Clarification Edit: for people who speak English natively and are learning a second language
When you start a new language, you learn “The Rules” first, and wonder why your first language doesn’t have such immutable “Rules.”
Then when you get fluent, you realize there are just as many exceptions as your first language.
Or do Japanese: There are two main types; the one where you and everyone else neatly follows the immutable rules which you speak to superiors and to strangers by default, and the one where everyone blurts out whatever words in whatever order they come up in their brain, aka what’s spoken between friends and to acquainted inferiors
I’m doing Japanese and I beleive you are referring to polite and impolite (or formal and informal) Japanese
That’s correct, 敬語 perfectly follows the rules, but while there are rules for 普通体 (ある instead of あります), people mostly just talk in whatever way they want that does not follow any rules.
It’s quite shocking to me as a Dutch person, we hardly have such a big difference between formal and informal Dutch
English is the language that beats up other languages in dark alleys then rifles through their pockets for loose phrases and spare grammar.
That sounds suspiciously like Pratchett ;)
Perhaps other people have said it but this is the quote I’m familiar with:
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”James Nicoll
Cheery! Stop playing with your lipstick and go down to Cable Street. Igor’s potatoes have escaped again and Washpot can’t find Fred and Nobby.
Ok, I’ll pick up some Dwarven Battle Bread in case we need it!
Right. Good ma-, er, dwarf
Don’t forget that there once was a time when smart people just added letters to words that don’t do anything - like the b in debt, which was called det before. Or when America got rid of Britains U after O because newspapers charged per letter.
British newspapers were only able to subsidize the use of the letter ‘u’ through taxes levied on the colonies, which led to the revolution. So who’s so smart after all?
Nah, seriously, the Normans added the ‘u’ to French-derived words after they invaded. English orthography wasn’t standardized, though. Johnson kept the ‘u’ out of a sense of tradition when compiling his British dictionary, and Webster elided it in his American dictionary because we don’t pronounce it. Neither spelling, -or or -our, derives from the other.
I don’t know about “debt”, I always pronounce a very subtle b when I say it and saying det just sounds like the “det” in “detrimental”
Seriously, other languages at least adapt loanwords to their own grammar, orthography, and whatnot… English just grabs them as they are and runs away without looking back.
That’s why you end up with the plural of radius being radii, or stuff like fiancé or façade (seriously, how are people who only speak English and have never seen a ç before in their lives supposed to know how to pronounce that‽)…
Of course it all comes from English being really three or four languages — (Anglo-)Saxon, Normand(/old French), and Norse — badly put together, so sprinkling bits of other languages on top didn’t make much of a difference, when there were already about five different ways to pronounce, for instance, oo, and the whole vowel shift debacle didn’t exactly help with this mess… but while other languages which may have had similar (if maybe less spectacular) growing pains eventually developed normative bodies, mostly from the eighteenth century onwards, that define and maintain a standard form of the language, English seems to have ignored all that and left grammar and orthography as a stylistic choice on the writers’ part, and pronunciation as an exercise for the readers…
+1 for the interrobang
Yep I’m learning Japanese and hate how they spell “maccha” as “matcha” in English because the English one doesn’t sound correct to me and annoys the fuck out of me
The one with the t has a subtle t sound to it while maccha sounds correct
Its taught me all languages are broken in some way. Romance languages have words that have arbitrary gender needing conjugation. Some have two genders, some three! Then the Romanian language comes in with its own tricks.
Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese) lack an alphabet so words are conjunctions of smaller words, or sometimes worse the phonetics of smaller words without the meaning of the word.
Starbucks (the coffee company) in Mandarin is 星巴克. 星 is the literal translation of Star. So far so good. However 巴 can mean “to hope”. 克 can mean “to restrain”. The reason they use 巴克 for the second half of Starbucks is that when you pronounce them they vaguely sound like “bahcoo” (buck). So the first half is the traditional use of direct translation ignoring what it sounds like phonetically, but the second half ignores direct translation and instead uses the phonetics of the second two characters to sound like “buck”.
