here’s some I’ve noticed:
- Why do we have articles? They’re mostly useless.
- Why do capital letters exist? (this is mainly an issue with the Greek and Latin alphabet though)
- Why is “I” used plural for verbs?
- Why are there so many inconsistent prefixes for tenses?
- 's is used for possessives. However, “its” is the possessive and “it’s” is not.
- Why do we have another set of pronouns for possessive pronouns?
- Why do adjectives go before the noun compared to basically every other language?
My biggest gripe as a non native speaker is phrasal verbs.
Unless you know exactly what they mean, you are screwed. You can’t decypher them, there’s no link between the meaning of the component parts and the phrasal verb.
As my English teacher used to tell us jokingly: you should never say: “I get on with my brother, but I get off with my sister”.
Similar with saying place names - The Map Men (men men men) tried to explain the ‘rules’, and concluded that there was no alternative but to learn the pronunciation of each place individually
Do other languages not have these? (Or fewer of them?)
What’s your native language if you don’t mind me asking?
Fascinating concept.
Interestingly I’ve heard from other people that Chinese languages are made difficult to learn for similar reasons. I wonder if this is actually a similarity between those languages and English
I’m French. I’m not aware of any other language that radically modifies the meaning of verbs with propositions in such a way.
As a foreigner, you might expect that break up and break down have opposite meanings because up and down do, but nope.
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We might have some silent letters, vestigial remnant of ancient forms, but English has basically no rule for pronunciation. It’s so funny watching English speakers debate among themselves how a name should be pronounced.
- Bear, pear, tear, tear, near.
- Rough, tough, though
- To read, read, read (your very best one, guys, believe me)
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In response to yours:
\1. They’re super useful. “I don’t want this spoon, I want that spoon.”
\2. To make text more readable.
\4. Because English is a mutt of a language, Germanic grammar and common words with Latin, French, and Greek chunks stirred in and a sprinkle of everything else.
\6. Like your article complaint, hardly unique to English. Spanish does both as well.
\7. Better for both building suspense and for poetry.
Things that annoy me: When one letter makes multiple sounds, or when you need to use multiple letters together to denote a sound.
Why the fuck are there no rules for pronunciation?? There is very little consistency in English.
I mean cases like yes - eyes, Kansas - Arkansas.
English orthography is highly opaque because when words are loaned, they typically keep the spelling of their original language, whereas the pronunciation might differ
Check out the poem “The chaos”. It uses many of the inconsistencies in pronunciation
I’ve never seen this before, and I both adore and loathe it. If I hadn’t grown up with this language, I’d contemplate giving up.
Yes! Fck this. There’s no way to decipher how a word is pronounced unless someone tells you.
And even then, going to another dialect, you’re still in the wrong.
There are so many, and I think it comes down to the fact that English is a mix of at least two language families and how a bunch of grammar nerds overcorrected it.
The word “colonel.”
Where is the god damn R sound coming from?!
The pronunciation came from French and the spelling came from Italian.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel
By the end of the late medieval period, a group of “companies” was referred to as a “column” of an army. According to Raymond Oliver, around 1500, the Spanish began explicitly reorganizing part of their army into 20 colunelas or columns of approximately 1000-1250 soldiers. Each colunela was commanded by a cabo de colunela or column head. Because they were crown units, the units were also confusingly called coronelas, and their commanders coronels. Evidence of this can be seen when Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, nicknamed “the Great Captain”, divided his armies in coronelías, each led by a coronel (colonel), in 1508.
It’s a mess.
…same as lieutenant, pronounced leftenant… and then there’s Cholmondeley , pronounced “chumley”
It’s only pronounced that way in the UK, if I’m not mistaken. I went most of my life thinking that lieutenant and leftenant were seperate terms before learning that it’s simply how the word is pronounced in Britain. Pretty bizarre, IMO, but that’s English for you.
Personally, I kind of enjoy the chaotic nature of English compared to other more consistently structured Latin languages. I feel like there is a wider variety of ways to phrase things in English than there are in many other popular languages around the world, which is a nice perk.
Or lieutennant in British and Australian english (Left-tenannt)
I acknowledge english has many confusing and contrary facets, but I must counter with why do other languages assign gender to things and make others neutral? A car could be female, the muffler neutral, and the window glass male.
Also, I don’t have much to offer regarding adjectives other than it doesn’t matter. The human brain is capable of sorting both “the car blue” and “the blue car” just fine.
I like these things, makes it feel quirky and weird. I don’t want my natural language to work like a computer language!
Why is there no adjective form of the word integrity? If someone has integrity they are _____? Because integral means something else so it can’t be that.
I suggest integratuitous.
I think integrous is an actual word if I’m not mistaken.
That word you just made up is integratuitous.
English lets you get away with saying things you don’t exactly mean. A lot of the efforts from groups that might be disparaged as ‘woke’ over preferred terminology exist because it allows for so much ambiguity.
To use a common example: there’s a difference between “Group X struggle to get bank loans” and “Banks have consistently not loaned to Group X” in terms of where the fault lies, but because English allows us to use the former to mean the latter, it seems like an imposition to be reminded.
Other languages - e.g. German - don’t allow for this: your intended emphasis changes the word order, so you have to think about what you really mean.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Time_Enough_for_Love
In the first place, very little thinking was ever done in English; it is not a language suited to logical thought. Instead, it’s an emotive lingo beautifully adapted to concealing fallacies. A rationalizing language, not a rational one.
That book seems stacked for quotes.
“Son, I hate to say this — because, if you’ve been reading a lot of English, I see how you reached that opinion — but you are one hundred percent wrong.”
let’s
Fixed, thanks.
All the words that sound the same and/or are spelled the same. I always thought sentences like I saw the saw saw the seasaw must be hella confusing for non-native speakers.
Shouldn’t there only be two saws in a row there?
Now there’s only two.
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@Xylight When they taught you a really really important rule of the language and this rule has a little exception. Then another exception, also another exception, please add one more exception, around of applause for another exception, and another exception…
The cycle continues until you see that the “rule” should be the exception and all those “exceptions” should be the rule.
I before E, except after C. Except when your foreign neighbor Keith receives eight counterfeit sleighs from feisty caffeinated weightlifters.
The rule with more exceptions than matches
Mr. Bean.
Oh sorry, I thought you said The English.
What do you have against Johnny? Any issues with Edmund Blackadder?
We have overlapping terms that describe things we already have terms and words for.
We need to think of newer words, than just applying an already made word to mean several different things.
I agree that this is annoying, but I think your belief about its cause might be a bit of an assumption - as I understand it, this kind of thing is usually caused when dialects have different meanings for the same word and then they merge, rather than a simple lack of creativity.
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