English is a trial and error language

[birdinsky]

Also, what becomes the "universal language" has zilch to do with the properties of that language and is entirely dependent on geopolitical power. Latin, Greek, Chinese, and Arabic (etc. etc.) have all had outsized infleunce for centuries in the past, and English won't be the universal language forever either.

 

[CobaltBlu]

Most languages have weird inconsistencies. I don't think English is special in this regard.

 

[meow]

My favorite on that list is #3 "any noun can become a verb if you don't care enough."

 

[Azem]

The English language is an amalgamation of several other languages.

The native British languages were replaced with Latin (and they had Latinised Greek, which is why words like 'encyclopaedia' are pronounced weird), then Anglo-Saxons brought their Germanic language, vikings brought their relative Norse language, Normans brought their French. Add centuries of development and evolution, incorporation of new loan words and concepts, and you have the English language.

The reason why "the rules don't make sense" is because the rules come from different languages. That's it.

 

[Senator Toadstool]

Weird rules happen because we don't have a standardizing body like many romance and other languages. People and common usage controls the language which makes it highly adaptable.

 

[colui]

As a native Italian speaker:
Yes, English makes little sense.

 

[hailvera]

the obsession with "logical" language is a bit bizarre to me as language is more about mutual understanding and less so concrete rules.

 

[RM8]

Most languages have weird inconsistencies. I don't think English is special in this regard.

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English is absolutely special in this regard, most other languages have more consistent rules, especially when it comes to spelling and pronunciation. That's why you have spelling bees, people within the same country pronouncing a single word in many different ways, literal vowel shifts over time, etc.

It's funny because if you remove pronunciation / spelling, it's actually one of the absolute easiest languages to learn, with very few "moving parts" compared to other germanic languages and of course romance languages.

 

[Futureman]

I actually remember being taught number 7 in school.

 

[theusedversion]

I just want the spelling for Colonel to be fixed.

 

[Brandino]

Fuck the fucking fuckers.

Valid sentence.

 

[Pickman]

This sums it up pretty well. Always liked this skit.

 

[hateradio]

I still suck at double consonants.

 

[Solace]

As someone using English as a second language, I have to say that it is easy as fuck to learn. You wanna talk about arbitrary rules and complex structures? Try Arabic. That shit breaks you. We had to learn Arabic as a third! language in school. I aced everything except for arabic. That shit is scary and it will make you scream and cry.

 

[Unknownlight]

English spelling is pure bullshit, but spoken English is fairly straightforward by language standards. For simple cases, people learning English can drag-and-drop dictionary words into a simple structure and be decently confident that they've spoken a valid sentence. For example, one of the most basic building blocks of English is Subject-Verb-[article]-Object.

I own a car.

There are only two articles in English: the and a. "A" is used for the concept of an object, while "the" is used for a specific one. It's very consistent and easy to remember.

Every other word here can be replaced with few to no changes to the rest of the sentence. First, the subject:

You own a car.
She owns a car.
Bob owns a car.
We own a car.
They own a car.

The only irregularity is that an "s" is added to the end of the verb for "third-person" subjects (s/he, it, proper nouns). It's arbitrary, but nothing compared to a lot of languages. Also, the irregluar "s" disappears if you make the verb past or future tense. For many cases, you make a verb past tense by adding "ed".

You owned a car.
She owned a car.
Bob owned a car.
We owned a car.
They owned a car.

Anyway, the verb and object can be replaced with anything as well.

We have the tickets.
I see the finish line.

You can turn this into a question just by adding "do" to the beginning.

Do you own a car?
Do we have the tickets?

You add "will" after the subject to turn it into a statement for the future.

I will own a car.

You add "will" before the subject to turn it into a question for the future.

Will you have the tickets?

Obviously this is a really, really simple example and English gets way more complicated, but think of this from the perspective of someone who doesn't know English but needs to speak it during travel. They'd know enough to be able to ask for food, directions, and other understandable sentences with nothing but this super short post and a word-to-word translation dictionary. All things considered, it's not as difficult as it easily could be.

 

[gutter_trash]

there so many Latin and French loan word in English LOL

 

[Cocolina]

Oh this topic again

 

[Cantaim]

All languages suck ass

sincerely,
Cantaim the man with phonological dyslexia

 

[diakyu]

As a lit senior major I don't think about it much.

 

[Sei]

I'll say that 8 was definitely a roadblock when I was learning.

At least for Spanish and French, they are for the most part, consistent with how you write something and how you pronounce it, and some times that leads to other types of trouble (like different words that sound the same).

But English is not consistent at all.

Some one already brought up Colonel, I'll add cache, nuclear, often. Why don't you just fix it so it's written like it sounds...

 

[flatearthpandas]

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.

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Ehhh, sure someone pointed this out already but the k was not originally silent.

 

[Unknownlight]

Some one already brought up Colonel, I'll add cache, nuclear, often. Why don't you just fix it so it's written like it sounds...

