The english language: Awesome

[Gark the Goblin]

This language has little standardisation (f%&%ing grammar! how does it work!). It has become the trade language of Europe and most industrialised countries encourage its practice. Every subculture has its own obscure phrases, definitions, and even grammar and words themselves.* Its current rate of evolution is insane.**

Of course, English is f#+%ing up the integrity of all other languages. If languages can be said to evolve, English is the protobacterium in the primordial petri dish that "decided" not to share its genes and only to take genes from others, thus becoming the only ancestor of all life. Or kudzu.

*Perhaps the modern era will be seen by historians as the Cambrian explosion of sublanguages? Except the explosion had a lot of diversity in root lineages but whatever.
**Okay probably not because it just seems this way to us because we speak the language but whatever.

Would you like to play a game?

[General Silliness]

Ending a sentence with a preposition is something up with which I will not put.

Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.

[Gark the Goblin]

Paizo should just stop editing their products. They're called "quirks!"

Basically what I'm saying here is that Dinosaur Comics broke my crazy editing skillz/anality.

[Prof Chaos]

This Prof. Chaos post is brought to you by Skittles, taste the rainbow.

Hey kids! It's that time again. It's Prof. Chaos time.

Children yelling: Yay!

Prof. Chaos: The checkers of the north are upon us. Stifle the hose with my other wheel.

This has been another presentation of Prof. Chaos

[Evil Lincoln]

"English is a language that makes up for in obscurity what it lacks in style." -Stoppard

[Fruit Slaad]

Prof Chaos wrote:

This Prof. Chaos post is brought to you by Skittles, taste the rainbow.

Hey kids! It's that time again. It's Prof. Chaos time.

Children yelling: Yay!

Prof. Chaos: The checkers of the north are upon us. Stifle the hose with my other wheel.

This has been another presentation of Prof. Chaos

Skittles consistently turn up in randomly generated space. It's almost a law of the universe.

Cbagbeg!

[Azazyll]

English won the language game because it was willing to chase all the other languages down dark alleys and club them brutally while stealing their nouns. Which is appropriate, considering the British Empire.

But seriously, learn Old English, and then come back to me and tell me Modern English is difficult. And I will laugh at you.

[Shadowborn]

This.

[Bruno Kristensen]

English is more a highly developed and complex pidgin than a proper language, by which I mean no disrespect. But it has a Germanic base (the grammar is mostly Germanic and the 100 most used words are all of Germanic origin), with a heavy influence of Romance languages (through Norman/French and Latin, mostly), and Arabic (most words related to science, astronomy, etc., often through Latin), but with many words from many and varied sources, including native American languages (barbecue, canoe, moose, woodchuck, chocolate, and many more), African (cola, jazz, banjo, zombie, etc.) and Asian (candy, cot, peacock, rice, teak, etc.), and other languages.

Ultimately, English is possibly the most hybrid language, most open to new words from other sources, not only in the "open" word classes (mostly nouns and verbs), but also the closed (personal pronouns, for instance, almost never get adopted from other languages, yet, the third person plurals (they, their, and them) replaced the Anglo-Saxon/Old English (hiē/hēo, hiē/hīo, hiera/heora, him), because these were too similar to the third person singular pronouns, for instance.

[nategar05]

As near as I can tell, the Cambrian explosion of language happened a few thousand years ago.