No wonder English is such a hard language to learn.

[Ps2Huang]

I found out English alphabetics and grammar were originated from Hebrew culture long time ago, then modified by Greek and Latin as time passed by. Why did they have to borrow stuffs from Hebrew in ancient world? No wonder English has such an idiotic grammar which I feel hard to learn and use. Also the words are combined in theyr means, that makes English vocabulary hard to memorzie.

[pgrmdave]

English borrows a lot from many different languages. We borrow a lot of our more common words from German, and a lot of our less common words from Latin. However, because of the constant influence of many, many different cultures on english speaking people, from invasions of Britain, to colonial expansion, to the technological expansion today, English has become a melting pot of many different languages, with, if I'm not mistaken, many more words in it than most other languages. I believe (I'll confirm this later, if I can find it) that english has something like 2 million words, while French, for comparison, has around 600,000.

[Ps2Huang]

Originally Posted by pgrmdave

English borrows a lot from many different languages. We borrow a lot of our more common words from German, and a lot of our less common words from Latin. However, because of the constant influence of many, many different cultures on english speaking people, from invasions of Britain, to colonial expansion, to the technological expansion today, English has become a melting pot of many different languages, with, if I'm not mistaken, many more words in it than most other languages. I believe (I'll confirm this later, if I can find it) that english has something like 2 million words, while French, for comparison, has around 600,000.

So you mean English history has not many to do with Hebrew history? Those a,b,c alphabetics were originated from Hebrew, were they?

[Ps2Huang]

and by the way, are you trying to say nowadays English has less to do with Latin?

[pgrmdave]

Most of the common words that we use, along with a lot of the grammer, are more germanic than romantic, I think.

[Ps2Huang]

Germanic is fine, I lvoe German. But I am concerned that English alphabetics were from Hebrew?

[Buffy]

Originally Posted by Ps2Huang

Germanic is fine, I lvoe German. But I am concerned that English alphabetics were from Hebrew?

Um, why does it "concern" you that its from Hebrew?

Chauvinistically concerned,
Buffy

[Ps2Huang]

As a matter of fact, I had obstacles to communicate with Hebrews, plus they are mean. So that makes me hard to learn English.

[Buffy]

Originally Posted by Ps2Huang

... I had obstacles to communicate with Hebrews, plus they are mean.....

Ah, I see...

Faint praise,
Buffy

[Qfwfq]

Not all Jews are mean, I am quite against certain things myself but there are also positive things in Jewish culture. Just like in any ethinc group, there may be bad and good people. Please remember the rules concerning racism or derogatory posts.

The same goes for other European alphabets as for the English. The Greek and Latin alphabets were derived from the Semitic alephbets, not so specifically from the Hebrew. Anyway that shouldn't make English more difficult to learn and grammer has nothing to do with the origin of the alphabet.

The Semitic alephbets, including the Arabic, came in turn from use of a few of the Egyptian heiroglyphs to denote the initial consonantal sound of the corresponding word. The letter d was indicated with the heiroglyph for door, that began with the same d sound. Greek had much more need to indicate vowels and no need for some consonantal sounds such as 'h' or a glottal stop, so the Greek scribes used a few symbols for vowels.

For instance 'a' is from the Greek alpha, in turn from the Semitic Aleph which originally indicated a glottal stop. In Arabic it is still a vertical line and derived from the heiroglyph for 'rejoice', hallel, which presumably didn't have the initial h sound but a glottal stop. The heiroglyph was a guy with arms straight up.

The Semitic he became the Greek epsilon from whence the Latin e, but soon a letter h also crept into Latin writing.

The Semitic vau originally represented the consonantal sounds of v and w as pronounced in English, the current name of the letter is something like "waw" in Arabic and "vav" in Persian, but it also gave birth to the vowels o and u, as well as being behind the history of the letter f.