I mean that makes sense because that’s kind of how it is in english too. “Star” makes you think of a star, but “bucks” at the end of the word doesn’t make you think of anything specific, it’s just a sound
Oddly enough, “starbuck” has nothing to do with stars. It comes from some Old Norse meaning “sedge river”. This became the place name Starbeck, a town in northern England. People then took that as a surname, and the spelling changed to Starbuck at some point. Herman Melville then gives a character in Moby Dick the surname Starbuck, and eventually the founders of the coffee chain picked it for no particular reason other than that they liked the sound of it
So the “buck” part is, I guess, “river”. Or “brook”, to pick the more closely-related English term. This doesn’t change anything you said, of course, as nobody actually thinks of it like that, I just found the winding path it took kinda interesting
“buck” is a common slang for a US Dollar. Its also a male deer. These are both very common words in American English. The “buck” in Starbucks doesn’t use either of these meanings, and thats fine, in this case you’re right that that part of Starbucks doesn’t carry any meaning from English…HOWEVER neither does “star” in Starbucks. The modern Starbucks logo has no star shapes in it, and nothing referencing astronomical stars. Its equal to “bucks” in that it is just a set of sounds. Yet in Mandarin, the “star” is literally translated as “star” like the astronomical body and spoken it sounds close to “sheen”, while the “bucks” sounds close to “bahcoo” for a total pronounced word of “sheenbahcoo”. So literal for the first part, phonetic for the second part. Essentially using two completely different sets of rules inside one word.
Somebody who was aware of all this once invented a language that was supposed to fix all the problems. He called it Esperanto.
Esperanto isn’t the only constructed language, and I think it is more Western-oriented, for good or ill. It does do a lot of things right within that framework, though, with certain rules that make everything explicit while removing other rules for structure that are no longer needed due to the explicit nature of the language.
Which has its own myriad of issues
Reject language features, o kama toki pona
It isn’t broken. It’s quirky, and they all are.
What I appreciate about Spanish over English is the ease of spelling and pronouncing new words. What I appreciate about English over Spanish is the ease of creating new words.
I have some limited ability/understanding in other languages, but not enough to judge. Except for French.
If you want to create new words, boy am I excited to tell you about German
And what’s the word in German that means everything you just wrote?
Neuwörtermachenaufgeregheit.
Neologismuskreationsvorfreude would fit too
“Verschlimmbessern” is the best one I’ve read somewhere. It’s the result of trying to fix it but you fail and make it worse.
Oh, and it’s read as in red, not read as in rede
Truly unbelievable language. I love it. So easy to start, then you hit that wall of 25-letter words.
No you hit that wall of der, die, den, das…
The only ability you have in French is to judge. It’s what the language is for.
It isn’t broken, it’s just preserved
Languages with phonetic writing in the modern day likely achieved that through a language standardization process that included spelling reforms.
English’s changes in spelling and grammar are mostly legitimized through influential works of the language, hence why you all gotta learn Shakespeare in highschool, you’re being taught the history of how the language we speak today evolved.
There is no centralized academy of English grammar, and official dictionaries in English for the most part add words descriptively to reflect how the lexicon is changing in real time.
Put together this all means that the English language isn’t remotely broken, it’s just old, older than most modernly written languages by a couple of centuries actually.
Funniest part is if you study immigrant settlements in the Americas from all those countries that underwent standardizations, they’re all about as “broken” as English looks too, because they’re forms of those languages preserved from before standardization came to their homelands.
Japanese and Italian are especially funny since the standardization came into enforcement recently enough that native speakers from Japan and Italy will be bewildered by speakers from the Americas because the speakers from the Americas speak in a way that sounds like their grandparents or great grandparents if they recognize the dialect at all to begin with.
Languages with phonetic writing in the modern day likely achieved that through a language standardization process that included spelling reforms.
Not Arabic. It is pronounced as it is written. Except a handful of words that have a different transcription to make them easily distinguishable.
As someone who is learning Arabic right now this is the vaaaaastest oversimplification I have ever seen on that subject in particular.
For starters, dialects
We only refer to MSA when talking about Arabic. Most Arab speakers consider dialects side languages to Classical Arabic. They have never had a transcription throughoutout history. People started writing in their dialects only recently with the arrival of SMS and the internet.
I get that as a new comer to Arabic you probably have come across learning materials for dialects like Egyptian and levantine. But in reality you won’t find uni courses for those dialects because academics don’t consider them to be proper languages with clear grammar and an established vocabulary.
Actually I chose to learn dialect first because literally everyone who knows anything about the language cautions that native speakers will swear up and down that you should learn MSA and then be completely incomprehensible to you because of how little anyone actually uses it in the Arab world.
I’ve been working with my teacher for a year and a half now and she agrees that MSA is basically pointless unless you intend to start consuming arabic language news or listening to arabic language political speeches.
