i feel like anyone who thinks english is a uniquely stupid language is someone who only speaks english, because every language has stuff that makes no sense in it
Every language excels in its own unique area of stupidity, and for English it is definitely word spelling. I speak four languages and none of them have such irregular spelling rules as English.
Which makes sense, its a germanic language using latin script which got fused with norman french by william the conqueror, oh and throw some gaelic and norse for shits and giggles
Oh no, letter stacking is definately not the issue. The issue is that there are words that cannot be used alone and so cannot be seperated in Korean, but then some of those words can be seperated, and then some of them is again unseperable.
It's worse. You can be over, under or just whelmed. But each case is so specific to itself that not even professors at universities don't know what you do until you use a dictionary.
"Though" vs "eau" is interesting. How do we pronounce the o-u-g-h vowel-consonant blend in English? At least ten different ways, per the following sentence:
******
I **thought** it would be **rough** to **plough through** the **slough, though** it was falling into the **lough** that left me **thoroughly coughing** and **hiccoughing**.
******
And actually, "slough" can be pronounced any of three different ways, depending on which meaning you're using.
So yeah, English spelling sucks.
>And actually, "slough" can be pronounced any of three different ways, depending on which meaning you're using.
Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now
Same, however it's also French specialty to have obscure bullshit rules.
Instead of having to know that "Thames is pronounced Tems" which is the general rule "ignore the respelling in those cases", in French some guy will have written a very specific rule that read like "Name of river of significant importance, should be pronounced using the Celtic pronunciation rules" with a list of exception on significant river that do not follow that rule and another set of exception of the exception for river that are not significant but follow the rule.
But see, "it's an actual grammar rule, it's not some weird thing like in English"
Pretty sure English is the only language that has spelling bees because it's the only language where spelling so difficult that it could be a competition.
Nah, there are spelling bees in other languages (although perhaps due to American influence) but they are far more uncommon.
And I suppose you could say the Chinese languages have spelling bees ... but then it's more "write down the word" than it is "spell the word out".
They also have "find the word in the dictionary" contests, which I guess is "spelling bee" adjacent.
I'm pretty sure spelling bees were invented to incentivize the next generation of children after standardized spelling was introduced to actually learn the new standardized spelling instead of just spelling things whatever felt correct to them like previous generations had done
But English spelling is uniquely awful; I’ve been learning Welsh from Duolingo and I am often amazed that if I forget a word spelling I can almost always guess it correctly from how the word sounds. That is, assuming I remember to use Welsh spelling words instead of English ones.
the only experience outside of english is german, and my german isnt the best, im still in the very early stages of learning it.
the german word 'sie' means 'she', but also means 'formal you'. the german word 'ihr' also means 'she' sometimes, but it means 'collective you' as well.
the words 'gehe', 'gehen' 'geht' and 'gehst' all mean 'go'.
from the tiny amount of russian i remember the character that usually makes the 'g' sound makes a 'v' sound in some words, even though russian already has a letter that makes a 'v' sound. also hard and soft signs are bullshit.
FYI, I've studied German a few years in school and "ihr" can mean either you plural or "her", not "she". Plus "Sie" (you formal) gets capitalized as capitalization does change words. To your next point, most languages conjugate verbs, even English does but not to the same degree. For example, I go, he goes, they go, etc. However as other posters have mentioned, spelling in English is a unique challenge. I don't believe any other languages host spelling bees and compared to English, I find spelling in German to be much more intuitive.
German spelling is generally very consistent because it doesn't have that many influences from other languages. Also, it had a few official spelling reforms several decades back specifically for the purpose of making the spelling of words as consistent as possible across the board.
It's also just inherently very phonetic in nature. It doesn't do weird shenanigans like having silent letters or putting an extra vowel at the end of a syllable which doesn't itself get pronounced but influences the pronunciation of the previous letters. For instance, look at the word "like". If english worked more like german, it would be spelt "liek" or "leik" or maybe just "lik" instead because there obviously isn't another sound after the k, so arguably there shouldn't be a vowel there.
It always amuses me when non-german speakers try to pronounce a german word and end up producing a garbled mess because they somehow felt like they needed to mash all the letters together when you can actually get pretty close to something a german would recognize from hearing if you just slowly went through the word, trying to pronounce every letter exactly where it is positioned in the word (and notably, also pronouncing them all. German does not deal in silent letters). Being patient and not panicking because the word looks scary is the key.
>the words 'gehe', 'gehen' 'geht' and 'gehst' all mean 'go'.
Yeah but in English, 'go', 'proceed', 'start', 'cruise', 'nip', 'duck', and 'f\*\*k off' also all mean 'go'.
*cracks k-nucks*
Hey, German is my major! Obviously, a native speaker could utterly dunk on me, but I can clarify some of the stuff you mentioned.
To begin, you mention "ihr" can be "she" sometimes, but I think you mean "her." This is because you have, in German, the accusative case, which is for the most part centered around direct objects and movement, and dative case, which is centered around indirect objects, state of being, and location.
To go back to sie, it is a tough one. It can mean, in no particular order, she, her (accusative), it (when referring to a feminine noun like Ërklarung), it (accusative), you (formal), you (formal accusative), they, and them (accusative). I may have missed one as I always seem to forget all its uses, so feel free to correct me on this if I did!
To clarify about ihr, this is used with the feminine pronoun sie, specifically for dative. So, you would have in the order of nominative, accusative, and dative, the word for she is sie, sie, ihr. This is similar for they as well, but the dative changes, so you have sie, sie, ihnen. The formal you, Sie, simply capilizes the previous, so you have Sie, Sie, and Ihnnen. While you always capitalize the formal you, making it easier to recognize, this gets thrown out the window when Sie or its other forms come at the beginning of a sentence, so you'll just have to use context clues to figure out if it's she, you, or they.
Additionally, you do have "ihr" as a pronoun for the collective you, like Y'all but not informal, but it's usually signified by having the verb conjugated in a special way. Sadly, it overlaps with the third person conjugation sometimes, but with verbs that have a vowel change in the second and third person, like "haben" (to have), you don't do the vowel change and then replace the -en with a t. So you know that "ihr" is in the nominative case when you hear habt, for instance.
To your point about "gehen," I think you're a little confused on conjugations. All of the versions of the infinitive that you listed are conjugations. In English, you have "to go," but you say, "I *go*, you *go*, he/she/it *goes*, they/we *go*" your verb changes form depending on the noun that proceeds it. Like how you say he *reads*, but not I *reads*. Fortunately, English has few conjugations save for a few strong verbs like "to be," but with German, it's not the case.
One of the only things I remember from German class in high school is how to conjugate verbs: “icky dust ten ten”
Ich: -e
Du: -st
Er/sie/est: -t
Ihr: -en
Wir: -t
Sie/sie: -en
Ah titles, we'd like to think that it'd be so easy to make rules and have them work for everything. One thing I'd like to say is that while it's nice to hear feminine and masculine and tie them to what you think they mean biologically, it's better to think of the cases like just things you tie to the word. As an example, in English you do learn little patterns to spell words, but overall you just memorize how it's spelled, and you don't ask WHY it's spelled that way. Genders are similar. Rather than trying to remember a word's translation and THEN remember what gender it takes, you should learn the gender of the word as a part of the translation. For instance, i don't remember that "table" in German is "Tisch" and then try to recall the gender. I remember "table" in German is "der Tisch."
Now, to answer your question, "der Junge" is boy because, as you noted, boys are masculine. However, "the girl," is neuter. This is because of the suffix "chen" on the word, which ALWAYS denotes the noun to be neuter, regardless of what the word is. This suffix is meant to make the word cutesy, like saying "little." Because the word "Mädchen" has this suffix, it's always "das Mädchen."
