Clarification Edit: for people who speak English natively and are learning a second language
Hehe. I don’t think English is that broken. I mean it’s definitely broken. But still one of the easier languages to learn. It’s my second language, so my perspective might be a bit different. But I also had French in school. And oh my, that’s a proper hassle to memorize all the articles, specifics and numerous exceptions to every rule there is… English was way easier (for me.)
Learning German taught me how messed up non-English languages are. Having to memorize if every noun is either male, female, or neuter just so you can use the right form of “the” with it is crazy.
As a German myself who tried to learn French a while ago, I gave up because that language has the same issue, but the genders for nouns are different and I just can’t be bothered to memorize two different genders for every noun 💀
And then you also have different meanings depending on pronunciation, here some examples:
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umfahren: to drive around something or to run over something
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Montage: the act of assembling or the plural of Monday
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übersetzen: to ferry across a river or to translate into another language
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umschreiben: to rewrite or to paraphrase
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durchschauen: to look through something or to understand
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unterstellen: to place something underneath or to imply or accuse someone of something
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unterhalten: to hold something underneath or to support or to converse with someone or to entertain
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wiederholen: to fetch something back or to repeat something
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Ladies and gentlemen, this is what is known as a leading question.
I started Russian Duolingo a while back. You can make English sentences that would take five or six words in two words under first impressions the language doesn’t f*** around it gets right to the point.
But then I started getting to conjugations and it turns into a dumpster fire real quick.
If you think that’s fun, just wait until you get to the verbs of motion.
The language has its issues, but the Cyrillic alphabet is great. Being able to sound out any word phonetically makes it easy to pronounce anything
Yeah that’s seriously like a super power, just reading names on social media feels so good
I learned Latin and in the process learned that quite a lot if what makes English fucked up was a movement a couple of hundred years ago to make it more like Latin.
Well, and also one to make it less like Latin. And the same with French.
People have been beating this thing with a stick for many centuries. It’s part of the charm. And now it’s doing the same to every other language. That’s maybe less charming.
Can you give an example?
Debt used to be spelled dette or simply det. We spell it with a useless silent “b” today because meddlers decided to bring it back to its Latin roots of debitum. This happened in French as well, even though neither language ever pronounced the “b” and had no business adding it. The same happened with words like doubt, plumber, subtle, indict, and island. French was sensible enough to reverse this through modern spelling reform, but I think English is stuck with it for the foreseeable future.
Who had the power to unilaterally decree that the spelling of multiple existing words must now be spelled differently?
EDIT
The links i found all just refer to “scholars in the middle ages” being the cause of this
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/why-is-debt-spelled-like-that
Yep. It’s a bit hard to fathom today, but in the Middle Ages few people had the ability to read and write, mostly either learned monks and clergy, or those wealthy enough to be taught by them. With such a small pool of people, it’s comparatively easy to influence the prevailing spelling through the actions of a few.
Learning a second language hasn’t made me think English is broken. I already thought English was messed up but know a little of it’s history so have a general idea why. Learning Spanish means learning the flaws of a second language. I thinking all languages are flawed, but English just goes the extra mile.
Conversely, when we Spanish have to learn English, the thing we hate the most is that words are not pronounced the way they’re written. In Spanish, however, we’ve got some weird rules with irregular verbs and articles, but the former is common to both languages
I don’t feel it’s particularly broken honestly. Some languages are more consistent with their rules and therefore easier to learn but English is surprisingly consistent in practice/sound throughout the world. You also don’t need to memorize the gender of a washing machine…
For what it’s worth, you don’t memorize the gender of things. It’s just difficult, when you learn another language that does it differently. And that’s true for every language you learn, the difficulty lies in how it’s different of your own.
I mean, you do memorise them, you just don’t realise you’re doing it because you’re a baby or toddler and babies and toddlers are language sponges, and not very aware of how their own minds work.
When learning a gendered language as an adult you definitely have no option but to memorise what gender each word uses, since there’s generally no specific rule, just how the language happened to evolve. (And this can be particularly hard if your native language is gendered, but you’re trying to learn one that genders words differently, for instance when learning German coming from a Romance language, or vice versa.)
