Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
Yes, that's the one. Thanks!
Well my point wasn't well stated. I just meant that most of the words that make Modern English "modern" are foreign words. As a linguistic community we seem to have chosen not to do a lot of word-building from native roots. Indeed, Dutch, Yiddish and the Scandinavian languages all tend to "calque" compound words using their own phonetic versions of the German roots. "Science" in Danish is vitenskap (he says without a Danish dictionary handy to get the spelling right). I guess if we tried that it would be something like "wisescape."
Does anybody know Frisian, the language which is alleged as being the closest relative of English?
You're right. However there seems to be a trend in modern colloquial German to elide those unstressed E's. Maybe they've been fraternizing with the French too much.
We're veering pretty far from linguistics here but what the heck, I'm more famous for my postings about dogs than linguistics. Humans and dogs created the earth's first voluntary multi-species community. It's debatable whether the Mesolithic people would have used the word "ownership" since it's generally acknowledged that dogs domesticated themselves. One school of thought says they saw the benefits of cooperative hunting, another says they probably thought they were taking advantage of us by eating all the perfectly good food we left lying on the ground. In either case, I'm not the only person who wonders, without the experience of learning to love "people" we couldn't even talk to who weren't even of the same species, whether we could ever have learned to love other humans who spoke funny languages and believed in blasphemous gods. It's quite possible that our relationship with dogs was a key step toward founding civilization. That disqualifies it as a "narrow" relationship.
In the grand scheme of things, diet seems to be a fairly easy evolutionary adaptation. Dogs have made a complete transition from carnivores to omnivores in a mere 15,000 years. Teeth, brain size, behavioral instincts, the whole package. About the only thing that changes faster is, amusingly enough, the one thing we humans make such a big frelling deal over: skin color. Move a human population from the tropics to the arctic or vice versa and in about 4,000 years they will change from black to white or vice versa.
Anyway, I don't think domestic animals suffer sensory deprivation from our diet fads. Especially since many of our preferred pets seem to be omnivores like dogs, parrots, and rodents. We also love the ones who have trapped themselves into the "greenest" levels on the food chain, like pandas (bamboo) and koalas (eucalyptus).