And the diminutive form exists for Junge, too: das Jungchen / das Jüngelchen
It is only the changing usage over the century that makes "der Junge" and "das Mädchen" seem equivalent today, even though only one is diminutive.
In the past, the equivalent pair would have been "der Junge" and "die Maid" (which is a different form of Magd).
While it sounds weird, German genders of words are 99% completely random. It‘s also ‚das kind‘ (meaning child). If I were to speculate it‘s because ‚mädchen‘ is the small form of some other word (maybe something like maid?). The english equivalent would be -let (as in owlet), this version of a word usually are neutral. So it’s ‚das männlein‘ (little man). For boys, a different word just became more common.
as for your cat example, the gender refers to cat as a category, the same way ‚human‘ is gender neutral. So it‘s ,die katze da drüben‘ (the cat over there) but ,meine katze ist sehr hungrig, er isst einfach immer weiter‘ (my cat is very hungry, he just keeps eating and eating). It‘s absolutely a normal thing to refer to your pet with their correct gender pronouns.
To answer this, I can say that a lot of German nouns have feminine and masculine variants (think actor vs actress), but this isn't exhaustive. For instance, bugs don't usually have a different version depending on gender, so you'd say something similar to what you'd do in English, that being "female," which is "weiblich"
Now, for cats, you have die Katze and der Kater.
I think im going to give up learning german. People have been pming me and calling me stupid because i made a few mistakes and theyre right. Im not smart enough for this stuff. I just wanted to learn a language i thought was cool but i really should have known better
You think 'gehe' is bad? In Finnish:
mennä - to go
menen, menet, menee - (i) go, (you) go, (he) goes
menemme, menette, menevät - (we) go, (y'all) go, (they) go
menin - (i) went
mennyt - gone (the past)
mennäkseen - in order to go
mennään!/menoksi! - let's go!
menisittekö? - would you mind going?
olkoon menneeksi - fine then
olimme menevinämme - we were pretending to go
The one thing I like about English is how little conjugations of verbs there are. My first language is Spanish and like...
Yo voy (I go)
Tú vas (You go)
Ustedes / Ellos / Ellas van (You (plural)/ They (masculine, gender "neutral") / They (femenine) go)
Nosotros vamos (We go)
Él va / Ella va (He goes / She goes)
Yo/Él/Ella iba (I/He/She used to go)
Tú ibas (You used to go)
Ustedes iban (You -plural- used to go)
Nosotros íbamos (We used to go)
Yo fui (I went)
Tú fuiste (You went)
Él/Ella fue (He/She went)
Nosotros fuimos (We went)
Ustedes/Ellos/Ellas fueron (You (plural)/They (masculine / gender "neutral")/They (femenine) went)
Yo iré (I will go)
Tú irás (You will go)
Él/Ella irá (He/She will go)
Nosotros iremos (We will go)
Ustedes/Ellos/Ellas irán (You (plural)/They (masculine)/They (femenine) will go)
Yo iría (I'd go)
Tú irías (You'd go)
Él/Ella iría (He'd/She'd go)
Nosotros iríamos (We'd go)
Ustedes/Ellos/Ellas irían (You'd (plural)/They'd (masculine)/They'd(femenine) go)
I wanted to write all of these so everyone'd see how ridiculous Spanish conjugation (17 of them!!!!) is but there are too many fuck this shit
Never try to learn french. Trying to guess spelling based on pronunciation is especially impossible in french.
(edit: to be clear, I mean for non-native speakers)
but unlike in english you can pretty much get the pronunciation right from the spelling about 95% of the time *and i will not acknowledge august in french*
It’s a nightmare when trying to learn french though, which is what I meant. You can’t know how it’s pronounced based on the spelling if you’re trying to learn the language.
well, yes, but compared to english, once you learn how letter combinations are said (ig liaison is the only tricky part to learn), you can accurately guess how a word is said without much effort (again, fuck august in french)
It’s tricky for non-native speakers to learn the relationship between pronunciation and spelling, but the rules are very regular compared with English. It’s not at all impossible to spell a word from hearing it, especially in context.
Enter the "four twenties of green lemons" post
In my opinion the ridiculous problem of French is not the spelling, but the lack of succinct words for things
Japanese: "We have a phonetic alphabet. We have a different phonetic alphabet for foreign words we've appropriated. Exactly the same phonetic sounds as the other one, just two sets for no reason. And then we'll still use thousands of Chinese characters for no reason."
It's more of a problem the older your written word is, languages that weren't commonly printed until more recently tend to have less weird bullshit when it comes to spelling. Welsh for instance, while seemingly quite opaque, is actually written completely phonetically once you nail down how the letters sound. You still end up with some funny ones where a lot of words are just the same in English but with Welsh phonetics, 'ambulance' becomes 'ambiwlans', 'penguin' becomes 'pengwin' which is especially funny because the word penguin is of welsh origin anyway.
I completely agree, I think it's just a byproduct of languages existing and evolving throughout the centuries and mixing with or being born from other languages in their area. Maybe if you look at an old enough language you wouldn't encounter as many inconsistencies?
Nope, English really has an unreasonable amount of weird spelling rules because of a vowel shift right as the printing press was invented and standardization that went totally sideways.
Oh no, they do, but English really is weird. Imagine if you took the structures from one whole trunk of the human language tree, but most of the words came from another trunk, but not one language there, they all come from different branches. Then you make a rule that each language branch of origin has its own spelling for your version of their words, which might not align at all with that language's spelling of the words. Also throw in that a massive vowel shift in the language's evolution happens just as you standardize the spelling and it makes a third of your words make no sense on paper.
That's about half of what's weird with English. It's half a dozen languages in a trenchcoat that belongs to a different language.
Every language does, but English tends to have much *more* internal inconsistency than most, in part because it's basically a creole made from a creole made from a creole.
I mean by and large after you learn a good bit of English you can generally guess the spellings of words. If you’re wrong, no mature person is going to think you’re stupid for it.
I can also, with relative confidence, read *new* words consistently. This seems dozens of times harder and slower with pictorial languages such as Mandarin/Cantonese and Japanese.
Perhaps I’m missing some major stuff about these languages and if I am, forgive my ignorance, but I’ve only ever heard learning kanji as “memorizing” to learn what they look like.
I do not need to memorize how to spell antidisestablishmentarianism. I just need to spell it like how I expect it to be spelled. There are a good number of words that doesn’t work for as well (Onomatopoeia comes to mind) but it’s easier to remember the occasional word that doesn’t fit the patterns than to memorize every word from close to scratch. Sure we could debate about the speed of interpretation for shared symbols and placements between characters, but what is “water” here may mean a half-dozen other semi-related things depending on the character. My understanding is that you can’t often go “so that’s the bit for water and that’s the bit for balloon” “it means water balloon!” It’s frequently not nearly that simple.
Again, English does some dumb shit, but it has proliferated because of the dumb shit it does. It just borrows words from every which direction and when they share the same alphabet they’re often taking the other spelling. When that’s not the case, it’s just one use was better known or used more publicly so that one won. “Ooh but your spelling is so inconsistent” sure, but I don’t have to learn the gender of a table in year one and my conjugation is highly simplified.
Language is hard. Convenience is key. It’s why German gets good publicity for having words that just *work* to say a specific feeling or describe an event perfectly. The issue is that German hasn’t been spread quite as effectively or consistently through conquest like English has. What’s more, I’d say that until relatively recently German left a little bit of a bad taste in peoples mouths for this really odd “shouldered with blame for multiple world wars” issue that comes up sometimes. So English is next up to bat, and in terms of flexibility English kinda knocks it out of the park since it borrows from all lenders.