No, you don’t memorize it. You memorize the words and how they sound, then based on how their endings sound, you know their gender. You don’t have to maintain a dictionary of words to their gender. There are a few exceptions and you memorize those, but for the most part all you need to memorize is a few rules.
you don’t memorize it. You memorize the words and how they sound
Potahto potayto. 🤷♂️
Not really. In case you’re not catching the implication, it means there is no more memorization of words’ gender in Spanish than there is in English, for instance.
You simply do not need to memorize gender as it can and is derived on the spot from other memorized info, ie the word itself.
Except many languages’ vocabularies share common roots (e.g. Latin and Greek) even if the languages themselves don’t, so quite often someone learning Spanish will be able to make an educated attempt at figuring out the equivalent Spanish word (for instance, an English speaker might figure out that machine ≈ máquin_)… but will have no clue about the gender, having a 50% chance of ending up with, say, máquino.
And, as I said, misgendering words seems to be a relatively common mistake for people learning Spanish without having a Romance language base.
You don’t really need to memorize the gender in Spanish either. The gender is signaled by the word ending. It’s a maquina; that’s a feminine noun. As you’re speaking you can see “maquina” coming up and arrange for the gender without having to memorize the word’s gender.
Someone learning Spanish as a second language will have to remember that it’s máquina and not máquino when speaking or writing it, though (and will then probably be quite confused if they ever meet some guy nicknamed El Máquina, which would somehow be a perfectly cromulent nickname in Spanish).
Confusing genders when speaking or writing is one of the most common mistakes amongst people new to the language, because while everything else has some form of rule, this doesn’t (sure, when reading or listening you can most of the time use the word ending, and you’ll probably have an article, too, but when you are the one speaking or writing you have no option but to just know a word’s gender, or how it ends, which is the same thing).
I don’t feel it’s particularly broken honestly.
There are five (5) ways of pronouncing oo, if you people haven’t added a sixth one since the last time I looked.
Radii, fiancé, and façade are apparently perfectly cromulent English words that native English speakers who’ve never seen an ii, an é, or a ç are supposed to be able to pronounce correctly…
Your words for food animals come from completely different and unrelated languages depending on whether the animal is alive or dead (since the people who tended to the farms and the people who actually ate their meat spoke different languages)…
There are probably more irregular verbs than regular ones… (again, probably because of English really being three different languages in a trenchcoat)…
At some point in the sixteenth century you apparently just up and decided to randomly switch the pronunciation of all your vowels… without changing how you wrote them…
While most languages have developed some form of standard and regulative body, English seems like it’d rather leave the whole grammar, orthography, pronunciation, and whatnot situation as an exercise for the
victimspeaker, writer, or reader…Yeah, no, not particularly broken at all… 😒
You forgot naïve. Why does it have a fucking umlaut???
It’s a dieresis, to let you know that the i is to be pronounced separately from the a.
Are there any other words that have it though? Also if the english spelling were consistent you would not need the dieresis
The New Yorker’s style guide requires markers for coöperate, coöpt, etc., but it’s non-standard outside of that one particular publication.
- Not sure
- 100% agree
This would make a good t-shirt
I have seen coöperate, but it is certainly uncommon.
I honestly wasn’t aware naïve had a dieresis in English.
I mean, it makes complete sense for it to have one in languages that use them, but I wasn’t aware it was a loanword (from French or Normand, I assume).
It’s from french although naive is also a valid spelling.
Honestly it pisses me off that autocorrect adds all the beauty dots to it when I just try to write “naive”
I’m just pointing out the consistency in spoken form. Your criticisms are valid from a technical perspective, the best kind of correct…
There are five (5) ways of pronouncing oo
That’s a good thing. Vowels are enormous in the range of ways they can be pronounced. Any vowel can become any other vowel before it’s done being pronounced, and then you can chain that effect. You can tell where people are from by their vowels. Vowels convey analog information whereas consonants convey digital. Vowels therefore have bandwidth to carry extra information. And so not only do we have lots of vowel pair sequences with their own rules for pronunciation, we have tons of rules for how surrounding consonants change those vowels. And then finally we have all sorts of cultural understandings about how altered vowels indicate mood and intent.
