English Customs Department

[Sturm]

Well, the Shetland isalnds are tiny, I'm not really sure to what extent they were even populated prior to Viking settlement, certainly the population is genetically (and culturally) closer to Norway than Scotland.

 

I'm not really that bothered by American English, I think English has always been quite a fluid, changeable language and you'd be hard pressed to avoid Americanisms now, English tends to absord and exchange words readily, far more so than say French or German as you have mentioned. I suspect that with grammar simplification once momentum is gained it's hard to stop.

 

I guess with Slavic languages they're a very old group of languages and spoken by a wide number of peoples for a long time so maybe that has insulated them against grammar simplification? Just a thought, I'm far from an expert on this. I remember reading an article on the language the Goths spoke, we know it was in the Germanic group but we have next to no records of it. I imagine that it was probably at least as grammatically complex as Slavic languages so it probably didn't offer anything above those languages as a lingua franca, and died out for whatever reasons. Maybe because the Slavic languages were more widely spoken and learning another highly inflected language was just harder work, ultimately language has to be useful for communication and learning any language requires a lot of time and effort.

You'd be surprised.

 

The Slavic languages were probably the last Indo-European language family to diverge into separate languages. In fact, they were the LAST family to diverge. Most evidence tends to point that Proto-Slavic still existed into the 11th century. That surpasses the development of any Indo European language family that I am aware of by a long time, unless you count Romance languages (which does not really count because the Romance languages are a subfamily of the Italic family, which all diverged from each other thousands of years ago). To give perspective, the earliest attested fragments of Germanic languages were Elder Futhark inscriptions from the 1st or 2nd centuries, which were, even then, a diverged Germanic language. Gothic was first attested a hundred or so years later, with Ulfila's translation of the New Testament. That translation has survived in several forms, and because of that, Gothic is actually more well-understood than you would think.

 

This is part of the reason why most Slavic languages share a massive degree of mutual intelligibility with each other (I've heard accounts of Slovaks understanding Ukrainians, and Czechs understanding, well...Slovaks, but also Slovenes, Poles, and possibly Russians. Polish speakers can generally understand Belarusians pretty well, probably more so than Russians can understand Belarusians, but Belarusians can also understand Russians pretty well). I don't speak any Slavic languages, but I have a fair bit of knowledge of them regardless. From a glance, I would say Czech, in the west, and Russian, in the east, share upwards of ~70% of their vocabulary with each other. That is pretty impressive. Try putting a native English speaker, with no knowledge of German, up against a naive German speaker. It is unlikely the English speaker will understand a single word. Same can be said for certain Romance languages. An Italian is not going to understand a word a Romanian is saying. With regards to North Germanic languages, a Norwegian will certainly not understand anything an Icelander is saying. Swedes can barely understand Danes from what I've heard).

 

Slovene is probably the most difficult language for other Slavic speakers to understand. I cannot really explain why though.

 

Also, I want to add that despite what so-called 'experts' say about Romance languages, none of them are similar to Latin in any significant way. Classical Latin is a much, much different language than any Romance language, including Italian. It is not even close.

 

 

Anyways, sorry that I derailed the entire purpose of this thread. I really love languages, as you can probably tell. Whenever I have a viable opportunity, I will try to start talking about this stuff, lol.

[Gunnman]

I really enjoyed reading this. If you would like to go on more about different languages, you should make a thread on the off topic section.

 

I don't know if you'd want to, but I rather enjoy reading peoples opinions on random things like this.

[TheFull9]

[super64]

I've learned two things from this thread, firstly, UK customs can't be trusted to put together an M4, no surprise there, and secondly, as a Geordie I'm part Norse God, who knew!

 

Getting back to the original point though, I suppose anything that comes into and out of the U.K. needs to be checked. Especially if that thing looks like an assault rifle and is then going on to Ireland. There are still people both in the North and South of Ireland who are wanting to kick the troubles off again and are wanting access to weapons. I think there would be serious questions asked of U.K. Border Force if they weren't thoroughly checking that sort of thing and just letting them sail through. It's common sense really, just as stuff coming into the U.K and remaining here would have to be thoroughly checked. In Icolater's case you'll have trouble proving that the damage was caused by U.K. Border Force and not by the original seller. It's a shame for you that Britain is obviously one of the hubs for items be shipped into Ireland from abroad and so they'll always be inspected by U.K. Border Force.

[icolater]

Yes a very valid point indeed, but the Irish Custom do just that without damaging the merchandise. Still no word back from an post about the complaint I made. I would imagine they did nothing about it. I'm well over it by now, but I was very upset at the time.