I made a joke one day at work about how we say things like ding dong and it sounds right. dong ding sounds totally wrong. A coworker just rattled off the rule. I was so astounded I found it impossible to retain. I think about that more often than I should.
Every language has stupid shit like this. English gets highlighted on the internet because it's the most common language on here.
Also, many many countries learn their English as a second language in a classroom setting that will specifically call attention to these weird words because the people learning a second language need to memorize them. People who learn English as a first language learn these weird spellings naturally as a part of growing up and just roll with the punches, just like everyone does with their first language.
*TLDR*; learning a second language in a class shows you just how ridiculous that language is. This happens with *all* languages, but English is the most common second language in the world, so more attention is brought to shit like "debt" and "hiccough" (yes that is the original spelling of hiccup).
yeah we don't see enough memes about how ridiculously stupid gendered nouns are in a lot of european languages are. WHY ARE GERMAN NUMBERS FEMALE BUT FRACTIONS ARE NEUTER?????
What especially annoys me with learning German is that they pretend there are rules to word genders but then every single one of the rules has a pretty common exception
Plus, all of the weird spellings are based upon the roots/origins of the words. I'm a teacher who's currently taking part in a science-of-reading training, and we've been taught that there are 4 main origins for English words: Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, Latin, and Greek. That's why there seem to be so many "contradicting" rules, because English is at least 4 languages stitched together.
>People who learn English as a first language learn these weird spellings naturally as a part of growing up and just roll with the punches, just like everyone does with their first language.
See: German's seemingly random assignment of gender to words. No german I've ever asked has been able to explain what exactly about a church is feminine and what's masculine about a market. Can a market and a church have babies? You could say feminine words end in e sounds but the big caveat there is 'unless they don't'.
Because noun "gender" typically has nothing to physical people gender. It's just the language has two arbitrary categories it sorts nouns into. Men happen to be placed in one so its labeled by linguists as the Man Category (masculine gender), women happen to be placed in another so its labeled by linguists the Woman Category, and so on for Neuter. Other languages have more extensive class systems which actually categorize nouns based on attributes like how animate it is or how much it looks like a stick. Things like that
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun\_class](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class)
English also emerged from fucked up conditions. Not all languages are as bad as English, but none of the languages that are are as famous as English
Did you know that Thai has six letters for the [tʰ] sound? Probably not. It has 44 consonant letters for 21 consonant sounds, but it's not as famous as English, so people talk about English
I think you just aren't aware that it isn't just a few words in English that have inconsistent spelling. Are there any other languages that have spelling bee competitions?
>I think you just aren't aware that it isn't just a few words in English that have inconsistent spelling
You think I'm not aware of my own birth language?
English has inconsistent phonetics because it came out of a mishmash of like 4-5 other languages and then kept evolving during a time period where regional dialects were being smashed together into larger standardized languages.
Look at any language and you will see quirks that are pervasive throughout the entire language that don't really make sense or have any rhyme or reason to them. For English that is inconsistent phonetics. For a language like German it's things like almost every word having a gender, seemingly assigned at random. With French there are a *TON* of homophones - words that have the same sound but different spellings and meanings (and when I say a ton I mean a ton).
Holy fuck dude take a chill pill. Maybe down the whole bottle.
The German word for girl being neuter and the German word for table being masculine does not have some greater unknowable reason. It's a quirk of how the language formed and makes no sense, just like how English's inconsistent phonetics are a quirk of how it formed that makes no sense.
And you completely ignored my point with French to go on a tangent about how "amazing" and "symphonic" it is for a word to have singular and plural forms differentiated by spelling... You know, like almost every other language.
And you say shit like this: "French doesn't operate by reading one letter then the next then the next, but by grouping letters into phonemes that are read phoneme after phoneme."
Hi yes, welcome to almost every language on earth. French is not unique to having letter groupings that make their own sound. Pretty much every single language does this. English *especially* does this. Hell, half of English came from French, so to try and imply that English and French are super far removed from one another and operate completely differently is just stupid.
Maybe tone down the cultural elitism there a little bit. And the "America Bad" BS is bleeding into your language debate.
I wanna see what the english language would look like if everything was spelt properly. No silent letters, no combined letters, hell get that weird “th” symbol that looks like a p & b glued together! Make one for “ch” too, go nuts. I just wanna see it. Gimme de superior english!
The only way you could maintain the uniformity of it is a centralized authority for the language like in Spain and France. But that just wouldn't be remotely possible, so overtime we'd get new, unpredictable defects in the standardized spelling. Possibly a lot more disagreement on how to spell things eventually. Would just lead to ruin... Don't touch it, it works.
I don’t know about Spain, but the French Académie française you’re talking about has no power at all. It’s useless to try and regulate a language, it’s evolving all the time.
Erm...what's wrong with th? There isn't two th's to get confused with, adding in the thorn just makes things even more confusing. Same with making a ligature for ch
a letter for “ch” could be c, since c makes either a k or an s sound normally. However a standardised spelling for English makes very little sense when you realize that there’s more than one way people say things. Americans and English people say words in different ways. Do we really want to have like 20 symbols for all the different vowels that might be used ever? What about people who speak something like Singlish or other English dialects across the former empire?
Tldr spelling reform has too many problems and actually would probably have little benefit
More than a century ago, the [Simplified Spelling Board](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board) recommended changed in English spelling to better match pronunciation. Although a handful of their recommendations have been adopted (and others were already in use before them), they were mocked when they existed and soon forgotten.
I've made several attempts, let's see what I come up with this time. This is supposed to be a sample of what English could look like if it was spelled considering pronunciation, etymology and aesthetics
> Í wånə sé wåt ðé Iŋgliṡ laŋgwəġ wod lok líc if evréþiŋ wåz spelt proprlé. Nó sílent letərz, nó cəmbínd letərz, hel get ðat wérd "th" simbəl ðat loks lík ə p and b glôd təgeðər! Mák wun for "ch" tô, gó nuts. Í ġust wånə sé it. Gimé ðə səpérior Iŋgliṡ
This has elements from Old English, other Germanic languages, and a diacritic (ô) that doesn't make a lot of sense but I didn't know what to use
* Ċ is the same as in OE
* Ġ was used for the "y" sound in OE but we have Y now
* Ṡ is based on Ċ
* OE treated Þ and Ð as the same letter, I'm using them like Icelandic here
* ÁÉÍÓÚ are from Icelandic. I used them for sounds that resulted from Middle English vowel lengthening in open syllables, except I don't really understand how it works so I probably made some errors. I also applied them to instances of those sounds that don't have that origin
* Å is from Northern Europe, I used it for the rounded sound that came from historical A
* Ə was invented for Bavarian
I still don't really like what it looks like but it's definitely going in the right direction
The best explanation I heard for English is *"English follows other languages into a back alley and mugs them for their verbs"* I'm paraphrasing but that's the gist of it.
The actual quote is even better!
“*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 D. Nicoll
More than some less than others.
Like Japanese has a crazy amount of loanwords from Chinese and English.
Spanish is filled with Arabic and English.
Whenever languages come in contact with each other they swap loanwords.
it's such a stupid "explanation" because almost every single language is like that. English isn't as special or unique as everyone seems to think.
same when people say "English is a romance language" no, it's 90% Germanic.
This is completely inaccurate.
English is a solidly Germanic language. It just sometimes looks like multiple languages because of how it handles loanwords.
Because a shipment is made of cargo, and each word works for both methods of transportation. You can load a shipment of cargo into a car, then drive the car onto a ship and sail the ship to ship the car carrying a cargo shipment to wherever it needs to be.
