And lo, the screen fell wine dark

Nothing is interesting, but anything can be. It depends on your point of view, the context of information you bring to bear.

I've been reading about the history of English, and I'm both delighted and disoriented by the parallels between Old English and the modern Dutch I hear (and try to speak) every day. Infinitives that end in -n, participles that begin with ge-, cognates, vowel sounds, verb placement. The word numb, for example, comes from Old English niman (modern Dutch nemen) meaning "to take". It's actually kind of creepy. Now a typical, everyday phone call is like travelling back over a thousand years to pre-Norman Britain, when grave Saxon warriors tore at the dark heavens with sharp lamentations about their cable service.

Comments

[niblettes]

I've always thought of English as the sort of Linux of languages (wow, that was a geeky reference): Its open, flexible, a mashup of many contributions from many other languages and cultures that actually do work together, it has many usability problems and it is in a perpetual beta.

The English language is also in these ways very similar to English gardens and English common law (again, relatively open, free, wild, a little messy, and flexible).

[Jeffre Jackson]

And French would be AOL: a curated, walled garden.