for the unaware out there, our numbers come directly from Arabic
Yes they do. and thank the Arabs very much.....but they come from Arabic, not because the words/descriptions came from the Arabic family tree, but because the CONCEPT did. The numbers, and "0" for that matter. WE were stuck with 'roman numerals' up to that point. And no place holder zero, either.
Without them we would be toast, as any sort of modern civilization. However, that's not 'language,' that's math. They had to teach us the entire concept so that we, as a global civilization, could plug it in.
But Arabic numerals don't have anything to do with language trees, Lyndon. Indo-European is one tree...and you will find neither Arabic nor Hebrew in it. Afro-Asiatic is the one where you find Arabic and other semitic languages. (shrug) Indo-European branches out itself...West Germanic (that's us...) the "Romance" languages that came from Latin and include Spanish, Portuguese, French, etc, . Baltic-Slavic, which gave birthto Russian, Croatian, Ukrainian and the languages related to them, and "indo-Iranian" (which is actually just Indo European without the fancy branching) which ended up as Hindi, Bengali, etc.
Of all the languages from all the 'trees,' English is the most opportunistic. Unlike many, if not most, other languages, there is no council that attempts to keep the 'purity' of the language. The French have one, and so do the Spanish. Germans do, too....I THINK. I could be wrong about that.
But the English don't.
English grabs vocabulary whenever it can find it, to use for whatever is needed. If there is a concept we need to find a word for, and we don't have it but someone else does, we'll grab it. We've been doing that since the Normans invaded the British Isles. And English speakers have been trying to pretend that English is something it's not for centuries. Shoot, it's only been within the last fifty or sixty years that the academics have admitted that we have a Germanic grammar, not a Latin one. think about it, for those of you who are old enough...HOW many times were you told as a kid that you couldn't split an infinitive?
That's because languages with Latin roots CAN'T. the French can't. The Spanish can't...but we do it all the time. You know, "to boldly go' where no-one has gone before?
But our VOCABULARY is huge...because we steal it from everybody. So yeah, we have Arabic words....NOW. WE have Spanish ones and French ones (a LOT of French ones, actually) and Mandarin ones and Tagalog ones--but they are all 'modern.' That is, our 'corral' is just like the current Spanish corral. We don't have a different word that can be traced back to "corral.'
This isn't about which language is 'better.' It's just....the way it is. There are many languages that have 'better' or more accurate terms for something than English does. When we see one of those, we'll swipe it and adopt it as our own.
And this is, I think, one of the reasons that English is the most often spoken and taught 'second language' in the world. It steals, unabashedly and gleefully, all the best stuff from everybody else.
Mind you, English has no problem robbing words from other languages; English is very much a 'bastardized tongue.' We'll steal from anybody.
