spanish, english, what the.....?

[TheBigRaguPB4L]

why is it that in the us, we speak english, and in mexico, they speak spanish? aren't we american countries? the languages from england and spain are different than they are here and in mexico. shouldn't they get renamed or something? not to offend anyone but this was jsut on my mind and wanted to know if anyone else agreed with me. ok this is a dumb thread, but i still want to kknow.

[Havoc_online]

North and South America were branded so by Spain a long long time ago, Mexico already had it's language. Our English did orginiate from England.

[Hasty8]

The main Mexican version of spanish is actually an amalgamation of old world spanish and the derivitive of the Aztec and Mayan languages.

Also, English became more widespread in North America because It was mostly controlled by the English. They either bought it outright frmo other rival nations or fought for it.

Spain headed south and took over much of South America. Remember that Christoph Columbus, though he was Italian, actually sailed under the flag of Spain and he landed more in the Southern areas then in the Northern to Spain already had a very large pressence in South America.


France pretty much got kicked of the continent entirely except for Quebec.

[PyRo]

I live in NY, when I talk to people from California, places out there, neighboring states, or in some cases just differant parts of the state there is a noticable differance in speech (what kind of person calls a hero a submarine). Should we have several differant languages desingnated to each state? I speak New York Long Islandish, what language do you speak?

[Army]

Columbus never set foot on either continent, he only found the Spice Islands....'cept they were never lost in the first place......

The first Continental Congress nearly voted to make German our national language, but Ben Franklin called it a barbaric sounding tongue and they settled on English instead. Nobody at the time understood French, except for the Canadians (and we already kicked their butts 50 years prior!)

Puerto Rico speaks a more pure form of "espana" than Mexico, since as it was already noted, the Mexican language is a muddle of Indian and Spanish.

To answer the question; we should be speaking Italian. America is named for Amerigo Vespucci, but only because his travels were more widely disseminated than Columbus' were.
Amerigo landed on and plotted much of the eastern seaboard of South America. His second journey took him as far north as Nova Scotia. He was accredited with the American name in more modern times by Ralph Waldo Emerson in an essay on discoveries in the new world.



Pyro! Whutcha talkin' bou? We's don' have no accent like yous do, so fuggedabowdit!

[J]

Hey just out of curiosity, why German? I was thinking of a new language that took the best part of all languages now, a global language. But that's impratical and would be expensive. Maybe we could just reform english, its a pretty messed up language.

As for accents, who calls a Sub a Hero???

[TheBigRaguPB4L]

if i'm not mistaken, which i could be, we messed up the english lauguage. cantractions, abbrev., ect, where all the idiocies that we created and added to really mess up the language we call "english". like i said, i really don't know about the actual british english, but i think we messed up the american english.

[MagMan5446]

In my opinion, Spanish would/should be the global language if we ever have one. It's so simple and easy to learn.

Either that or Italian, it's so fun to talk in Italian.

[irbodden]

Originally posted by MagMan5446
In my opinion, Spanish would/should be the global language if we ever have one. It's so simple and easy to learn.

Sigh-

Do you even speak any Spanish? Spanish is WAY more difficult than English in many aspects. Look at verbs in Spanish, 6 diffrent forms for each verb depending on who performs the action- multiple diffrent types of stem changing verbs etc.

The only part which may be diffcult about learning English would be the many sayings of ours that make no literal sense.

[Thor the Mighty]

why not pig latan? thats such a sweet anguagelay

[Hasty8]

Originally posted by irbodden


Sigh-

Do you even speak any Spanish? Spanish is WAY more difficult than English in many aspects. Look at verbs in Spanish, 6 diffrent forms for each verb depending on who performs the action- multiple diffrent types of stem changing verbs etc.

The only part which may be diffcult about learning English would be the many sayings of ours that make no literal sense.

Sorry irbodden but you are wrong here. Out of all the Anglo-Saxon languages English is the hardest. French, spanish and Italian all follow very specific conjugation rules with an exception of like 100 words or so.

English pretty much has it's own rules for each verb.

[Hasty8]

Originally posted by Army
Columbus never set foot on either continent, he only found the Spice Islands....'cept they were never lost in the first place......

ACtually, Army, Columbus visited five islands in the Bahamas before reaching Cuba. He named these (in order) San Salvador, Santa Maria de la Concepcion, Fernandina, Isabela, and Las Islas de Arena. The last of these has been identified (almost universally) with the modern Ragged Islands in the Bahamas. The first four are in dispute. To avoid confusion with modern placenames, the first four are referred to in Roman numerals as Island I through Island IV. The native names for these islands were Guanahani for Island I and Samoete (or Saomete or Samoet) for Island IV. The native names for Island II and Island III were not recorded.

To be totally honest the true location of where Columbus first landed is apoint that is still in contention with almost all scholars even to this very day.

[TheBigRaguPB4L]

don't tell army about columbus and such. he knows, he was there, right?

[J]

English pretty much has it's own rules for each verb.

Thats true, I'm taking Italian in school and their rules are pretty straight-foward and not deviated from. But here are the some words that I do not think make sense in English:

Through- no, its thru, not thraht
Kansas and Arkansas - same ending, different sound
tear(drop) and tear(rip)- same spelling, differnet sound
Phone- c'mon, it fone, and what's with that silent "e" at the end of our words??? It somethimes makes a difference, but its so inconsistant that it does not matter.

[Thordic]

English is one of the hardest languages to learn. It takes german and some latin and beats it with a confusing stick (English is a germanic language for those who don't know).

The romance languages (Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, etc) are some of the easiest to learn.

I think the worst language as far as pronunciation goes though has to be gaelic. I'm not sure about verb forms, but it follows no conventional phonetic forms You could probably read german, french, italian, etc, outloud and still be somewhat understandable. You couldn't do that with Gaelic.