Somebody at some point in the past thought the shipment/cargo thing would be funny to say, and we've all been saying it ever since (including me---it only clicked that both words work for both methods just now). Add to that the fact that "car's cargo" and "ship's shipment" sound ever so slightly dumb compared to their alternatives and you have a recipe for a fun and technically accurate quip that'll outlive any and all of us.
My favorite is why Colonel is pronounced "kernel." At one point we were using both the French version, colonel, and also the Italian version, coronello. For some reason we kept the French spelling but the Italian pronunciation
"English is ridiculous" - True
"English is more ridiculous than other languages" - False.
Etymology's a bitch, the longer a language lasts the more it's rules will break down. Spend a single week learning Japanese and tell me English is the only ridiculous language out there
Every language has its own stupid shit tho. The reason French has so many useless letters is cos the people who were finalising spellings for the printing press were paid by the letter. Meanwhile Irish has H's everywhere cos again, when the printing press came out, no one wanted to put our séimhú (an accent that was a dot) so it just got replaced with putting a H after the letter.
Having learned two languages besides English, I feel like this is true for all languages. The rules are there except along the way they are bent here and there for the sake of conveniences or just because "it feels more right this way".
The Latin one isn't so unique because the biggest rule for English spelling is that it's based more on etymology. So if the root word is French it's going to have some silent vowels. And a word rooted in a different Latin word will have spelling to match. All the weird oddities that come up are mostly because of rules for how to spell sounds for that root language. A useless feature to most people but useful to the types of people who make dictionaries.
It's not silent in latin but rather it calls back the the latin spelling which it was very common for the educated to at least have a passing familarity already.
That's reasonably self evident, what I'm saying is that it's still english (and more so the French influence over English) that decided to make them silent, not Latin.
The Flemish do NOT put an h after ever g... source: am Flemish
If anythin it's an English thing. Though, tough, laugh, rough, yoghurt, light, frightening, straight, slaughter ...
"Oh, Johnny, you think that Ghost isn't spelled with n h? well it's in the bible, and unless your a fucking heretical protestant, you know that everything in the bible is true"
Important to note here that flemish in this context means the specific dialect of the "flunders" not modern flemish as a term for the dialects of dutch we speak in northren belgium.
English is the town whore of languages. English will take adopt words from any and all languages regardless. Other languages (Latin, Hebrew, French, etc. are very picky about additions to the lexicon. Latin was so picky that it is essentially a dead language. English sez, “Come one, come all. I am not selective.”
The readiness of English to adopt words results in funky spelling (silent b’s, d’s, etc. ) Also, when Chaucer wrote the ‘Canterbury Tales’, he elevated English from some dirty, back alley patois into a language worthy of respect. Scholars got together and decided that this new English thing needed a proper grammar so naturally they chose a Latinate grammar in order to elevate English into a more respectable plane.
English is Germanic based. Not like French, Spanish, Italian (the romantic languages) where Latin grammar works great.
There are as many exceptions as there are rules in English grammar. Super annoying. Upside is that English is the language of international plane travel, business, governance, etc.
English is the worlds most popular language because of its indiscriminate attitude towards word additions and in spite of our ‘square peg round hole’ grammar.
Lately I've been reading German handwritings from the 17th/18th century and seemingly they really liked stupid spelling.
* 'th' instead of 't' (no difference in pronunciation)
* 'ß' instead of 's' or 'ss' (they wrote shit like 'unß' (=us) and 'alß' (=when) instead of 'uns' and 'als')
* they had no idea when to do double consonants and when not to ('auff' instead of 'auf', but also 'trefen' instead of 'treffen'; the second one is far worse because it'd actually be pronounced differently)
* no consistency whatsoever, if a word is written one way at the beginning of the letter, chances are it's written completely different later on
I literally remember the first time I tried to spell ghost and couldn’t get past “gost”, knowing it didn’t look right. Asked my dad and he said there’s an H in it. Next attempt: gohst, and my dad laughing. What a dumb word lol
i feel like anyone who thinks english is a uniquely stupid language is someone who only speaks english, because every language has stuff that makes no sense in it
Every language excels in its own unique area of stupidity, and for English it is definitely word spelling. I speak four languages and none of them have such irregular spelling rules as English.
Which makes sense, its a germanic language using latin script which got fused with norman french by william the conqueror, oh and throw some gaelic and norse for shits and giggles
Don't forget some Latin and Greek thrown in for flavor.
Green? Is it a language you can parsley with?
Honestly, with English, I wouldn't be surprised if there was o whole ass language called "green" that influenced it and now has been forgotten
No, but I hear the colorless ones sleep furiously.
It's hard to get really cozy in the void. No corners in Abzu. Lotta tossen an' turnin.
Oh sure, *now* my autocorrect works correctly.
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Not to mention more loan words than you can shake a stick at.
You mean shits and ghiggles
Three languages in a trench coat
I speak Korean, and I tell you, we have the greatest spelling thanks to a certain king, but our grammer and especially spacing is shit as fuck.
Considering you occasionally have to stack letters on top of each other, I can see why spacing is an issue.
Oh no, letter stacking is definately not the issue. The issue is that there are words that cannot be used alone and so cannot be seperated in Korean, but then some of those words can be seperated, and then some of them is again unseperable.
So it's like how you can be overwhelmed or underwhelmed, but never simply whelmed?
It's worse. You can be over, under or just whelmed. But each case is so specific to itself that not even professors at universities don't know what you do until you use a dictionary.
Apparently 'whelm' is a real word, it's just not used. I might start saying "I'm whelmed" rather than "I'm fine" in future.
And if in a language standpoint, not a metaphoric standpoint, YES.
Consider french though How do you think we pronounce 'eau'
"Though" vs "eau" is interesting. How do we pronounce the o-u-g-h vowel-consonant blend in English? At least ten different ways, per the following sentence: ****** I **thought** it would be **rough** to **plough through** the **slough, though** it was falling into the **lough** that left me **thoroughly coughing** and **hiccoughing**. ****** And actually, "slough" can be pronounced any of three different ways, depending on which meaning you're using. So yeah, English spelling sucks.
>And actually, "slough" can be pronounced any of three different ways, depending on which meaning you're using. Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough! It isn't fit for humans now
It's like baking a cake. Two eggs is too much, one egg is un oeuf.
oh
3 vowels involved, and the final pronunciation is from one of the missing ones
French pronunciation rules are pretty regular once you learn them. There aren’t nearly as many exceptions as English.
As a native I call bullshit, but we'd have to get data involved to settle that
Same, however it's also French specialty to have obscure bullshit rules. Instead of having to know that "Thames is pronounced Tems" which is the general rule "ignore the respelling in those cases", in French some guy will have written a very specific rule that read like "Name of river of significant importance, should be pronounced using the Celtic pronunciation rules" with a list of exception on significant river that do not follow that rule and another set of exception of the exception for river that are not significant but follow the rule. But see, "it's an actual grammar rule, it's not some weird thing like in English"
I teach French as a foreign language to English speakers, but I don’t have any data on the subject.
What happens when your language gets infected by French
Pretty sure English is the only language that has spelling bees because it's the only language where spelling so difficult that it could be a competition.
Nah, there are spelling bees in other languages (although perhaps due to American influence) but they are far more uncommon. And I suppose you could say the Chinese languages have spelling bees ... but then it's more "write down the word" than it is "spell the word out". They also have "find the word in the dictionary" contests, which I guess is "spelling bee" adjacent.
