Three of them are descriptive. I believe it's something like "Bison from Buffalo bully bison from Buffalo, whom are bullied by bison from Buffalo."
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English is a trial and error language
- Thread starter Shahed
- Start date
One of the fun parts of English is the fact that, while the way we pronounce words has changed A LOT over the years, the way we spell things has not. So we get words like "knight," which is the sensible phonetic spelling of how it was pronounced hundreds of years ago, but makes absolutely no sense for modern pronunciation.
English is way more coherent and consistent if you ignore written English and just focus on spoken English, to be quite honest. Of course, it is kinda hard to do that and still be part of society.
English is way more coherent and consistent if you ignore written English and just focus on spoken English, to be quite honest. Of course, it is kinda hard to do that and still be part of society.
Language isn't math and things don't all have to make some sort of cosmic sense. Thinking about languages as collections of rules isn't consistent with how most are used. So many great works of literature in any language wouldn't work if they were "corrected".
It may have a lot of dumb rules and seem like nonsense, but you can speak it poorly and still get your point across.
"It deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe."
Is this a problem in other languages too?
So many english sentences dont make sense unless the rest of the story gives you a clue(and oftentimes they dont, newspapers do this alot)
For example.
So many english sentences dont make sense unless the rest of the story gives you a clue(and oftentimes they dont, newspapers do this alot)
For example.
wtf is in the pajamas?
Pajamas are something you wear. So the person shot a man while wearing their pajamas.
Wrong. He shot the infamous 'PJ stalker,' a criminal who robs people in his pjs.
I met a spanish woman who was learning english and iirc she said it wasn't too difficult itself, it was all the slang and language which means one thing but can also mean something completely different or is referencing something else. Idioms! That's what I'm thinking of.
"A bitter pill to swallow"
"a dime a dozen"
"an arm and a leg"
"beating a dead horse"
"don't sink a ship for a bucket of tar"
You have to learn what those words mean but you also have to learn what they also mean.
"A bitter pill to swallow"
"a dime a dozen"
"an arm and a leg"
"beating a dead horse"
"don't sink a ship for a bucket of tar"
You have to learn what those words mean but you also have to learn what they also mean.
Yes, that's also another way to read it. Putting wearing is probably better but yeah, it's confusing.
I picked the third option but it's hard to know as a native speaker.
On somewhat related notes I will say that Korean has a far superior alphabet and I like how phonetic Spanish is. But fuck the whole masculine/feminine word shit you have to remember.
On somewhat related notes I will say that Korean has a far superior alphabet and I like how phonetic Spanish is. But fuck the whole masculine/feminine word shit you have to remember.
I'll say that on top of all the weirdness of the english language, you people who learned it from birth must have some super hearing for the most subtle differences in pronunciation. For example, when I see threads like one where they ask "how do you pronounce SEGA?" and see the options as Sega, Se-Guh, and see Se-guh leading and people posting videos on how it sounds, I'm all like, wait, what? Sega can be pronounced differently? what are you talking about?
I've learned/dabbled in several languages over the years (Dutch, English, German, French, Japanese, Chinese, Korean), and English is one of the easiest BY FAR, although that kind of thing largely depends on your native tongue as well, of course.
Does it have bullshit? Yes.
EVERY LANGUAGE DOES.
There's no need to single out English, it's just a language like any other in that regard.
In fact, most European languages are MUCH harder, because English grammar is pretty simple.
I'll admit the spelling is whack though.
Does it have bullshit? Yes.
EVERY LANGUAGE DOES.
There's no need to single out English, it's just a language like any other in that regard.
In fact, most European languages are MUCH harder, because English grammar is pretty simple.
I'll admit the spelling is whack though.
Whoa, as a non-native English speaker, I struggle with this as well. When I carefully read idiomatic sentences like these, their usage does end up making sense in a certain context, but they just don't come to me naturally. Growing up, I noticed that a lot of people used idioms in their everyday vocabulary, and I've tried to incorporate them into mine, but I either struggle trying to remember what the full phrase is or I end up making myself look dumb, so I stopped. I just took the simpler route, which means less anxiety, lol.
There is NOTHING intuitive about the order rules in #7!
If you weren't a native English speaker, if you are trying to learn English in your teens, or 20's, or older, #7 is going to be a headache.
Language itself is weird and is also constantly evolving. Idioms and other weird figures of speech also exist in other languages as well and generally make no sense unless you know the meaning behind it. A lot of my students don't know many phrases that I thought were universal, so those come and go with time as well.