It’s good we don’t try to pretend there are only a handful of vowels.
That’s a good thing.
Nah, man. That’s the abused justifying the abuser. That’s pure Stockholm syndrome.
There’s no world in which the oos in moon, book, door, blood, brooch, and cooperation (I had forgotten about this one. There are six. SIX! 😩) representing SIX different sounds is a good thing. There simply isn’t.
A sane language would replace some of those with u, ø, ō, ô, ö, õ, whatever, make some rule so that the poor sod attempting to decipher the written word could begin to know how to pronounce it… but not English. Not English. 😞
It’s 3 languages stacked up in a trench coat. The annoying thing about Gaeilge, it uses all the same letters but everything is pronounced differently
When I started learning Japanese I was impressed by how reliably phonetic their alphabets are, with only a few exceptions (and even the exceptions are phonetic, just by a different set of rules). I was like damn, would be real nice if English’s letters were like this. Then I found out that Japanese wasn’t always this way; prior to the 19th century reading it was a huge pain, with a lot of “i before e except after c…” rules to memorize, no diacritics to distinguish pronunciations, etc. At some point they had a major overhaul of the written language (especially the alphabets) and turned them into the phonetic versions they use today. Again I was like damn, would be real nice if English could get a phonetic overhaul of its written word. But it’s a lot easier to reform a language only used in a single country on an isolated island cluster with an authoritarian government and questionable literacy rates… Can you imagine the mayhem if, say, Australia decided to overhaul the English language in isolation? It would be like trying to get all of Europe to abandon their native tongues in favor of Esperanto.
I love archaic inconsistent Japanese. 今日 (obviously きょう) used to be pronounced the same way but spelled… けふ. There’s a Wikipedia page on historical kana orthography and the example the use on the page’s main image is やめましょう spelled as ヤメマセウ. The old kana usage sticks around in pronunciation of particle は and へ. There also used to be verbs ending in ず that turned into じる verbs like 感じる. Here’s a post on Japanese stack exchange where somebody explains verbs that end with ず, づ, ふ, and ぷ.
Honestly I’m glad I don’t have to learn historical inconsistent spellings, but part of me thinks that it’s really cool and wishes it was still around.
Consider these terms vs words:
Site / look
An overlook / overlooked
An oversight / [provide] oversight
ITT: Loads of monolingual native English speakers who has no knowledge of linguistics or even how their own language is not unique in all the ways that they think it is.
Actual itt: “internet experts” clash with casual passing commenters
All languages that are used are kinda broken, except the synthetic ones, like Esperanto.
The amount of exceptions and weird rules in non-English languages I speak (Lithuanian and Swedish) and kinda know (Russian) proves it.
Yeah, if humans use it long enough, any language becomes bastardized. Every generation comes up with new slang with only minor regard for the rules. Some of that slang becomes permanent.
English is the language that beats up other languages in dark alleys then rifles through their pockets for loose phrases and spare grammar.
That sounds suspiciously like Pratchett ;)
Cheery! Stop playing with your lipstick and go down to Cable Street. Igor’s potatoes have escaped again and Washpot can’t find Fred and Nobby.
Ok, I’ll pick up some Dwarven Battle Bread in case we need it!
Right. Good ma-, er, dwarf
Perhaps other people have said it but this is the quote I’m familiar with:
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”James Nicoll
Don’t forget that there once was a time when smart people just added letters to words that don’t do anything - like the b in debt, which was called det before. Or when America got rid of Britains U after O because newspapers charged per letter.
British newspapers were only able to subsidize the use of the letter ‘u’ through taxes levied on the colonies, which led to the revolution. So who’s so smart after all?
Nah, seriously, the Normans added the ‘u’ to French-derived words after they invaded. English orthography wasn’t standardized, though. Johnson kept the ‘u’ out of a sense of tradition when compiling his British dictionary, and Webster elided it in his American dictionary because we don’t pronounce it. Neither spelling, -or or -our, derives from the other.
