[SuziQ]

Heh, I live in MA, but am from MS, so these folks have a hard time understanding me, sometimes!

I found a cute t-shirt at AnimeBoston this year. It reads "English does not borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them down, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar." I got it for our #1 son, an English major who is finishing Law School this year.

[Question_Assumptions]

In many ways, English is a pidgin of Danish, Anglo-Saxon, and Norman French with vocabulary borrowed from a lot of other sources. That's why it's fairly easy to speak it well enough to be understood.

By the way, if it weren't for Latin-educated academics who couldn't bear to use anglicized Latin words rather than properly declined Latin words and couldn't write an English grammer without claiming that you shouldn't split your infinitives, well, because you just can't do that in Latin, we wouldn't have mugged Latin for it's grammar. Instead, we'd be happily talking about indexes, datums, genuses, and so on without Latin grammar pedants telling us it's improper.