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Not that I want to defend English spelling, but nuclear is written as it sounds. Nu-cle-ar. New-clee-err.

 

[Fatoy]

I'll add cache, nuclear, often. Why don't you just fix it so it's written like it sounds...

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Cache is a slightly strange one (you could pronounce it one of two ways) but nuclear and often are both pronounced exactly the way they're written in quite a lot of English accents.

 

[Dice]

the obsession with "logical" language is a bit bizarre to me as language is more about mutual understanding and less so concrete rules.

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that was beautiful ♫

 

[WolfForager]

I'm fully aware of how difficult English is as a language from listening to colleagues experience of learning it. That being said, I'm currently learning German (almost finished A2) and I'd put German on par with English for learning difficulty. There are some strange bloody rules and exceptions there too, can't really ever see myself being anywhere near fluent in it.

 

[diverit]

then
than

nuff said

 

[Deleted member 12790]

This sums it up pretty well. Always liked this skit.

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they call them fingers, yet they don't fing.

 

[Unknownlight]

then
than

nuff said

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I'm not sure what your accent is, but then and than are pronounced differently. They're pronounced exactly how they're spelled.

 

[Midgarian]

Honestly. When you sit down and compare English to other languages, which mostly follow a 1:1 alphabet to sound ratio, English is a mess. I'm quite eloquent by nature and take it for granted that knowing these rules isn't easy to non-English speakers (and even native English speakers!).

You know how "Chinese", "Japanese" and "Greek" are stereotyped as "hard" languages from an English speaking perspective. They are even used as metaphors when describing something we don't understand. English is the real version of that.

However I wonder if such esoteric rules and grammar form a greater foundation for intellectual rigour if one masters the English language, than the 1:1 languages do?

 

[Deleted member 30411]

 

[Astronut325]

Yup... trying to teach English to my 2nd grader... it's really painful as the language isn't phonetically consistent.

 

[Deleted member 4247]

English "deserves" to be the world's language exactly because of how ramshackle and thrown together it is.

There are no rules here, no academics in ivory towers determining right and wrong. It is the most alive of any living language.

Because all of those examples in that Buzzfeed article? They are either ways that English makes sense even when it's nonsense, or ways in which nonsense doesn't have to make sense because being "right" is only valuable to a point.

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The same word having two literally opposite definitions is bullshit though.

 

[TwinBahamut]

Ehhh, sure someone pointed this out already but the k was not originally silent.

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Huh? Err, that's what I said. The spelling of the word knight is a good phonetic spelling for the days when it started with a k sound, used the original i sound prior to the Great Vowel Shift, and had that back-of-the-throat fricative gh sound. But these days that spelling isn't close to the modern pronunciation.

I have no idea what you think I was trying to say.

 

[Fugu]

I don't know when the idea that English is especially difficult or complex started to take hold among English speakers, but it will never fail to confuse me. I have to think that most people who believe this speak only English.

Most assessments of language acquisition difficulty put English decidedly in the easy camp. There are certainly some elements of it that are challenging (like spelling), but there's a lot about it that makes it easy. For one thing, English speakers around the globe are highly accustomed to second language speakers and most fluent speakers will be able to find a comprehensible thought in just about any pile of English words because they are essentially trained to do it by the huge acceptable range in English comprehension.

 

[ibyea]

My first language is spanish. I thought english was easy to learn, and in fact, an easier language than spanish. Yes, the spelling is not phonetic, but there is some internal logic to them, and the ones that are irregular, well, you just have to learn them like every irregular stuff that are in every language.

 

[gutter_trash]

i learned English from watching TV and reading children's books. I found it to be way easier to learn than French (I learned both at the same time due to living in Montreal)

 

[Cocolina]

The same word having two literally opposite definitions is bullshit though.

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English has loads of words but sometimes context is implied, in other languages the context is just attached to the original word and a phrase is the word.

French don't just say potato, they say apple of the ground. In Spain they don't say toe, they say finger of the foot. Yeah so what if read means both tenses at once, it's a time traveller like our doctors. But mostly English has words for absolutely everything.

 

[Deleted member 4247]

English has loads of words but sometimes context is implied, in other languages the context is just attached to the original word and a phrase is the word.

French don't just say potato, they say apple of the ground. In Spain they don't say toe, they say finger of the foot. Yeah so what if read means both tenses at once, it's a time traveller like our doctors. But mostly English has words for absolutely everything.

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Yeah, but, like:

 

[ItchyTasty]

Eeh I know 3 languages (all germanic tho) but everyone of them has some strange situation specific rules. I imagine it's like that all over the world.

 

[Fatoy]

i learned English from watching TV and reading children's books. I found it to be way easier to learn than French (I learned both at the same time due to living in Montreal)

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I grew up in England, but moved to France when I was a teenager and went to a French-speaking school. My French is a bit rusty these days, but I got it to close to bi-lingual standard when I was there.