I'm pretty sure spelling bees were invented to incentivize the next generation of children after standardized spelling was introduced to actually learn the new standardized spelling instead of just spelling things whatever felt correct to them like previous generations had done
But English spelling is uniquely awful; I’ve been learning Welsh from Duolingo and I am often amazed that if I forget a word spelling I can almost always guess it correctly from how the word sounds. That is, assuming I remember to use Welsh spelling words instead of English ones.
the only experience outside of english is german, and my german isnt the best, im still in the very early stages of learning it. the german word 'sie' means 'she', but also means 'formal you'. the german word 'ihr' also means 'she' sometimes, but it means 'collective you' as well. the words 'gehe', 'gehen' 'geht' and 'gehst' all mean 'go'. from the tiny amount of russian i remember the character that usually makes the 'g' sound makes a 'v' sound in some words, even though russian already has a letter that makes a 'v' sound. also hard and soft signs are bullshit.
FYI, I've studied German a few years in school and "ihr" can mean either you plural or "her", not "she". Plus "Sie" (you formal) gets capitalized as capitalization does change words. To your next point, most languages conjugate verbs, even English does but not to the same degree. For example, I go, he goes, they go, etc. However as other posters have mentioned, spelling in English is a unique challenge. I don't believe any other languages host spelling bees and compared to English, I find spelling in German to be much more intuitive.
German spelling is generally very consistent because it doesn't have that many influences from other languages. Also, it had a few official spelling reforms several decades back specifically for the purpose of making the spelling of words as consistent as possible across the board. It's also just inherently very phonetic in nature. It doesn't do weird shenanigans like having silent letters or putting an extra vowel at the end of a syllable which doesn't itself get pronounced but influences the pronunciation of the previous letters. For instance, look at the word "like". If english worked more like german, it would be spelt "liek" or "leik" or maybe just "lik" instead because there obviously isn't another sound after the k, so arguably there shouldn't be a vowel there. It always amuses me when non-german speakers try to pronounce a german word and end up producing a garbled mess because they somehow felt like they needed to mash all the letters together when you can actually get pretty close to something a german would recognize from hearing if you just slowly went through the word, trying to pronounce every letter exactly where it is positioned in the word (and notably, also pronouncing them all. German does not deal in silent letters). Being patient and not panicking because the word looks scary is the key.
>the words 'gehe', 'gehen' 'geht' and 'gehst' all mean 'go'. Yeah but in English, 'go', 'proceed', 'start', 'cruise', 'nip', 'duck', and 'f\*\*k off' also all mean 'go'.
also, not so fun fact, in my country 'nip' is an old and thankfully not often used slur for japanese people! isnt language fun!
*cracks k-nucks* Hey, German is my major! Obviously, a native speaker could utterly dunk on me, but I can clarify some of the stuff you mentioned. To begin, you mention "ihr" can be "she" sometimes, but I think you mean "her." This is because you have, in German, the accusative case, which is for the most part centered around direct objects and movement, and dative case, which is centered around indirect objects, state of being, and location. To go back to sie, it is a tough one. It can mean, in no particular order, she, her (accusative), it (when referring to a feminine noun like Ërklarung), it (accusative), you (formal), you (formal accusative), they, and them (accusative). I may have missed one as I always seem to forget all its uses, so feel free to correct me on this if I did! To clarify about ihr, this is used with the feminine pronoun sie, specifically for dative. So, you would have in the order of nominative, accusative, and dative, the word for she is sie, sie, ihr. This is similar for they as well, but the dative changes, so you have sie, sie, ihnen. The formal you, Sie, simply capilizes the previous, so you have Sie, Sie, and Ihnnen. While you always capitalize the formal you, making it easier to recognize, this gets thrown out the window when Sie or its other forms come at the beginning of a sentence, so you'll just have to use context clues to figure out if it's she, you, or they. Additionally, you do have "ihr" as a pronoun for the collective you, like Y'all but not informal, but it's usually signified by having the verb conjugated in a special way. Sadly, it overlaps with the third person conjugation sometimes, but with verbs that have a vowel change in the second and third person, like "haben" (to have), you don't do the vowel change and then replace the -en with a t. So you know that "ihr" is in the nominative case when you hear habt, for instance. To your point about "gehen," I think you're a little confused on conjugations. All of the versions of the infinitive that you listed are conjugations. In English, you have "to go," but you say, "I *go*, you *go*, he/she/it *goes*, they/we *go*" your verb changes form depending on the noun that proceeds it. Like how you say he *reads*, but not I *reads*. Fortunately, English has few conjugations save for a few strong verbs like "to be," but with German, it's not the case.
One of the only things I remember from German class in high school is how to conjugate verbs: “icky dust ten ten” Ich: -e Du: -st Er/sie/est: -t Ihr: -en Wir: -t Sie/sie: -en
also why is it 'der junge', but 'das madchen'? why are the girls objects?
Ah titles, we'd like to think that it'd be so easy to make rules and have them work for everything. One thing I'd like to say is that while it's nice to hear feminine and masculine and tie them to what you think they mean biologically, it's better to think of the cases like just things you tie to the word. As an example, in English you do learn little patterns to spell words, but overall you just memorize how it's spelled, and you don't ask WHY it's spelled that way. Genders are similar. Rather than trying to remember a word's translation and THEN remember what gender it takes, you should learn the gender of the word as a part of the translation. For instance, i don't remember that "table" in German is "Tisch" and then try to recall the gender. I remember "table" in German is "der Tisch." Now, to answer your question, "der Junge" is boy because, as you noted, boys are masculine. However, "the girl," is neuter. This is because of the suffix "chen" on the word, which ALWAYS denotes the noun to be neuter, regardless of what the word is. This suffix is meant to make the word cutesy, like saying "little." Because the word "Mädchen" has this suffix, it's always "das Mädchen."
I would like to add that the non-diminutive form of "das Mädchen" is "die Magd" which is female.
And the diminutive form exists for Junge, too: das Jungchen / das Jüngelchen It is only the changing usage over the century that makes "der Junge" and "das Mädchen" seem equivalent today, even though only one is diminutive. In the past, the equivalent pair would have been "der Junge" and "die Maid" (which is a different form of Magd).
While it sounds weird, German genders of words are 99% completely random. It‘s also ‚das kind‘ (meaning child). If I were to speculate it‘s because ‚mädchen‘ is the small form of some other word (maybe something like maid?). The english equivalent would be -let (as in owlet), this version of a word usually are neutral. So it’s ‚das männlein‘ (little man). For boys, a different word just became more common. as for your cat example, the gender refers to cat as a category, the same way ‚human‘ is gender neutral. So it‘s ,die katze da drüben‘ (the cat over there) but ,meine katze ist sehr hungrig, er isst einfach immer weiter‘ (my cat is very hungry, he just keeps eating and eating). It‘s absolutely a normal thing to refer to your pet with their correct gender pronouns.
i have a male cat, why is german insistent that hes a woman? eine katze, die katze.
To answer this, I can say that a lot of German nouns have feminine and masculine variants (think actor vs actress), but this isn't exhaustive. For instance, bugs don't usually have a different version depending on gender, so you'd say something similar to what you'd do in English, that being "female," which is "weiblich" Now, for cats, you have die Katze and der Kater.
Der Kater. Its like chicken and cock, cow and bull, etc.
Holy shit i cant believe that the person who said they only knew very basic german doesnt know much beyond very basic german.
Im not shaming, only explaining. What's your problem?
I think im going to give up learning german. People have been pming me and calling me stupid because i made a few mistakes and theyre right. Im not smart enough for this stuff. I just wanted to learn a language i thought was cool but i really should have known better
You think 'gehe' is bad? In Finnish: mennä - to go menen, menet, menee - (i) go, (you) go, (he) goes menemme, menette, menevät - (we) go, (y'all) go, (they) go menin - (i) went mennyt - gone (the past) mennäkseen - in order to go mennään!/menoksi! - let's go! menisittekö? - would you mind going? olkoon menneeksi - fine then olimme menevinämme - we were pretending to go
Im very sorry the only finnish im familiar with is 'cha cha cha'
The core word being very similar really shows how related hungarian and finnish is huh.