BTW this is from a professional cultural expert who’s literal job is to prep government workers and businessfolks to be able to engage successfully with the Arabic world, something she’s been doing for 20 years now, so I’m pretty sure she knows what she’s talking about.
You do you. And you have to take into consideration what your goal is by learning Arabic.
Dialects are definitely easier to learn and more rewarding as it allows you to converse with people and test your advancements. But you won’t be able to easily transition to another dialect. Because MSA is the glue that make the intelligible.
Learning MSA will take you triple the time. And I imagine your teacher is both proud of his dialect. But also doesn’t want you to drop learning if you were to have chosen MSA
With Japanese, it’s more-so that the standardised version is widely used in politics, to strangers, to acquainted superiors, and just in general by default
It’s only between friends, within most families (and to acquaintances who regard you as their superior) that you speak… Whatever, really.
On the contrary - it has made me appreciate how many different traditions the English language draws from and how flexible it actually is.
It certainly does show how many traditions, with their own sets of rules, English pulls from. That said, watching my poor kid learning how to spell and read has been painful. All the rules only exist to be broken. An example today was him trying to pronounce AMC. A fun word for spelling that came up recent was skool.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is what is known as a leading question.
Hehe. I don’t think English is that broken. I mean it’s definitely broken. But still one of the easier languages to learn. It’s my second language, so my perspective might be a bit different. But I also had French in school. And oh my, that’s a proper hassle to memorize all the articles, specifics and numerous exceptions to every rule there is… English was way easier.
Learning a second language AND professionally teaching English to speakers of said language. English is not broken. English is actually much better than many alternatives. We don’t need to worry about noun gender. We don’t have to worry about tones. We have precise ways to indicate number and time. Formality levels are not baked into word construction. The pronunciation of words can generally be inferred from the spelling, despite learning this skill being a little complicated— but that complicated nature even has its usefulness.
We rag on English, but it is by far not the worse out there, not even close. It’s just contempt for the familiar.
The pronunciation of words can generally be inferred from the spelling
Definitely NOT. English is among the worst languages in that regard.
This definitely.
Exceptions on exceptions on exceptions, on top of grammar rules that vary based on what language the word you’re using was originally from, except even then you can’t know because it can be a word came to English from French even though it’s originally Latin and then the way the French pronounced it carries over to the English.
As someone who’s native language is Finnish and you literally know how a word is pronounced when you see it. If you know how to use the phonetic alphabet, then you basically know how to pronounce Finnish. Compare English words and their IPA to Finnish words and their IPA:
hevonen = [ˈheʋonen], hernekeitto = [ˈherneˌkːei̯tːo]
VS English
‘geography’ = ʤɔ́grəfɪj, explanation = ek.spləˈneɪ.ʃən/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help:IPA/Finnish
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chaos
Dearest creature in Creation, Studying English pronunciation,
I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse. It will keep you, Susy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy;
Tear in eye your dress you’ll tear. So shall I! Oh, hear my prayer,
You know the fun thing about “The Chaos”? It was written by someone who had English as a second language. Most native speakers simply don’t get how chaotic their language is.
This I can fully believe.
And here’s Dr Geoff Lindsey’s channel, excellent videos about the English language. (And in regards to being deaf to features of one’s own language, it took a native speaking English professor for me to realise just how much vocal fry there is in my native language, Finnish.)
As a native German speaker, I really dislike the formality levels and hope someday everyone uses the informal level. In a big company it’s really annoying to start with the formal level and then awkwardly switching to informal level when contacting someone for the first time.
It seems to me that you’re making a strange argument throwing bugs and features into the same pot. The fact that other languages have different complexities does not make one language more or less broken.
When I started learning Japanese I was impressed by how reliably phonetic their alphabets are, with only a few exceptions (and even the exceptions are phonetic, just by a different set of rules). I was like damn, would be real nice if English’s letters were like this. Then I found out that Japanese wasn’t always this way; prior to the 19th century reading it was a huge pain, with a lot of “i before e except after c…” rules to memorize, no diacritics to distinguish pronunciations, etc. At some point they had a major overhaul of the written language (especially the alphabets) and turned them into the phonetic versions they use today. Again I was like damn, would be real nice if English could get a phonetic overhaul of its written word. But it’s a lot easier to reform a language only used in a single country on an isolated island cluster with an authoritarian government and questionable literacy rates… Can you imagine the mayhem if, say, Australia decided to overhaul the English language in isolation? It would be like trying to get all of Europe to abandon their native tongues in favor of Esperanto.
