I never enjoyed the X-Men movies all that much, but always appreciated Hugh Jackman as Wolverine.

I couldn't really tell you a damn thing that happens in any of the movies or much about X-Men in general. Can I enjoy Logan as a standalone experience with basically no knowledge of the franchise?

I think you'll love it then.

There's a few weird moments where if you didn't see an earlier movie, you won't know who a character is or know exactly what they're referencing, but those are few and far between, and mostly explained via the course of the film so you'll get it later on (I missed a few films, and that's how I felt watching this, anyway).

Again, the only thing that bothered me was the stuff that was different from the comics. If you don't go in with that knowledge, you'll be able to enjoy the film fully for what it is. A great action film with an interesting coming of age story about an extremely late bloomer.

There was a lot of ret-conning (LOTS of it) vs the comics, but I enjoyed the film a lot. It was a complete story with good acting and amazing action.

I'm not super knowledgeable about Comics, but I was under the impression that Days of Future past changed the timeline. So it's not so much a retcon as an alternate universe, similar to the Abrams Star Trek films.

That's usually how comics achieve what fans call retconning honestly. It's almost always either time travel or an alternate universe or even a combination of the two. Rather than restart a universe from scratch they pretty much always have some cataclysmic event cause changes to the timeline.

It kind of completely ignores the previous events anyway. It really focus on the "now" of the movie and on some events between it and the previous titles, so even if it hadn't had a timeline reboot, you would still be able to follow it without any troubles.

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This is long, like a full poop read, so I put in headings so it's easier to find your place.

Thank you! That was fantastically enlightening.

Your quartz-breathing metaphor is great, and I'm still laughing thinking about it. That makes perfect sense now.

For the purposes of the film, I'm willing to suspend my disbelief when it comes to the time traveling thing, since that's the conceit of the entire film (not actually time traveling, but having memories that are, as Vonnegut would put it, unstuck in time), but I now understand what you're saying about the linguistics being laughable. It's a shame. I loved that film, and - from my standpoint of linguistic ignorance - it was flawless. Design, direction, editing, acting, and story were all executed to a T without being overwrought.

Follow up questions: How does language and it's cultural use relate to thought? Since Japanese linguistic culture values creative metaphor, the kids growing up who are good at metaphors tend to view those who aren't as dumb. The language hasn't created that in their heads, but the culture has placed emphasis on developing a language that is well suited to that purpose, correct? Or like how Germans disdain use of the irregular words in their language (my professor in college told me to memorize all of the irregular words so that I might never accidentally use them), and value efficient speech (despite their language often being inefficient purely in terms of how long the words are). Is that a modern reaction to, shall we say, historically poor choices when it came time to making new words?

I know nothing about Japanese, but I don't find it implausible that people think that those who lack ability in a particular aspect of language are considered dumb. Speakers of ebonics are considered dumb by their apparent bad use of standard English grammar, despite the dialect having established and systematic rules.

Strong verbs

As for German, I find what he said not only untrue in experience, but also in prior plausibility. The Germanic strong verbs have their origin in Proto-Indo European ablaut, where aspect of the verb was marked with a vowel change, eg. give gave/geben gab. These maintain their old distinctions from 3000 years ago because the words are so common that they have resisted standardization into the -t of the modern preterite.

The less a word is used, the more likely it is to be supplanted by a new word or have its form changed. For example, if we look at English's hundred most used words, https://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/common-words-100.htm, they're almost all Germanic. These are original words from English (some exceptions are Old Norse derived words; I'll get to those later). Indeed, English's strong verbs show this. Many of our least used strong verbs are losing distinction, like bide, which is now mostly bide, bided, bided, as opposed to bide, bode, bidden.

So, again, I call bullshit.

Long words in German

Also, in terms of long words, it's just a compounding, and is no different than in English, except we put spaces in in our orthography. Think about something like a washing machine, or die Waschmaschine auf Deutsch, or vollautomatisch, fully automatic, or süßsauer, sweet and sour. This is no more inefficient than English. Indeed, it's exactly the same. We don't say "the washing the machine" or "the sweet and the sour sauce." We treat these multiple words as one, just with a space.

About valuing efficiency in German, I can't really speak to that. I haven't noticed it, but I know some Germans proclaim it, as do some English speakers.

