English was actually degrading before the Norse and Norman invaders...

This is a matter of orthography, not grammar.

Orthography has good rules to follow, tighter than grammatical objections. But at the same time, the spelling of "principle" vs "principal" is entirely arbitrary, and the assignment of denotation is entirely arbitrary. And thus there is no good "rule" between them, except convention.

As per the sibling post, and quoting from a cousin post of mine:

It's called Negative Agreement.

"I don't have any books" is ok, but "*I have any books" is wrong.

"I didn't go anywhere" is ok, but "*I went anywhere" is wrong.

Replacing "any" with "no" to form Negative Agreement doesn't actually change the state of the negation. It just changes the term used to construct Negative Agreement.

It's called Negative Agreement.

"I don't have any books" is ok, but "*I have any books" is wrong.

"I didn't go anywhere" is ok, but "*I went anywhere" is wrong.

Replacing "any" with "no" to form Negative Agreement doesn't actually change the state of the negation. It just changes the term used to construct Negative Agreement.

Indeed! And agreed!

AH YES! The past perfect form... the form that literally says "this happened, but is over now"

"When I was fooled, it was because I wasn't careful enough."

There's a different word between "were" and "was" in the conditionals, and so humans want and desire to create a reason for why they are different. Sometimes, they're just two different ways of saying something.

Indeed, the situation is more nuanced than one pithy little quote can do justice to. It's just a phrase that linguists tend to use, because they are confronted almost constantly by people insisting that some language is just a dialect or some dialect is actually a language. Often, this is for political reasons (which I shortened to reinforcing the "us" vs "them" cultural difference.). I am aware that Moldova has since changed their official language to Romanian, not Moldovan, so there's some recognition coming to the area in the last 10 years since I studied linguistics in college...

But yes, everything you posted here is awesome, thank you for expanding upon my original post.

"mutually intelligible" is unfortunately a continuum, rather than a binary quality. It stands though that Scandinavian languages are closer to each other than some Spanishs or Arabics.

I wouldn't because I don't know "redneck" dialect well enough. But if two people speaking a common dialect wish to celebrate a contract in a dialect other than the formal register of the country in which they live, then I say, go for it!

Contracts, resumes, etc, are all written in a certain register (smaller than a dialect) because that is the appropriate register for the audience. However, would you walk into an urban depressed neighborhood and go around using the Received Pronunciation register? No, it's not appropriate, because of audience mismatch.

But punishing a group of people just because the formal register of power in their country is significantly more different from that spoken by a privileged class that need not learn the hojillion needling rules... that's not right.

I think it's important that a possible change of heart internally is seen by any of the other members. A lot of time when I read about instances where people get sucked into, say, a Nigerian money scam or worse Scientology, it often becomes a serious issues because they were first tricked into giving a little bit of money and then a little more until it's a sizable sum in total. At that point it's very hard to get out because you're mentally holding yourself prisoner there with the logic that if you quit now, you've lost that investment and you're going to look like an idiot. But, through inaction, you maintain the outward appearance of knowing what you are doing and your investment is still good -- hell, it's even growing because they need another small to medium sized payment. And down down down you go into the trap. It takes a lot to not chase your bets and to say, "I fucked up by giving them the $99 applicant fee but better quit now than waste anymore time and resources. Lesson learned."

And I think the fact that a DOCTOR (no matter what kind or what validity) says, "I paid the money, I saw they were preparing me for the biggest snuff film ever and I got out." Well, now the average person involved in this project can say, "He is right, I came to the same realization, I'm no stupider than this academic." This is why there are support groups out there for gambling problems and cults escapees. The ideafication of your exit is sometimes important than your ability to make your own decision ... because without that your decision only has one option and it's the wrong option.

After I learned German, "wherefore" stopped confusing me. "dagegen" "darüber" "danaben" all of them composed of "there" and a preposition. The corresponding question words for them are "wogegen" "worüber" "woneben". Or "where-preposition". And where is used even when the preposition doesn't refer to a location, but an idea. (persons are composed of "preposition who"). "Wofür hast du das gemacht?" (For what purpose did you do that?)

Knowing how German works yields great insight into the grammatical usage of the English used by Shakespeare. Because English has been traveling towards a "creole-like" grammar for a very long time... i.e. before the norman invaders, and before the norse invaders.

Actually, watching Beowulf (the "horrible" CGI one, which for amateur linguists wasn't horrible at all, because OMG OLD ENGLISH THIS IS AWESOME!), I was kind of actually able to understand Grendel... or more accurately, with subtitles I could pick out words whose meaning I could accurately place in them.

I'm not talking about your humorous Sarah Silverman satire video but the actual people who misappropriate a joke for their own. I've seen it on Facebook where someone reads a joke on Reddit or XKCD or SMBC and just rehashes it as their own idea in a post knowing that no one else out there could possibly be wasting their time on something like SMBC. Do you see this as frequently as I do? In all honesty does this bother you or merely flatter you? Is it just a natural unavoidable quality of memes or do you think it's more sinister?

How do you respond to the criticism that by widely distributing your single use monocles to teenagers and adults, you'll be making highbrow socializing safer and therefore increase it to immoral levels?

Have there been any times you feared you went too far with your humor? If not, when have you received the most mail asserting that you did?