern German words for hydrogen and oxygen, and in Dutch the modern equivalents are waterstof and zuurstof. Sunstuff refers to helium, which derives from λιος, the Ancient Greek word for 'sun'. Ymirstuff references Ymir, a giant in Norse mythology similar to Uranus in Greek mythology.
If you're already n-lingual with English as one of them, you can bump it to n+1 :)
What do you call a person that speaks 2 languages? A bilingual.
What do you call a person that speaks 3 languages? A trilingual.
What do you call a person that speaks 1 language? An American.