I shouldn't claim to be an expert here, but as far as I can tell, German has just retained a lot of the things that we've dropped from the Shakespeare days.
Thou (singular) - du
You (plural) - ihr
Although I think it's more like "du" and "euch" which our "thou" and "you" are related to.
Another one of the different words that we've compressed into "where".
where (at where) - wo
whence (from where) - woher
whither (to where) - wohin
Related to that, German has a thing where you take that "at where" and attach the answer you want to make a question. English still has that with "whereby", which means "how" since it's asking by which method something happened. German has more of it:
woüber - above what?
worunter - under what?
wodurch - through what?
worum - around what?
womit - with what?
wonach - after what?
wofür - for what?
wovon - from what?
wogegen - against what?
That's also why it's "wherefore art thou Romeo", since it's asking rhetorically why, or for what reason he is Romeo. If he wasn't Romeo, a member of the rival Montague family, there would be no reason for a tragedy to happen.
While we're here, take some German sentences and substitute them for English without changing the word order as see what it sounds like:
Als Gregor Samsa eines Morgens aus unruhigen Träumen erwachte, fand er sich in seinem Bett zu einem ungeheuren Ungeziefer verwandelt. - As Gregor Samsa one morning from unquiet dreams awoke, found he himself in his bed to an enormous vermin transformed.
Da steh ich nun, ich armer Tor! Und bin so klug als wie zuvor; - There stand I now, I poor fool! And am so wise as how before;
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English has weird exceptions to common rules, but not so many that they're impossible to memorize with reasonable practice.
Upon reading the first sentence...
BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
- while English is less gendered that the Romance languages, it is still more gendered (actor/actress, etc.) than other languages
- while verb conjugation in English isn't as much of a pain in the ass as it is in French, there are languages with no verb conjugation
There are several languages out there that are much easier to speak than English.
English spelling is a nightmare. History conspired a perfect storm to fuck it up. But in terms of actual grammar, English is super stripped down and simple. No gender, no case, extremely basic conjugation. The verb tenses can be a little specific, but every language is quirky in how it splits up time for verb tenses. Some irregular plurals and conjugations but that's pretty much a constant in any language too.
I guess you could argue the size of the vocabulary is also a problem, with all the synonyms that have slight tonal differences, and maybe that pronunciation is hard thanks to a pretty large number of sounds that are popular in the language. Both of those come from the same "three languages in a trenchcoat" phenomenon that contributed to the fucked up spelling.
Also it's hard for me to get too mad at spelling when Chinese and Japanese have to just learn a drawing for every word. At least you can still kind of guess what letters are in a bad English spelling, versus a completely arbitrary symbol.
I guess you could argue the size of the vocabulary is also a problem, with all the synonyms that have slight tonal differences, and maybe that pronunciation is hard thanks to a pretty large number of sounds that are popular in the language. Both of those come from the same "three languages in a trenchcoat" phenomenon that contributed to the fucked up spelling.
Also it's hard for me to get too mad at spelling when Chinese and Japanese have to just learn a drawing for every word. At least you can still kind of guess what letters are in a bad English spelling, versus a completely arbitrary symbol.
I believe it is due to its origin as a loanword from Greek. Also it isn't unique. Look at chasm, chameleon, or chiropractor.
I was under the impression English Grammar is relatively straight forward and easy, and that it's English's non-existent spelling and pronunciation rules that are the hard part. A lot of that you can blame on French, the Norman Conquest made English a Frankenstein's monster of a Language.
As the Usenet quote goes "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 riffle their pockets for new vocabulary."
As the Usenet quote goes "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 riffle their pockets for new vocabulary."
The pronunciation doesn't really matter, though. The definition/intent comes from the context it's used in. Other languages are way more sensitive about this sort of thing.
So, in conclusion: while English is this, there are "other languages" that are better, and while english is that,"other languages" that are better. Solid point.
Maybe you were too busy laughing to give some actual examples.
Please, show me a language that:
- uses our alphabet
- is pretty much genderless
- doesn't use diacritical signs
- has the most basic verb conjugation
Why is "uses our alphabet" an advantage? There are other alphabets that are simple and also far more consistently applied.