I love archaic inconsistent Japanese. 今日 (obviously きょう) used to be pronounced the same way but spelled… けふ. There’s a Wikipedia page on historical kana orthography and the example the use on the page’s main image is やめましょう spelled as ヤメマセウ. The old kana usage sticks around in pronunciation of particle は and へ. There also used to be verbs ending in ず that turned into じる verbs like 感じる. Here’s a post on Japanese stack exchange where somebody explains verbs that end with ず, づ, ふ, and ぷ.
Honestly I’m glad I don’t have to learn historical inconsistent spellings, but part of me thinks that it’s really cool and wishes it was still around.
Well, I suppose it made me realise how useless articles are in a statement.
«где здесь кинотеатр?» (where here movie theatre?)
“where is the movie theatre around here?”
Without articles the point comes across in a much simpler form. that being said, a lot of other languages also have a terrifyingly complex case system or pointlessly gendered language or both. I don’t think any language is “broken” but they all definitely have quirks.
Learning Japanese (especially colloquial Japanese) also gives me a strong “why waste time say lot word, when few word do trick” vibes. Articles? Don’t exist. Prepositions? Only if you want to sound like a dweeb. Subjects/Objects? Used unnecessarily you’ll change the meaning of the sentence.
“Went” is a complete sentence in Japanese.
My friend told me that a whole lot of Japanese sentences are literally just exclamations of an adjective or adverb and apparently that’s enough for most Japanese folks to intuit an entire sentence of meaning.
That’s a funny way to put it but pretty accurate. Like, you see a cat walk up to you and you exclaim かわいい! (= cute). You wouldn’t say “that cat is cute!” or “what a cute cat!” like you would in English. Because if you did say the word-for-word Japanese equivalent あの猫がかわいい it implies something like “that cat is cute, unlike all the other cats,” because why would you go through the trouble of saying all those words that were obvious from context unless you were trying to call out this cat specifically?
I think about how some languages like Japanese are like this, and then I think about how stereotypical “caveman” grammar in English is kind of structured like those languages, and I get a little uncomfortable at the implications…
We do that in English as well in some cases.
q: “Where’s the beer?” a: “fridge”.
Sure, but “fridge” is a sentence fragment, not a complete sentence. 行った (“went”) is a complete sentence. You don’t need a subject or an object in Japanese, whereas you need at least a subject in English (e.g. “He went”)
I don’t feel it’s particularly broken honestly. Some languages are more consistent with their rules and therefore easier to learn but English is surprisingly consistent in practice/sound throughout the world. You also don’t need to memorize the gender of a washing machine…
I don’t feel it’s particularly broken honestly.
There are five (5) ways of pronouncing oo, if you people haven’t added a sixth one since the last time I looked.
Radii, fiancé, and façade are apparently perfectly cromulent English words that native English speakers who’ve never seen an ii, an é, or a ç are supposed to be able to pronounce correctly…
Your words for food animals come from completely different and unrelated languages depending on whether the animal is alive or dead (since the people who tended to the farms and the people who actually ate their meat spoke different languages)…
There are probably more irregular verbs than regular ones… (again, probably because of English really being three different languages in a trenchcoat)…
At some point in the sixteenth century you apparently just up and decided to randomly switch the pronunciation of all your vowels… without changing how you wrote them…
While most languages have developed some form of standard and regulative body, English seems like it’d rather leave the whole grammar, orthography, pronunciation, and whatnot situation as an exercise for the
victimspeaker, writer, or reader…Yeah, no, not particularly broken at all… 😒
You forgot naïve. Why does it have a fucking umlaut???
It’s a dieresis, to let you know that the i is to be pronounced separately from the a.
Are there any other words that have it though? Also if the english spelling were consistent you would not need the dieresis
The New Yorker’s style guide requires markers for coöperate, coöpt, etc., but it’s non-standard outside of that one particular publication.
- Not sure
- 100% agree
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I have seen coöperate, but it is certainly uncommon.
I honestly wasn’t aware naïve had a dieresis in English.
I mean, it makes complete sense for it to have one in languages that use them, but I wasn’t aware it was a loanword (from French or Normand, I assume).
It’s from french although naive is also a valid spelling.
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I’m just pointing out the consistency in spoken form. Your criticisms are valid from a technical perspective, the best kind of correct…
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That’s a good thing.
Nah, man. That’s the abused justifying the abuser. That’s pure Stockholm syndrome.
