Clarification Edit: for people who speak English natively and are learning a second language
English is the language that beats up other languages in dark alleys then rifles through their pockets for loose phrases and spare grammar.
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…
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
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.
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”
That sounds suspiciously like Pratchett ;)
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
When you start a new language, you learn “The Rules” first, and wonder why your first language doesn’t have such immutable “Rules.”
Then when you get fluent, you realize there are just as many exceptions as your first language.
Or do Japanese: There are two main types; the one where you and everyone else neatly follows the immutable rules which you speak to superiors and to strangers by default, and the one where everyone blurts out whatever words in whatever order they come up in their brain, aka what’s spoken between friends and to acquainted inferiors
I’m doing Japanese and I beleive you are referring to polite and impolite (or formal and informal) Japanese
That’s correct, 敬語 perfectly follows the rules, but while there are rules for 普通体 (ある instead of あります), people mostly just talk in whatever way they want that does not follow any rules.
It’s quite shocking to me as a Dutch person, we hardly have such a big difference between formal and informal Dutch
Learning a second language AND professionally teaching English to speakers of said language. English is not broken. English is actually much better than many alternatives. We don’t need to worry about noun gender. We don’t have to worry about tones. We have precise ways to indicate number and time. Formality levels are not baked into word construction. The pronunciation of words can generally be inferred from the spelling, despite learning this skill being a little complicated— but that complicated nature even has its usefulness.
We rag on English, but it is by far not the worse out there, not even close. It’s just contempt for the familiar.
The pronunciation of words can generally be inferred from the spelling
Definitely NOT. English is among the worst languages in that regard.
This definitely.
Exceptions on exceptions on exceptions, on top of grammar rules that vary based on what language the word you’re using was originally from, except even then you can’t know because it can be a word came to English from French even though it’s originally Latin and then the way the French pronounced it carries over to the English.
As someone who’s native language is Finnish and you literally know how a word is pronounced when you see it. If you know how to use the phonetic alphabet, then you basically know how to pronounce Finnish. Compare English words and their IPA to Finnish words and their IPA:
hevonen = [ˈheʋonen], hernekeitto = [ˈherneˌkːei̯tːo]
VS English
‘geography’ = ʤɔ́grəfɪj, explanation = ek.spləˈneɪ.ʃən/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Finnish
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos
Dearest creature in Creation, Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse. It will keep you, Susy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye your dress you’ll tear. So shall I! Oh, hear my prayer,
As a native German speaker, I really dislike the formality levels and hope someday everyone uses the informal level. In a big company it’s really annoying to start with the formal level and then awkwardly switching to informal level when contacting someone for the first time.
Learning Mandarin. The stereotype of a Chinese person saying “Me no English” makes sense now considering the word is literally 我(Me)不(No)英文(English)
“Do you speak English?”
“I profusely beg your forgiveness, old chap, but my linguistic skills do not reach to the Anglican sphere and thus I am unable to converse in anything but my native language, Mandarin.”
“So… yes or no?”
" 甚麼?"
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.
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.
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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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 💀
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what is known as a leading question.
Teaching English to non-native speakers will fully open your eyes as to how broken and outright ridiculous the English language is. “To” and “too”. “Through” and “threw”…
English is a difficult language. It can be understood through tough thorough thought though.
Relevant vsauce short: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3ipFdRfFvK4
I say “correct” more frequently now when in agreement instead of “right.” 🤷♀️
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.
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”.
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
quite simple: I learned english
Well, I suppose it made me realise how useless articles are in a statement.
«где здесь кинотеатр?» (where here movie theatre?)
“where is the movie theatre around here?”
Without articles the point comes across in a much simpler form. that being said, a lot of other languages also have a terrifyingly complex case system or pointlessly gendered language or both. I don’t think any language is “broken” but they all definitely have quirks.
It isn’t broken, it’s just preserved
Languages with phonetic writing in the modern day likely achieved that through a language standardization process that included spelling reforms.
English’s changes in spelling and grammar are mostly legitimized through influential works of the language, hence why you all gotta learn Shakespeare in highschool, you’re being taught the history of how the language we speak today evolved.
There is no centralized academy of English grammar, and official dictionaries in English for the most part add words descriptively to reflect how the lexicon is changing in real time.
Put together this all means that the English language isn’t remotely broken, it’s just old, older than most modernly written languages by a couple of centuries actually.
Funniest part is if you study immigrant settlements in the Americas from all those countries that underwent standardizations, they’re all about as “broken” as English looks too, because they’re forms of those languages preserved from before standardization came to their homelands.
Japanese and Italian are especially funny since the standardization came into enforcement recently enough that native speakers from Japan and Italy will be bewildered by speakers from the Americas because the speakers from the Americas speak in a way that sounds like their grandparents or great grandparents if they recognize the dialect at all to begin with.
Languages with phonetic writing in the modern day likely achieved that through a language standardization process that included spelling reforms.
Not Arabic. It is pronounced as it is written. Except a handful of words that have a different transcription to make them easily distinguishable.
As someone who is learning Arabic right now this is the vaaaaastest oversimplification I have ever seen on that subject in particular.
For starters, dialects
We only refer to MSA when talking about Arabic. Most Arab speakers consider dialects side languages to Classical Arabic. They have never had a transcription throughoutout history. People started writing in their dialects only recently with the arrival of SMS and the internet.
I get that as a new comer to Arabic you probably have come across learning materials for dialects like Egyptian and levantine. But in reality you won’t find uni courses for those dialects because academics don’t consider them to be proper languages with clear grammar and an established vocabulary.
Actually I chose to learn dialect first because literally everyone who knows anything about the language cautions that native speakers will swear up and down that you should learn MSA and then be completely incomprehensible to you because of how little anyone actually uses it in the Arab world.
I’ve been working with my teacher for a year and a half now and she agrees that MSA is basically pointless unless you intend to start consuming arabic language news or listening to arabic language political speeches.
BTW this is from a professional cultural expert who’s literal job is to prep government workers and businessfolks to be able to engage successfully with the Arabic world, something she’s been doing for 20 years now, so I’m pretty sure she knows what she’s talking about.
You do you. And you have to take into consideration what your goal is by learning Arabic.
Dialects are definitely easier to learn and more rewarding as it allows you to converse with people and test your advancements. But you won’t be able to easily transition to another dialect. Because MSA is the glue that make the intelligible.
Learning MSA will take you triple the time. And I imagine your teacher is both proud of his dialect. But also doesn’t want you to drop learning if you were to have chosen MSA
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