Even when it comes to "uses diacritical signs", consider that English went through the Great Vowel Shift, where we took markings that used to point at a vowel sound being held out longer (an actual long vowel) and instead replaced them by having the vowel have alternate pronunciations which aren't always clearly marked (English long vowels). Part of why diacritics are confusion to English speakers is because we don't expect vowel letters to have consistent sounds a scouring the rest of the word for evidence of what sounds they could possibly be making.
Korean.
- it uses an alphabet
- non-gendered
- no diacritical marks
- like many East Asian and Southeast Asian languages it does do verb conjugation
Fuck YOUR alphabet. Why does that have to be a criteria?
The green is the countries that use the latin alphabet.
But, as a universal language, we should go for the script of a country with a population of 50M, instead of opting for the one that half the world already knows? Sound logic.
Here's the thing: at a high level, every language is bullshit. English is in many ways more bullshit than others, but Korean is fucked up. (Source: am bilingual in English and Korean).
As a WRITING SYSTEM, Hangul is largely superior to the alphabet, imo. As a LANGUAGE, Korean is bullshit. Levels of speech (i.e., formal/informal hierarchical modes of speech) and verb conjugation are both a nightmare. Spacing between words in writing is a completely made up bullshit system that nobody can agree on. Spelling is also largely bullshit. It is far more bullshit than English, in my experience (i.e., college+ educated people routinely say/write "wrong" things in Korean, more frequently than college+ educated people do so in English).
My impression from learning German fairly intensively is that German is less bullshit than English. It's more rules heavy and therefore harder to learn at first (higher skill floor) but fewer absolutely batshit exceptions so that once you have the basics, it's less arbitrary (lower skill ceiling). Then again, I was never truly fluent so this may sound insane to a German speaker.
Anyway, languages are ever-changing and will never make perfect sense.
As a WRITING SYSTEM, Hangul is largely superior to the alphabet, imo. As a LANGUAGE, Korean is bullshit. Levels of speech (i.e., formal/informal hierarchical modes of speech) and verb conjugation are both a nightmare. Spacing between words in writing is a completely made up bullshit system that nobody can agree on. Spelling is also largely bullshit. It is far more bullshit than English, in my experience (i.e., college+ educated people routinely say/write "wrong" things in Korean, more frequently than college+ educated people do so in English).
My impression from learning German fairly intensively is that German is less bullshit than English. It's more rules heavy and therefore harder to learn at first (higher skill floor) but fewer absolutely batshit exceptions so that once you have the basics, it's less arbitrary (lower skill ceiling). Then again, I was never truly fluent so this may sound insane to a German speaker.
Anyway, languages are ever-changing and will never make perfect sense.
Do you honestly think learning another alphabet is the hardest component of learning a language? We're talking about assigning a hypothetical new universal language. That's a monumental task to begin with.
The green is the countries that use the latin alphabet.
But, as a universal language, we should go for the script of a country with a population of 50M, instead of opting for the one that half the world already knows? Sound logic.
Korean has 24 letters. English has two hundred irregular verbs.
Hell, while we're treating switching to another alphabet as if it was an insurmountable hurdle, let's recall that earlier forms of English were written with runes. The "Ye olde shoppe" thing actually becomes because English retained the thorn rune for a while, which looked a lot like the letter Y and was used where we'd use "th".
But sure, whine about another poster's "logic".
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True, although in practice I don't know how common even small adjective stacks really are, so I doubt it comes up much. But that's one reason why it's so odd that there's a "correct" ordering. Given that you can have a super long string of adjectives and yet native speakers would be practically unanimous on which order is "right" (despite the fact that super long strings almost never occur during normal use and that no one was ever explicitly taught the correct order), I'm partial to the idea that adjective ordering is an innate part of how our brains process language - although how exactly this works is tricky to prove. Perhaps the most well-known attempt at this sort of explanation comes from the Italian linguist Guglielmo Cinque who argues that there is a possibly universal "hierarchy of projections" -- sort of like the skeletal structure of sentences which has predetermined "slots" where certain kinds of words can be fitted in. So basically, the idea would be that the hierarchy of projections has a certain ordering of noun modifiers hard-coded, as it were. But this is a far from undisputed theory, and it's a difficult thing in general to really get at fruitfully.
Esperanto actually uses diacritical marks over c, g, h, j, s and u, not that it's a bad thing. I would say it's a pretty bad choice to replace English with, but its diacritics are not the reason for that.
English just seems so... versatile. Like, I generally hear other languages inject English words into their sentences because I think there isn't a word for that in their language.