I don’t know about “debt”, I always pronounce a very subtle b when I say it and saying det just sounds like the “det” in “detrimental”
Seriously, other languages at least adapt loanwords to their own grammar, orthography, and whatnot… English just grabs them as they are and runs away without looking back.
That’s why you end up with the plural of radius being radii, or stuff like fiancé or façade (seriously, how are people who only speak English and have never seen a ç before in their lives supposed to know how to pronounce that‽)…
Of course it all comes from English being really three or four languages — (Anglo-)Saxon, Normand(/old French), and Norse — badly put together, so sprinkling bits of other languages on top didn’t make much of a difference, when there were already about five different ways to pronounce, for instance, oo, and the whole vowel shift debacle didn’t exactly help with this mess… but while other languages which may have had similar (if maybe less spectacular) growing pains eventually developed normative bodies, mostly from the eighteenth century onwards, that define and maintain a standard form of the language, English seems to have ignored all that and left grammar and orthography as a stylistic choice on the writers’ part, and pronunciation as an exercise for the readers…
+1 for the interrobang
Yep I’m learning Japanese and hate how they spell “maccha” as “matcha” in English because the English one doesn’t sound correct to me and annoys the fuck out of me
The one with the t has a subtle t sound to it while maccha sounds correct
Its taught me all languages are broken in some way. Romance languages have words that have arbitrary gender needing conjugation. Some have two genders, some three! Then the Romanian language comes in with its own tricks.
Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese) lack an alphabet so words are conjunctions of smaller words, or sometimes worse the phonetics of smaller words without the meaning of the word.
Starbucks (the coffee company) in Mandarin is 星巴克. 星 is the literal translation of Star. So far so good. However 巴 can mean “to hope”. 克 can mean “to restrain”. The reason they use 巴克 for the second half of Starbucks is that when you pronounce them they vaguely sound like “bahcoo” (buck). So the first half is the traditional use of direct translation ignoring what it sounds like phonetically, but the second half ignores direct translation and instead uses the phonetics of the second two characters to sound like “buck”.
Somebody who was aware of all this once invented a language that was supposed to fix all the problems. He called it Esperanto.
Which has its own myriad of issues
Reject language features, o kama toki pona
Esperanto isn’t the only constructed language, and I think it is more Western-oriented, for good or ill. It does do a lot of things right within that framework, though, with certain rules that make everything explicit while removing other rules for structure that are no longer needed due to the explicit nature of the language.
I mean that makes sense because that’s kind of how it is in english too. “Star” makes you think of a star, but “bucks” at the end of the word doesn’t make you think of anything specific, it’s just a sound
Oddly enough, “starbuck” has nothing to do with stars. It comes from some Old Norse meaning “sedge river”. This became the place name Starbeck, a town in northern England. People then took that as a surname, and the spelling changed to Starbuck at some point. Herman Melville then gives a character in Moby Dick the surname Starbuck, and eventually the founders of the coffee chain picked it for no particular reason other than that they liked the sound of it
So the “buck” part is, I guess, “river”. Or “brook”, to pick the more closely-related English term. This doesn’t change anything you said, of course, as nobody actually thinks of it like that, I just found the winding path it took kinda interesting
“buck” is a common slang for a US Dollar. Its also a male deer. These are both very common words in American English. The “buck” in Starbucks doesn’t use either of these meanings, and thats fine, in this case you’re right that that part of Starbucks doesn’t carry any meaning from English…HOWEVER neither does “star” in Starbucks. The modern Starbucks logo has no star shapes in it, and nothing referencing astronomical stars. Its equal to “bucks” in that it is just a set of sounds. Yet in Mandarin, the “star” is literally translated as “star” like the astronomical body and spoken it sounds close to “sheen”, while the “bucks” sounds close to “bahcoo” for a total pronounced word of “sheenbahcoo”. So literal for the first part, phonetic for the second part. Essentially using two completely different sets of rules inside one word.
quite simple: I learned english