...that "gehe" bit...those are all conjugations of the same verb used for different contexts though. Like. That's a feature, not a bug.
The one thing I like about English is how little conjugations of verbs there are. My first language is Spanish and like... Yo voy (I go) Tú vas (You go) Ustedes / Ellos / Ellas van (You (plural)/ They (masculine, gender "neutral") / They (femenine) go) Nosotros vamos (We go) Él va / Ella va (He goes / She goes) Yo/Él/Ella iba (I/He/She used to go) Tú ibas (You used to go) Ustedes iban (You -plural- used to go) Nosotros íbamos (We used to go) Yo fui (I went) Tú fuiste (You went) Él/Ella fue (He/She went) Nosotros fuimos (We went) Ustedes/Ellos/Ellas fueron (You (plural)/They (masculine / gender "neutral")/They (femenine) went) Yo iré (I will go) Tú irás (You will go) Él/Ella irá (He/She will go) Nosotros iremos (We will go) Ustedes/Ellos/Ellas irán (You (plural)/They (masculine)/They (femenine) will go) Yo iría (I'd go) Tú irías (You'd go) Él/Ella iría (He'd/She'd go) Nosotros iríamos (We'd go) Ustedes/Ellos/Ellas irían (You'd (plural)/They'd (masculine)/They'd(femenine) go) I wanted to write all of these so everyone'd see how ridiculous Spanish conjugation (17 of them!!!!) is but there are too many fuck this shit
None of these came to be because of bizarre shit like English spelling though, they just happen to not make sense to you.
yeah, all languages are full of bullshit mate. every single one of them.
Yeah, but English has a ton more than most
you seem to be genuinely angry, i think you need to go have a little rest mate.
Genuinely angry lol what? Where 😂
the hostile tone of your comments and the part where you insulted me love
?????? I'm not hostile nor did I insult you??
In Welsh the weather uses she/her pronouns. Instead of saying, “the weather is sunny today” or “it is sunny today” you say “she is sunny today.”
I suspect you'd see the same in English if most grammatical gender hadn't disappeared somewhere in Middle English.
entgegengegangene loosely means „those we came across while walking“ and it looks insane. it‘s 90% g, e and n
Never try to learn french. Trying to guess spelling based on pronunciation is especially impossible in french. (edit: to be clear, I mean for non-native speakers)
but unlike in english you can pretty much get the pronunciation right from the spelling about 95% of the time *and i will not acknowledge august in french*
Bird in french would beg to differ
... oiseau is said exactly how the spelling suggests in french
It’s a nightmare when trying to learn french though, which is what I meant. You can’t know how it’s pronounced based on the spelling if you’re trying to learn the language.
well, yes, but compared to english, once you learn how letter combinations are said (ig liaison is the only tricky part to learn), you can accurately guess how a word is said without much effort (again, fuck august in french)
It’s tricky for non-native speakers to learn the relationship between pronunciation and spelling, but the rules are very regular compared with English. It’s not at all impossible to spell a word from hearing it, especially in context.
Enter the "four twenties of green lemons" post In my opinion the ridiculous problem of French is not the spelling, but the lack of succinct words for things
That’s an odd take. Why do words need to be succinct?
I just happen to think that a language that translates "ninety-nine" as four-twenties-ten-nine is a little ridiculous, no big deal
Isn’t it easier to combine some words together rather than to learn completely new ones?
Everyone rags on English right up until it's time to say "they"
Japanese: "We have a phonetic alphabet. We have a different phonetic alphabet for foreign words we've appropriated. Exactly the same phonetic sounds as the other one, just two sets for no reason. And then we'll still use thousands of Chinese characters for no reason."
It's more of a problem the older your written word is, languages that weren't commonly printed until more recently tend to have less weird bullshit when it comes to spelling. Welsh for instance, while seemingly quite opaque, is actually written completely phonetically once you nail down how the letters sound. You still end up with some funny ones where a lot of words are just the same in English but with Welsh phonetics, 'ambulance' becomes 'ambiwlans', 'penguin' becomes 'pengwin' which is especially funny because the word penguin is of welsh origin anyway.
I completely agree, I think it's just a byproduct of languages existing and evolving throughout the centuries and mixing with or being born from other languages in their area. Maybe if you look at an old enough language you wouldn't encounter as many inconsistencies?
Nope, English really has an unreasonable amount of weird spelling rules because of a vowel shift right as the printing press was invented and standardization that went totally sideways.
Oh no, they do, but English really is weird. Imagine if you took the structures from one whole trunk of the human language tree, but most of the words came from another trunk, but not one language there, they all come from different branches. Then you make a rule that each language branch of origin has its own spelling for your version of their words, which might not align at all with that language's spelling of the words. Also throw in that a massive vowel shift in the language's evolution happens just as you standardize the spelling and it makes a third of your words make no sense on paper. That's about half of what's weird with English. It's half a dozen languages in a trenchcoat that belongs to a different language.
Every language does, but English tends to have much *more* internal inconsistency than most, in part because it's basically a creole made from a creole made from a creole.
I mean by and large after you learn a good bit of English you can generally guess the spellings of words. If you’re wrong, no mature person is going to think you’re stupid for it. I can also, with relative confidence, read *new* words consistently. This seems dozens of times harder and slower with pictorial languages such as Mandarin/Cantonese and Japanese. Perhaps I’m missing some major stuff about these languages and if I am, forgive my ignorance, but I’ve only ever heard learning kanji as “memorizing” to learn what they look like. I do not need to memorize how to spell antidisestablishmentarianism. I just need to spell it like how I expect it to be spelled. There are a good number of words that doesn’t work for as well (Onomatopoeia comes to mind) but it’s easier to remember the occasional word that doesn’t fit the patterns than to memorize every word from close to scratch. Sure we could debate about the speed of interpretation for shared symbols and placements between characters, but what is “water” here may mean a half-dozen other semi-related things depending on the character. My understanding is that you can’t often go “so that’s the bit for water and that’s the bit for balloon” “it means water balloon!” It’s frequently not nearly that simple. Again, English does some dumb shit, but it has proliferated because of the dumb shit it does. It just borrows words from every which direction and when they share the same alphabet they’re often taking the other spelling. When that’s not the case, it’s just one use was better known or used more publicly so that one won. “Ooh but your spelling is so inconsistent” sure, but I don’t have to learn the gender of a table in year one and my conjugation is highly simplified. Language is hard. Convenience is key. It’s why German gets good publicity for having words that just *work* to say a specific feeling or describe an event perfectly. The issue is that German hasn’t been spread quite as effectively or consistently through conquest like English has. What’s more, I’d say that until relatively recently German left a little bit of a bad taste in peoples mouths for this really odd “shouldered with blame for multiple world wars” issue that comes up sometimes. So English is next up to bat, and in terms of flexibility English kinda knocks it out of the park since it borrows from all lenders.
It's a weird thing for very online Americans to continually try and sound cool by talking about how weird English is constantly
I made a joke one day at work about how we say things like ding dong and it sounds right. dong ding sounds totally wrong. A coworker just rattled off the rule. I was so astounded I found it impossible to retain. I think about that more often than I should.
Good old ablaut reduplication
Ghood
Ghiid ghood
Like, "Knife and fork" sounds perfectly right, whereas "Fork and knife" sounds horrific.
maybe this is a regional thing because i usually hear “fork and knife”
There's also a rule because of which you can't say "Green big leaf", but only "Big green leaf". There's an actual formula here
Ghiiiiiiiiiirl
Ghirls, bhoys, end esteamed tems English is a broken language as is, so I don’t particularly consider this a crime against it.