I've also read that people think Americans are inventive because we have a language that easily accepts the creation of new words, but it seems you're saying it's more likely that we have a culture that easily accepts invention and thus we feel liberated to invent new words on our own, and that would be the same no matter which language we spoke?

Maybe, but it's probably more of a product of English and what happens when there is an accepted standard. In languages with a governing body, like German, Greek, Finnish, French, et cetera, there is often little language innovation, and you get a period of diglossia. That is, the spoken language and the written language diverge so they are hardly intelligible, until the standards either catch up with the speakers, like what happened in English's history, or until a new standard is made, like what happened in Greece.

A basic history of English, its influences from other languages, and word histories I enjoy

The English moved into England from Jutland, Anglia, and Saxony, and also probably from Frisia. They conquered the Celtic Britons, and pushed them to Wales and into Scotland. Incidentally, Wales comes from an Old English word for foreigner. The English started writing stuff down, not only in the futhorc runic alphabet, but in Latin script. This early period shows some loan words in from Latin, like monk, abbot, pope, and priest (guess who was spreading the Latin). Once the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were unified in the late 9th century, in Wessex a writing standard was developed, the West Saxon dialect. Virtually all Old English was written in this dialect, and there was nigh zero language innovation in the areas of England for which we have writing.

The Normans invaded in 1066, and almost overnight English changed. Lots of the old grammar rules died, and many of the words were replaced with Scandinavian words and Norman French words.

Regarding the Scandinavian words, they came in from the north. Indeed, when the Danelaw, the area ruled over by the Swedes and Danes in England, was established, there's very good evidence that the English spoken there became a creole, a mix of the two languages. They were mutually intelligible, but had some different rules. The rules got dropped, and we ended up losing a lot of our grammar rules this way.

Tons and tons of basic Norse words were borrowed into English, like knife, egg, kid, race, raft, same. The fact that these words are so basic indicates an extreme mixing of the languages. For example, pronouns she and they are from Norse. One of our most basic verb forms, are, is from Norse. It's unheard of to borrow pronouns. I'll show you how close the languages were.

Some words of Norse origin are still extant with their English counterparts. While we lost English ei, and gained egg, we kept English ditch and Norse dike. We kept bench and bank, shirt and skirt, ship and skip, bleach and bleak. Do you notice any trends there?

English had this tendency to soften words, where Old Norse kept some of the hard sounds. We also inherited a lot of violent words from the Vikings. They gave us die, thrust, slaughter, gun, scathe, hit, and so on.

The French gave us almost all of our high class Latin lexicon from the period between 1066-1500, the Middle English period. England was ruled by the Norman French, and English was a low class language. Indeed, there are more words directly from French origin than there are from Germanic languages in modern English. As a prestige language, French was seen as better than English. We can famously still see this in some words. Cow vs beef, lamb vs mutton, that kind of crap.

By the late middle ages and Renaissance, Latin and Greek words started coming in plus some normal French words, some even reborrowed. For example, we have capital, meaning money or head, and we have chattle, meaning money, and cattle, meaning cows. Those are all the same Latin word, but separated at different times. Norman French had cattle, and money was associated with owning livestock. Then we got chattel, which was applied to money only, then later we got capital, which also referred to money.

Amusingly, because capital comes from caput, Latin for head, we have a redundancy in an idiom. So now, when we say "head of cattle", it's like we're saying "head of head," but in two different languages. Even more amusing is this, though: caput and head are the same word. Germanic languages underwent some sound changes that are highly regularized from proto Indo European, the language that gave us both Latin and English. One is that Cs turn to Hs. Card in Latin is heart in English, or canis to hound. One is that ps turn into fs. Pisces turns to fishes. Pod turns to foot. Let's apply these transformations.

caput -> hefut.

The Old English word for head is heafod.

This type of thing also happened from French itself. We have ward from Norman French, as in Robin being Batman's ward, and we have guard, which came in from standard French, later. Norman French had a W where standard had Gu, which is why William went to War with the English, as opposed to GUillome going to GUerre with the English.

Eventually, French was no longer the language of the nobility, and English returned to its previous state as the language of government, but changed so much by French that it was almost more French than English.

Before English could catch its breath, the renaissance and elightenment happened. English imported so many Greek and Latin words, the words direct from Latin in modern English began to outnumber the words from our Germanic base language. These had prestige, and a new hierarchy in English words formed.