There’s no world in which the oos in moon, book, door, blood, brooch, and cooperation (I had forgotten about this one. There are six. SIX! 😩) representing SIX different sounds is a good thing. There simply isn’t.
A sane language would replace some of those with u, ø, ō, ô, ö, õ, whatever, make some rule so that the poor sod attempting to decipher the written word could begin to know how to pronounce it… but not English. Not English. 😞
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Someone learning Spanish as a second language will have to remember that it’s máquina and not máquino when speaking or writing it, though (and will then probably be quite confused if they ever meet some guy nicknamed El Máquina, which would somehow be a perfectly cromulent nickname in Spanish).
Confusing genders when speaking or writing is one of the most common mistakes amongst people new to the language, because while everything else has some form of rule, this doesn’t (sure, when reading or listening you can most of the time use the word ending, and you’ll probably have an article, too, but when you are the one speaking or writing you have no option but to just know a word’s gender, or how it ends, which is the same thing).
For what it’s worth, you don’t memorize the gender of things. It’s just difficult, when you learn another language that does it differently. And that’s true for every language you learn, the difficulty lies in how it’s different of your own.
I mean, you do memorise them, you just don’t realise you’re doing it because you’re a baby or toddler and babies and toddlers are language sponges, and not very aware of how their own minds work.
When learning a gendered language as an adult you definitely have no option but to memorise what gender each word uses, since there’s generally no specific rule, just how the language happened to evolve. (And this can be particularly hard if your native language is gendered, but you’re trying to learn one that genders words differently, for instance when learning German coming from a Romance language, or vice versa.)
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you don’t memorize it. You memorize the words and how they sound
Potahto potayto. 🤷♂️
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Except many languages’ vocabularies share common roots (e.g. Latin and Greek) even if the languages themselves don’t, so quite often someone learning Spanish will be able to make an educated attempt at figuring out the equivalent Spanish word (for instance, an English speaker might figure out that machine ≈ máquin_)… but will have no clue about the gender, having a 50% chance of ending up with, say, máquino.
And, as I said, misgendering words seems to be a relatively common mistake for people learning Spanish without having a Romance language base.
It’s made me aware of how much I appreciate reliable consistent pronunciation in Spanish (at least compared to English). And it’s given me a huge amount of sympathy for people who are learning English and trying to speak to native English speakers :)
But I wouldn’t say it’s shown me how broken English is. I mean, I think it’s more broken than Spanish, but that could just be a comment on how much I still have to learn about Spanish :P
Same with consistent pronunciation in Indonesian - it’s so much better. I feel sorry for little kids learning to read English and getting told to ‘sound it out’. Sure thing, which of the five to nine sounds shall I use for the letter ‘a’?
That could just be a comment on how much I still have to learn about Spanish :P
Gotten into verbal tenses yet…? 😉
But, hey, at least it doesn’t have [weak pronouns](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_personal_pronouns#:~:text=The weak pronouns (Catalan%3A pronoms,different element of the sentence.) as we do in Catalan… Those can be confusing even for native speakers! 😅
ITT: Loads of monolingual native English speakers who has no knowledge of linguistics or even how their own language is not unique in all the ways that they think it is.
Actual itt: “internet experts” clash with casual passing commenters
I learned Latin and in the process learned that quite a lot if what makes English fucked up was a movement a couple of hundred years ago to make it more like Latin.
Well, and also one to make it less like Latin. And the same with French.
People have been beating this thing with a stick for many centuries. It’s part of the charm. And now it’s doing the same to every other language. That’s maybe less charming.
Can you give an example?
Debt used to be spelled dette or simply det. We spell it with a useless silent “b” today because meddlers decided to bring it back to its Latin roots of debitum. This happened in French as well, even though neither language ever pronounced the “b” and had no business adding it. The same happened with words like doubt, plumber, subtle, indict, and island. French was sensible enough to reverse this through modern spelling reform, but I think English is stuck with it for the foreseeable future.
Who had the power to unilaterally decree that the spelling of multiple existing words must now be spelled differently?
EDIT
The links i found all just refer to “scholars in the middle ages” being the cause of this
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/why-is-debt-spelled-like-that
Yep. It’s a bit hard to fathom today, but in the Middle Ages few people had the ability to read and write, mostly either learned monks and clergy, or those wealthy enough to be taught by them. With such a small pool of people, it’s comparatively easy to influence the prevailing spelling through the actions of a few.
