this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2025
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I've always said that English isn't a language, it's three languages in a trench coat stabbing and robbing other languages in a seedy back alley, rifling through their pockets for words and loose grammar.
What language doesn't match this description? People keep saying this like english is more built out of other languages than the others and, like, how do you think other languages are made? Do you expect someone to just suddenly come up with "anireslurp" for "table" and everyone in the country just uses it?
While loanwords are probably a thing in any language, there are definitely languages that seem to be a bit stricter with grammar, I think? I'd say German is an example.
Japanese is crazy with loanwords though. They steal them and if that's not enough they put the japanizing bean on it, so air conditioning becomes エアコン (romanization of that word again is eakon)
German has more rules with cases and whatnot but a lot of that is ignored in day to day speech, especially in certain sociolects. Similarly the syntax of German sometimes gets slightly altered in spoken German.
It's not that loanwords are a thing in all languages, it's that they are everything. A non-loanword would be a word without a historical etymology. There are some in physics, and everyone is laughing at them "quarks"
Some languages or populations may be stricter with their grammars, but I guarantee you they stole that grammar. A few things changed over time of course, but it's going to be very similar to how they talked before, mixed with how other people around them talked. You can't just make up new grammar and hope people will understand it (see attached Lojban)
I love how Japan just uses the first two or three syllables and stops there with loanwords. "First Kitchen" becoming "Fakkin" has got to be my favorite.
The Japanese word for television is television.
I think it's テレビ(terebi) but that's probably what you meant.
You'll have to define what you mean by "stricter with grammar" here - speakers of all languages make grammaticality judgments equally easily. What about German grammar makes it "stricter" than English?
I'm not really sure. It feels stricter, or maybe more precise because there are more grammatical rules like the four cases for Nomen and such.