In Ancient Rome, Greek was thought to be a high class language, and so it still is in Modern English. Consider the following words.

Smell, scent, aroma. Sweet, sugary, saccharine.

These are two sets of synonyms, but they seem to get progressively fancier. The first is a Germanic word, the middle is a French/Latin word, and the last is a Greek word. There's even a subtle distinction between Latin words and French words from Latin. Consider the following.

Odd, strange, peculiar, anomalous.

Same fanciness progression. A Germanic word, a French word, a Latin word, and a Greek word. We still perceive there to be some kind of hierarchy of words there, and it's not just due to infrequency of use.

For example, were I to say I'm going through the wood in the dale by uncouth ways, you'd think "why the fuck is he talking all old and shit?" They're Germanic words. However, were I to say "I traverse across the forest in the ravine via obscure passages," you'd think "why is he talking all fancy?" They're loanwords.

Anyway, by the 1700s English finally got a bit of a rest and efforts were made to standardize it and to start avoiding using loan words, though still more and more came in from the empire. They all failed, maybe because of this. England was the world's greatest power, and its language contact was unparallelled. It largely maintained the greatest empire the world had ever seen until basically the 1950s. By then, as England fell, America rose, and global commerce continued to affect English. We still have no actual English standard.

Other languages' linguistic purism

So if global commerce affected English, why are so many other languages averse to loan words? Well, from the 18-19th centuries in Europe, linguistic purism became a fad. This continued on the traditions of the insular languages in their standards by making loan words improper as the age of exploration and empire building continued. Some countries thought these standards and linguistic purism things were so important, they began outlawing words entirely and replacing them with native calques. Icelandic has a government body that does this (example: rafmagn is a calque, or literal translation, of electricity, meaning "amber power"). French has a government body that does this. Quebec has one. These aren't suggestions, either. They literally legislate what words can be in the languages. Other government bodies running things like German have been more lenient recently, but traditions die hard. English hasn't had a real standard in a thousand years, and some European countries make it illegal to use nonstandard speech in some situations.

tldr

To conclude, English is a bit special because most languages have been stable. German has been stable. Icelandic has been stable. French has been stable. English moved to an island, and just as they were getting standardized and not accepting new loanwords, the French and Danes took over, forcing in their languages to English. Once English started to get settled again, it became hip to start bringing stuff in from Latin and Greek. Once it started to get settled there, well, English had the empire. Empire's gone? Now we have the world market and internet.

While nobody knows exactly why English loves new words, that's my hypothesis, and it's broadly similar to hypotheses put forth by many actual experts. It has nothing to do with America, but exclusively to do with England.

American English is older than English English

In fact, America is far more conservative than England. America pronounces its Rs. Much of England developed a non-R pronouncing dialect after us, and indeed, this development is still happening in England. R pronouncing dialects are slowly losing their Rs. America retains old spellings like tire versus tyre, and even old words. For example, gotten is the past participle of get, a strong verb, as discussed before. England has eliminated that. They just say get and got. They're evolving out of that. Grammaticaly, they're also innovating, indicating the present subjunctive. "I suggested that he go shower," is a great sentence usable in America and in England circa 1850. However, in England now, that would be "I suggested that he should go and shower." The should indicated the present subjunctive, which is otherwise hard to hear in American English. They also put "and" in between "go" and the thing being done.

tldr tldr

So, in conclusion, Americans aren't the reason English has tons of loan words. The English are the reason. We take them now because we always have.

This is really neat to me, as it's a thing I've often heard people who know nothing about it discuss, so I really appreciate your expertise here. If this is all beneath you and bothersome, I understand. Frankly, I'm really impressed with the explanation you already gave me; it was far more than I'd hoped for!

I'm no expert. I'm just a guy who has always been interested in languages who decided to add on an English Linguistics degree while he is being forced to go to a college for teaching certifications in some sciences. I'll say that I'm more knowledgeable than most linguists regarding the history of English just due to the fact that most linguists don't care about that anymore, looking more into the social aspects or theoretical syntax, whereas I've actually done some (limited) historical language research, but I'm no expert.

Thanks again!

NP. I'll talk about language all day.

See also: http://anglish.wikia.com/wiki/Main_leaf