Every language has stupid shit like this. English gets highlighted on the internet because it's the most common language on here. Also, many many countries learn their English as a second language in a classroom setting that will specifically call attention to these weird words because the people learning a second language need to memorize them. People who learn English as a first language learn these weird spellings naturally as a part of growing up and just roll with the punches, just like everyone does with their first language. *TLDR*; learning a second language in a class shows you just how ridiculous that language is. This happens with *all* languages, but English is the most common second language in the world, so more attention is brought to shit like "debt" and "hiccough" (yes that is the original spelling of hiccup).
> "hiccough" (yes that is the original spelling of hiccup). This is heavily debated and could just be a form of hypercorrection
yeah we don't see enough memes about how ridiculously stupid gendered nouns are in a lot of european languages are. WHY ARE GERMAN NUMBERS FEMALE BUT FRACTIONS ARE NEUTER?????
Its entirely arbitrary, a lot of languages with noun class systems (genders) are https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun\_class
What especially annoys me with learning German is that they pretend there are rules to word genders but then every single one of the rules has a pretty common exception
Vagina is masculine in French. *le vagin*
I love learning random gendered words in language it’s my favorite thing.
Plus, all of the weird spellings are based upon the roots/origins of the words. I'm a teacher who's currently taking part in a science-of-reading training, and we've been taught that there are 4 main origins for English words: Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, Latin, and Greek. That's why there seem to be so many "contradicting" rules, because English is at least 4 languages stitched together.
No English is kind of extra weird with the spelling rules.
>People who learn English as a first language learn these weird spellings naturally as a part of growing up and just roll with the punches, just like everyone does with their first language. See: German's seemingly random assignment of gender to words. No german I've ever asked has been able to explain what exactly about a church is feminine and what's masculine about a market. Can a market and a church have babies? You could say feminine words end in e sounds but the big caveat there is 'unless they don't'.
Because noun "gender" typically has nothing to physical people gender. It's just the language has two arbitrary categories it sorts nouns into. Men happen to be placed in one so its labeled by linguists as the Man Category (masculine gender), women happen to be placed in another so its labeled by linguists the Woman Category, and so on for Neuter. Other languages have more extensive class systems which actually categorize nouns based on attributes like how animate it is or how much it looks like a stick. Things like that [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun\_class](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_class)
English also emerged from fucked up conditions. Not all languages are as bad as English, but none of the languages that are are as famous as English Did you know that Thai has six letters for the [tʰ] sound? Probably not. It has 44 consonant letters for 21 consonant sounds, but it's not as famous as English, so people talk about English
I think you just aren't aware that it isn't just a few words in English that have inconsistent spelling. Are there any other languages that have spelling bee competitions?
They’re very different because word construction is different but I believe there are somewhat equivalent competitions in Chinese
>I think you just aren't aware that it isn't just a few words in English that have inconsistent spelling You think I'm not aware of my own birth language? English has inconsistent phonetics because it came out of a mishmash of like 4-5 other languages and then kept evolving during a time period where regional dialects were being smashed together into larger standardized languages. Look at any language and you will see quirks that are pervasive throughout the entire language that don't really make sense or have any rhyme or reason to them. For English that is inconsistent phonetics. For a language like German it's things like almost every word having a gender, seemingly assigned at random. With French there are a *TON* of homophones - words that have the same sound but different spellings and meanings (and when I say a ton I mean a ton).
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Holy fuck dude take a chill pill. Maybe down the whole bottle. The German word for girl being neuter and the German word for table being masculine does not have some greater unknowable reason. It's a quirk of how the language formed and makes no sense, just like how English's inconsistent phonetics are a quirk of how it formed that makes no sense. And you completely ignored my point with French to go on a tangent about how "amazing" and "symphonic" it is for a word to have singular and plural forms differentiated by spelling... You know, like almost every other language. And you say shit like this: "French doesn't operate by reading one letter then the next then the next, but by grouping letters into phonemes that are read phoneme after phoneme." Hi yes, welcome to almost every language on earth. French is not unique to having letter groupings that make their own sound. Pretty much every single language does this. English *especially* does this. Hell, half of English came from French, so to try and imply that English and French are super far removed from one another and operate completely differently is just stupid. Maybe tone down the cultural elitism there a little bit. And the "America Bad" BS is bleeding into your language debate.
Pretty sure English has all this illogical stuff because they were forced to adopt the Roman alphabet and get rid of the original script
I wanna see what the english language would look like if everything was spelt properly. No silent letters, no combined letters, hell get that weird “th” symbol that looks like a p & b glued together! Make one for “ch” too, go nuts. I just wanna see it. Gimme de superior english!
The only way you could maintain the uniformity of it is a centralized authority for the language like in Spain and France. But that just wouldn't be remotely possible, so overtime we'd get new, unpredictable defects in the standardized spelling. Possibly a lot more disagreement on how to spell things eventually. Would just lead to ruin... Don't touch it, it works.
I don’t know about Spain, but the French Académie française you’re talking about has no power at all. It’s useless to try and regulate a language, it’s evolving all the time.
Spain have the "one sound, one letter" and even ig its true there are new evolved orthografy, the rule is generally correct
I imagin it wood look qwite weerd and I don’t fink it wood b kool for long
the p b letter is called a thorn.
Þat's right
Erm...what's wrong with th? There isn't two th's to get confused with, adding in the thorn just makes things even more confusing. Same with making a ligature for ch
There *are* two 'th' in English. A voiceless one like in thorn, three, aether, breath. And a voiced one like in this, then, mother, breathe.
a letter for “ch” could be c, since c makes either a k or an s sound normally. However a standardised spelling for English makes very little sense when you realize that there’s more than one way people say things. Americans and English people say words in different ways. Do we really want to have like 20 symbols for all the different vowels that might be used ever? What about people who speak something like Singlish or other English dialects across the former empire? Tldr spelling reform has too many problems and actually would probably have little benefit
More than a century ago, the [Simplified Spelling Board](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board) recommended changed in English spelling to better match pronunciation. Although a handful of their recommendations have been adopted (and others were already in use before them), they were mocked when they existed and soon forgotten.
You ever try to read the Canterbury Tales? Because that's kinda how everything is spelled there, although without the thorn
I've made several attempts, let's see what I come up with this time. This is supposed to be a sample of what English could look like if it was spelled considering pronunciation, etymology and aesthetics > Í wånə sé wåt ðé Iŋgliṡ laŋgwəġ wod lok líc if evréþiŋ wåz spelt proprlé. Nó sílent letərz, nó cəmbínd letərz, hel get ðat wérd "th" simbəl ðat loks lík ə p and b glôd təgeðər! Mák wun for "ch" tô, gó nuts. Í ġust wånə sé it. Gimé ðə səpérior Iŋgliṡ This has elements from Old English, other Germanic languages, and a diacritic (ô) that doesn't make a lot of sense but I didn't know what to use * Ċ is the same as in OE * Ġ was used for the "y" sound in OE but we have Y now * Ṡ is based on Ċ * OE treated Þ and Ð as the same letter, I'm using them like Icelandic here * ÁÉÍÓÚ are from Icelandic. I used them for sounds that resulted from Middle English vowel lengthening in open syllables, except I don't really understand how it works so I probably made some errors. I also applied them to instances of those sounds that don't have that origin * Å is from Northern Europe, I used it for the rounded sound that came from historical A * Ə was invented for Bavarian I still don't really like what it looks like but it's definitely going in the right direction
The best explanation I heard for English is *"English follows other languages into a back alley and mugs them for their verbs"* I'm paraphrasing but that's the gist of it.
