OLPC alone, not enough to improve education

"Maths" is short for "mathematics", which is clearly plural.

Quoting:"Maths" is short for "mathematics",

We knew that, but wanted to give the British speaking some "yankee-ing". :-)

I guess it is plural as it includes science of multiple subjects.

I've lived in Canada for 5 years now and I find myself saying "math" from time-to-time. It's damn annoying.

All these Americanisms are seeping into my language.

We're coming back to England for a visit this Christmas for a fortnight, just in time to top up my Yorkshire accent. ;)

The British have no clue about proper English, and haven't for some time. Why, even back in G. B. Shaw's day, the famous Professor Henry Higgens described the ongoing "cold-blooded murder of the English tongue".

He must have known what he was talking about, 'cause decades later they even made a stupendously succesful movie about that guy.

;-)

I've learned over the years that nobody speaks "proper English" any more than anybody ever did. Such a thing just doesn't exist.

The language is a mishmash of different bits and pieces cobbled together from here and there. There are more exceptions than there are rules.

A lot of the "yank-isms" are hangovers from colonial times where usage between the British and Colonies were more aligned and the US and British versions have just gone on their independent merry ways over time.

BTW, although I do count myself as "British" I am primarily English. A lot of people over here in Canada refer to my accent as British, which I find quite amusing since the Scots, Welsh, Irish, Cornish, Cockneys, Brummies etc all sound as different to me as someone from the US.

A case in point, the character Daphne from Frasier is supposed to be English from what I gather. From my perspective, she has a very definite Irish twang.

@skelband: What you describe happens in every language. In Hebrew, for example, modern terms often are borrowed from English or other languages and then made to sound more like Hebrew. I was listening to a news report, for example, and like most parliamentary democracies Israel has a coalition government. The Hebrew word for coalition is "coalitzia." I wonder where they got that from :)

@caitlyn:

Hah, my wife is Welsh and they have all sorts of things grafted into the Welsh language now.

Such gems as Ambiulans for ambulance and sosban for sauce pan.

[Edit] Correction, that should be ambiwlans, of course.

Want to hear some Tinglish ( Thai-Englisgh )

Shee wit guen loi no limit.

Meaning is something like.life has no limit-never ends-ethernal life.

Difficult to give exact meaning

@skelband: You can tell those aren't authentic Welsh words. They have vowels.

@caitlyn: You mean Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwyll-llantysiliogogogoch isn't Welsh, even though it's in Wales?

@caitlyn: Hebrew is an ancient language, and from what I understand, it wasn't even spoken much until the state of Israel was created; it underwent a revival at that point. So of course, being several thousand years old, it had to borrow a lot of words to describe modern concepts that didn't exist in the bronze age, such as coalition governments. Lots of languages borrow words from each other, but English is especially adept at it (which of course is why, as skelband says, there's more exceptions than rules, and also why English has by far the largest vocabulary of any language).

@Khamul: Your history is a bit faulty in that Hebrew was revived by Zionists in the 19th century after dying out as a living language during the Middle Ages. There was already a thriving Hebrew press under Ottoman rule in what is now Israel and it was used far later than the bronze age. So pardon me if I don't take your word about English being more adept or having a larger vocabulary than any other language on the planet.

@Khamul

Actually "modern Hebrew" was "revived" (in many respects, essentially invented) about the 1880's, considerably before the re-establishment of the modern state of Israel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_Hebrew_language

In its way, this was a feat nearly as remarkable as the creation of Esperanto (which coincidentally was about the same time, and by a jewish doctor).

@Bernard_Swiss: The article you cite (which is mostly, but not entirely accurate) puts the revival of the Hebrew language as far back as the early 19th century and points out that it was spoken in Jerusalem at least 50 years before the revival movement was formalized. It certainly predates Eliezer Ben Yehuda's work in the 1880s and the first aliyah.

More important than any given date is the fact that a language which had died out as a spoken language was revived and now has millions of native speakers. That has never happened with any other language.

What is your source for the claim that modern Hebrew is "invented"? Hebrew was taught as a liturgical language throughout the period during which there was no Jewish state. People could read it and understand it throughout that time.

Quoting:"coalitzia." I wonder where they got that from :)

Sounds Slavic to me, not Germanic.

It's from English. English is probably second only to Arabic in terms of languages from which words borrowed into modern Hebrew.

@caitlyn

"in many respects, essentially invented" (I did phrase it that way, with reason) because the world had moved on, while Hebrew had remained in use for little more than liturgical and Rabbinical uses. It had also diverged in its use by different populations into different dialects. Even the Jeruselem Hebrew you noted, was a sort of pidgin used for commerce.

For example, Eliezer Ben Yehuda himself noted that his wife found his insistence on a strictly Hebrew speaking household extremely onerous and frustrating, because she couldn't do something as simple as ask him how he would like his coffee, and he had to admit that the Hebrew of the time wasn't really suitable for the task.

And there were, inevitably perhaps, political power struggles over how and in what directions the modernization should take place (and even whether it should, or whether some other modern language should be adopted instead).

None of this, of course, diminishes the impressive accomplishment of the Jewish pioneers who undertook this major and never before attempted task, of reviving a virtually dead language used chiefly for a relatively narrow range of largely ceremonial uses, and successfully transformed it into a healthy and robust fruition once again, as a fully developed modern tongue suited for all fields of human thought and activity. Most people don't even understand what a truly remarkable achievement this was.

@BS --

We shouldn't forget the preservationist work done by our porcine cousins with pig latin.

@Khamul: "....English has by far the largest vocabulary of any language"

I don't know if that is true or not, but English certainly has the largest redundancy of any language I've come across. The fact that there are so many synonyms makes it possible to have crosswords, which don't really work as well in other languages.

I do know French has a lot of words that don't really have any kind of suitable equivalent in English, like provocateur and we "borrow" phrases like "déjà vu" to augment it. Some people don't like this "perversion" of the language, but I think it is one of the great strengths that English can pull in a lot of these things without morphing them to fit the rules of the language. I still find it kinda weird to see new words adopted into other languages (like Welsh and French) but mangled so that they seem more French or Welsh.

I stand corrected on the exact dates, but my point was that it hasn't been in widespread, continuous use for all that time. Bernard's comments are very enlightening here.

As for vocubulary, the people who write the OED basically agree with me, with a few caveats: http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/is-it-true-that-english-... And almost every language borrows words from other languages (either as-is, or corrupting them to fit in with the language better). No language is "pure"; they change over time with contact with other tribes and languages; that's why languages are all arranged by linguists into families, with other languages that they're similar to.