WhiningKhan said:
Humus said:
The English language pretty much ended up this way because of British imperialism in the old days, spreading it around the globe, mixing it up with local languages, and mostly mixing it up with french during the endless numbers of wars between the brits and french.
Actually, I remember my English teacher telling us that a large role in the messed up spelling and grammar of the language was played by the Norman invasion of the Anglo-Saxon Britain in the 11th century. So, as a true Englishman, he rolled the blame over to France.
Maybe the reason for us (the foreigners) making less spelling errors is that only the l33t ones are bold enough to post in a foreign language. People who don't trust their linguistical skills are less likely to voluntarily use foreign language.
The language has borrowed words from all over the place, due to the habit of people to keep invading.
The ancient languages that form English are
Angles (Germans around 400AD). This is the real base of English.
Danes (Danish/Viking invader owned alot of Britain at various times)
French (Normans in 1066AD)
Welsh (Welsh Gaelic/Celtic, the original language of the England/Briton)
Scotch/Irish (both are closely related)
Latin (Romans, lived here for 400 years)
Hebrew (Christians can't lend money, so we have a big Jewish community)
Greek (we just liked it I think...)
The modern era is based on 'free trade' AKA British Imperilism, here we borrowed any words that described anything we liked. From tattoo to Bungalow (Polynesian and IIRC Bangla)
A sentence like "The tattoo on his skin was of a moose in a valley", involves about 5 difference languages (tattoo - polynesian, skin - danish, moose - native american, valley - celtic, basic structure - angles).