French is a fairly sensible language, but there's no denying that conjugation is much harder is languages where nouns can be gendered, and where the verb can alter pretty dramatically depending on whether you're talking past, past imperfect, future perfect and so on.

English has:

• I am
• You are
• He / she / it is
• They are
• We are

French has:

• Je suis
• Tu est
• Vous etes
• Il / elle est
• Ils / elles sont
• Nous sommes

Sure, that's only four ways of conjugating "to be" and five for "etre," but consider the simple version of the past tense. "Was" and "were" are all you need in English, whereas French has five again: "fus, fut, fumes, futes, furent".

I find French pronunciation easier (far less trial and error, to stay on topic) but English is a much simpler language to build a sentence in.

 

[flatearthpandas]

Huh? Err, that's what I said.

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So it is, my bad. Easy

 

[Fatoy]

Yeah, but, like:

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Chuff is a very strange word. I've only ever heard anyone say there were "chuffed" to mean they were happy with an outcome, but then I've also heard people (myself included) tell someone to chuff off as a stand-in for fuck off, and I've said "chuff all" as an emphatic way of saying "nothing".

Egregious is just a modifier, though. And I've never known anyone who said "non-plussed" to mean anything other than "not fazed".

 

[gutter_trash]

I grew up in England, but moved to France when I was a teenager and went to a French-speaking school. My French is a bit rusty these days, but I got it to close to bi-lingual standard when I was there.

French is a fairly sensible language, but there's no denying that conjugation is much harder is languages where nouns can be gendered, and where the verb can alter pretty dramatically depending on whether you're talking past, past imperfect, future perfect and so on.

English has:

• I am
• You are
• He / she / it is
• They are
• We are

French has:

• Je suis
• Tu est
• Vous etes
• Il / elle est
• Ils / elles sont
• Nous sommes

Sure, that's only four ways of conjugating "to be" and five for "etre," but consider the simple version of the past tense. "Was" and "were" are all you need in English, whereas French has five again: "fus, fut, fumes, futes, furent".

I find French pronunciation easier (far less trial and error, to stay on topic) but English is a much simpler language to build a sentence in.

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caught you mistake
Tu es not Tu est
:P

they both make the same sounds but arbirtarily spelled differently because French gonna French

Spanish and Portuguese simplified their respective languages meanwhile French doubled down on complexifying theirs

 

[Fatoy]

caught you mistake
Tu es not Tu est
:P

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Dammit. I blame the fact that I have accent shortcuts turned off in macOS, so I'm not in the proper French mindset.

I never learned the AZERTY keyboard layout though. The hell with that.

 

[gutter_trash]

Dammit. I blame the fact that I have accent shortcuts turned off in macOS, so I'm not in the proper French mindset.

I never learned the AZERTY keyboard layout though. The hell with that.

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In Quebec, they use a QWERTY keyboard with accents on it . I use an English QWERTY keyboard but memorized where the French accents are on it.

 

[Jakten]

Yeah, but, like:

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Honestly there is so many words like this in English and when you start to think about the etymology of words it's weird how we dont notice really. Like Terrific, Awesome, and Horrific all meant the same thing basically but we use Terrific and Awesome to mean something that is good rather than scary now despite using their related words properly (Awful, Terrifying).

Then we get to the late 80's/90's where we cut the bullshit and just straight up say bad means good. Or sick, I still hear people use sick to mean good sometimes.

 

[Eoin]

Yeah, English is a mess.

That's mostly a good thing.

Sure, it produces some absolutely weird grammatical and syntactical conventions (they barely deserve to be called "rules"), and spelling (and sometime pronunciation) is a mess, but that comes with English being in such wide usage and being so freely adaptable. New words arrive by popular usage, or by people combining bits of English's enormous existing vocabulary, or by simple efficient theft of the word from another language.

The range of words and their (sometimes subtle) associations also means that English can be used as both a linguistic bludgeon or a scalpel. If you need to be precise, English normally lets you be. If you've written something you'e not quite happy with but need to say it in a very slightiy different way, you can normally find several nearly-but-not-entirely identical ways of saying it.

If another language was substituted for English and billions of people started speaking it, then firstly, you'd get the same effect. There's no way to regulate a global population making countless ongoing cultural contributions to a language. Secondly, any language that you'd pick is probably already influenced enough by English that you'd end up inheriting a lot of English's weird spellings and pronunciations anyway.

 

[Koukalaka]

I remember how one of my language teachers at my school described the challenge of learning English: "Most languages have a book of rules and a page of exceptions. English has a page of rules and a book of exceptions."

 

[Seneset]

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.

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Idioms exist in every language though.

 

[diverit]

I'm not sure what your accent is, but then and than are pronounced differently. They're pronounced exactly how they're spelled.

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And yet some do not understand