There are so many common words and phrases in English that came from the world of sailing, it's almost OVERWHELMING!Otherwords is a PBS web series on Storied...
is this unique to English? I imagine other colonial/naval languages have lots of sailor jargon too. Even in this video they mentioned a few of ours came from Dutch and French.
There are a bunch of expressions in Dutch, some even overlapping with English (like all hands on deck/alle hens aan dek). I could think of five to ten off the top of my head, so I imagine there are a lot more that aren’t as obvious.
I’d love to hear a few more! I came across some Frisian media once. It wasn’t mutually intelligible with English, but it seemed close. I could understand some fragments and meaning, much like the native English speaker could pick up some stuff from romance languages. It’s so weird to see how languages bump up and into(out of?) each other.
is this unique to English? I imagine other colonial/naval languages have lots of sailor jargon too. Even in this video they mentioned a few of ours came from Dutch and French.
There are a bunch of expressions in Dutch, some even overlapping with English (like all hands on deck/alle hens aan dek). I could think of five to ten off the top of my head, so I imagine there are a lot more that aren’t as obvious.
I’d love to hear a few more! I came across some Frisian media once. It wasn’t mutually intelligible with English, but it seemed close. I could understand some fragments and meaning, much like the native English speaker could pick up some stuff from romance languages. It’s so weird to see how languages bump up and into(out of?) each other.
Frisian is an entirely different beast, and even speaking Dutch doesn’t help you that much to make sense of it.