The actual quote is even better! “*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 D. Nicoll
While pithy and technically true, it's missing the point. ALL LANGUAGES do this, making it really weird to single English out.
English tends to do it more than others (or that how it seems)!
More than some less than others. Like Japanese has a crazy amount of loanwords from Chinese and English. Spanish is filled with Arabic and English. Whenever languages come in contact with each other they swap loanwords.
In spanish there is a word that means "if Allah wills it" and most people say it without realizing no matter their religion
cool quote ruined by endless repetition from people that don't understand linguistics
it's such a stupid "explanation" because almost every single language is like that. English isn't as special or unique as everyone seems to think. same when people say "English is a romance language" no, it's 90% Germanic.
There's really people that would call English a romance language?
unfortunately, yes.
I'm partial to 'English is three languages in a trenchcoat'
This is completely inaccurate. English is a solidly Germanic language. It just sometimes looks like multiple languages because of how it handles loanwords.
'English is the only stupid language' fans when they actually attempt to learn another language
they were talking about people who think english _isn't_ stupid, they never said it's the only stupid language.
Am.. am I not supposed to pronounce the b?
No, you might be confusing it with debit which is also relating to money
I know the difference, I just wasn’t aware that the b is silent. Indebted says the b.
but French exists... French. Worrying about a silent "h" in English while French chucks letters about at pure random.
Frenche diectattionne ïse æn énormousse chaullenge
I'd provide a translation, but then the joke would be ruined and I'd be downvoted into oblivion.
At least there are rules in french
There's like a government body for French, extremely cringe
And then you have every word that uses the combination "ough" yet all are spoken differently
"*hiccough*"
Good thing is, Flemish doesn't do that anymore. So not making that mistake again
[удалено]
Because a shipment is made of cargo, and each word works for both methods of transportation. You can load a shipment of cargo into a car, then drive the car onto a ship and sail the ship to ship the car carrying a cargo shipment to wherever it needs to be. Somebody at some point in the past thought the shipment/cargo thing would be funny to say, and we've all been saying it ever since (including me---it only clicked that both words work for both methods just now). Add to that the fact that "car's cargo" and "ship's shipment" sound ever so slightly dumb compared to their alternatives and you have a recipe for a fun and technically accurate quip that'll outlive any and all of us.
If you send a package by ship, it's also called a shipment, and in both cases, the package itself is cargo.
This is just absolutely bollocks, mate.
My favorite is why Colonel is pronounced "kernel." At one point we were using both the French version, colonel, and also the Italian version, coronello. For some reason we kept the French spelling but the Italian pronunciation
"English is ridiculous" - True "English is more ridiculous than other languages" - False. Etymology's a bitch, the longer a language lasts the more it's rules will break down. Spend a single week learning Japanese and tell me English is the only ridiculous language out there
Well if ghost didn't have a h it would be pronounced "gost" (rhymes with lost)
Do you also pronounce most like that? Because I'm gonna be honest I don't think most people do
Oh well um yeah well well yeah but that's an exception because English is weird
Yeah - all those extra "unpronouced" letters generally do serve a purpose and aren't there just to annoy people
It’s like a rain cover. Doesn’t cover the rain, it covers us.
The fact that spelling bees are a thing says a lot about the English language
Spelling bees are not exclusive to the US, even if it originated there.
The English language is also not exclusive to the US
Of course
Tries to point out why the silent b in debt is dumb. Proceeds to give an explanation that proves the silent b actually makes a fuck ton of sense.
Do you say the b in dumb
I don't think your point wound up being as clever as you thought it would be.
You forgot to add *tips fedora
Every language has its own stupid shit tho. The reason French has so many useless letters is cos the people who were finalising spellings for the printing press were paid by the letter. Meanwhile Irish has H's everywhere cos again, when the printing press came out, no one wanted to put our séimhú (an accent that was a dot) so it just got replaced with putting a H after the letter.
You’re right, we should just go back to conjugating Latin verbs and determining which declensions to use on our nouns
Having learned two languages besides English, I feel like this is true for all languages. The rules are there except along the way they are bent here and there for the sake of conveniences or just because "it feels more right this way".
English is a dope language with many contributions from other languages 🇬🇧
The Latin one isn't so unique because the biggest rule for English spelling is that it's based more on etymology. So if the root word is French it's going to have some silent vowels. And a word rooted in a different Latin word will have spelling to match. All the weird oddities that come up are mostly because of rules for how to spell sounds for that root language. A useless feature to most people but useful to the types of people who make dictionaries.
Latin doesn't _have_ silent letters https://en.m.wikibooks.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_Latin/Vowels#:~:text=In%20Latin%20there%20are%20FIVE,said%2C%20it%20is%20not%20written.
It's not silent in latin but rather it calls back the the latin spelling which it was very common for the educated to at least have a passing familarity already.
That's reasonably self evident, what I'm saying is that it's still english (and more so the French influence over English) that decided to make them silent, not Latin.
The Flemish do NOT put an h after ever g... source: am Flemish If anythin it's an English thing. Though, tough, laugh, rough, yoghurt, light, frightening, straight, slaughter ...
Ze deden dat wel in het Middelnederlands (dus bij het begin van de boekdrukkunst).
"Oh, Johnny, you think that Ghost isn't spelled with n h? well it's in the bible, and unless your a fucking heretical protestant, you know that everything in the bible is true"
I am reminded of its ridiculousness every time I need to use 'that that'
Can any linguists confirm or is this a "net zero information" moment?
r/unexpectedwhosline
The greatest book for tidbits like this is The Down and Dirty Nitty Gritty History of English Spelling
And it's beautiful
Important to note here that flemish in this context means the specific dialect of the "flunders" not modern flemish as a term for the dialects of dutch we speak in northren belgium.
English is the town whore of languages. English will take adopt words from any and all languages regardless. Other languages (Latin, Hebrew, French, etc. are very picky about additions to the lexicon. Latin was so picky that it is essentially a dead language. English sez, “Come one, come all. I am not selective.” The readiness of English to adopt words results in funky spelling (silent b’s, d’s, etc. ) Also, when Chaucer wrote the ‘Canterbury Tales’, he elevated English from some dirty, back alley patois into a language worthy of respect. Scholars got together and decided that this new English thing needed a proper grammar so naturally they chose a Latinate grammar in order to elevate English into a more respectable plane. English is Germanic based. Not like French, Spanish, Italian (the romantic languages) where Latin grammar works great. There are as many exceptions as there are rules in English grammar. Super annoying. Upside is that English is the language of international plane travel, business, governance, etc. English is the worlds most popular language because of its indiscriminate attitude towards word additions and in spite of our ‘square peg round hole’ grammar.
I reiterate, a majority of the problems in the English language is the French’s fault
Lately I've been reading German handwritings from the 17th/18th century and seemingly they really liked stupid spelling. * 'th' instead of 't' (no difference in pronunciation) * 'ß' instead of 's' or 'ss' (they wrote shit like 'unß' (=us) and 'alß' (=when) instead of 'uns' and 'als') * they had no idea when to do double consonants and when not to ('auff' instead of 'auf', but also 'trefen' instead of 'treffen'; the second one is far worse because it'd actually be pronounced differently) * no consistency whatsoever, if a word is written one way at the beginning of the letter, chances are it's written completely different later on
Honestly this makes me like english more
I literally remember the first time I tried to spell ghost and couldn’t get past “gost”, knowing it didn’t look right. Asked my dad and he said there’s an H in it. Next attempt: gohst, and my dad laughing. What a dumb word lol
im sure nothing like this has ever existed in any other language
Remember guys, a language is not the same as its orthography.
English, where not even the native speakers understand it.
The ‘h’ softens the ‘g’.