13 ms·

English is not normal

56 points by nkurz 11y ago

jugad 11y ago
Almost any largely spoken old language will have unique quirks of its own... stating some unique and weird points of english don't suddenly make it extra unique.
irakli 11y ago
Fun read, but alas factually inaccurate. Article says: "almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European – and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way." 1. There're quite a few languages in Europe that do not belong to Indo-European: Basque, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, Hungarian, Turkish... 2. It is not true that English is the only Indo-European language the nouns of which don't have gender. Armenian for instance, does not and there are probably others.
- robotresearcher 11y ago
  You ignored the word 'almost'.
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    You didn't read the quote. > almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European This is where we see "almost". Basque, for example, is a European language, but famously does not belong to the Indo-European language family. > and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way No qualifier here. Armenian is an Indo-European language with no grammatical gender (making it even less gendered than English), which the quote states, boldly and without qualification, to be impossible. You could make the argument that he ignored the word "European", because to you Armenian is an Asian language and not a European one -- but saying "English is the only language within an oddly-shaped geographic region to have some special feature" is a very strange way to assign significance. Saying "English is the only descendant of Proto-Indo-European to have mostly lost its grammatical gender" gets the idea of "what might be interesting" right -- it makes more sense to compare English to sister languages than to compare it to unrelated languages that happen to lie within the same weird gerrymander outline you drew on a map -- but it isn't true.
    - Mithaldu 11y ago
      "them" in that case is the group of languages belonging to the family "Indo-European". He was selecting a group of language from the european ones and then making a statement about that group.
      - thaumasiotes 11y ago
        You're agreeing with me. Where "them" is the family of Indo-European languages, the claim "of all of them, English is the only one that doesn't assign genders that way" is false, and is not qualified with the word "almost". Where "them" is the special-pleading-based group of Indo-European languages currently spoken within "Europe", the claim is less false than otherwise (but still not great), and it's still not qualified with the word "almost".
        Mithaldu 11y ago
        Yeah, i misunderstood you a little. Nevertheless your initial complaint is mistaken. Honestly, this is a nice example of attribution of responsibility in message comprehension. As a professor he constructs elaborate structures to convey meaning and puts the responsibility to understand on the reader. As an internet commentor you put the responsibility to express himself clearly on him. You considered it ridiculous that he may have meant "European" languages, but he clearly constructed the group out of those.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- blowski 11y ago
  It seems that the article found some bits of the language which are genuinely unique ("in conjugation only third-person singular changes") but these are so specific as to be irrelevant. If English had no way of expressing the conditional, for example, that would be genuinely interesting. As it is, it reads like a teenager talking about their uniqueness because only they like eating peanut butter and ice cream while listening to Leonard Cohen.
- noamyoungerm 11y ago
  Also: Scots is a mutually intelligible language On the other hand, just like trying to explain programming to someone who only knows how to use MS Word, trying to explain linguistics to someone without formal training is bound to end in misunderstandings and inaccuracy.
  - Turing_Machine 11y ago
    "Also: Scots is a mutually intelligible language" That's very strongly dependent on your native dialect. I know people who have to put on the subtitles to understand the movie Trainspotting, and (I think) that's not even full-blown Scots.
- guard-of-terra 11y ago
  Armenia is located in Asia. Of course it is a formal distinction but it is there.
  - irakli 11y ago
    Doesn't matter. Even if it were on Mars, the language is qualified as part of the Indo-European group in all classifications.
    - guard-of-terra 11y ago
      You're right, the article is kind of vague on the exact set of languages which all assign genders to nouns.
oska 11y ago
I found this article mediocre and its conceit, that English is “weirdly different”, not well justified. But what I have discovered recently, on the same subject, is a podcast called The History of English [1]. It's very, very detailed. So far there have been 69 episodes made, each about 45 minutes long, and the creator has only just got up to the Norman Invasion. I've listened to the first 22 episodes and in the last two episodes it's only just started discussing Old Germanic. So maybe more detailed than most people want but it's very good and quite easy to listen to. [1] http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/ http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/
hasenj 11y ago
All languages are not normal in that same sense. Study any language and you will be struck with "weird" all the time.
- rustynails 11y ago
  I learnt French, German and Italian in school. Those languages may have complexities (eg. In German, Gender for a table is male, a fly is female). However, if you heard a word, you could spell it and vice versa. English has many inconsistencies: Spelling vs pronunciation, completely different words for tenses (eg. Go/went), inconsistent pluralisation rules (look up fish vs fishes as one example), "me and" vs "and I" rules, etc. I've heard many people say that English is one of the hardest European languages to learn. Supposedly, Japanese and Chinese are a different league altogether.
  - Mithaldu 11y ago
    Japanese and Chinese are in different leagues because they come from a completely different language root than european languages and require one to think differently. For example instead of common sound based words in writing, they use kanji, which effectively are either small, simple and time-corrupted little pictures, or combinations of less complex pictures. For example 新 consists of 7 "prime" pictures, of which three are easily recognizable, and as such can be remembered as "axe | standing-up, tree" => "new". ( http://jisho.org/search/%E6%96%B0%20%23kanji http://jisho.org/search/%E6%96%B0%20%23kanji ) This is easly memorized but cannot re-use latin-based language patterns and requires creation of entirely new language circuitry in the brain.
    - meric 11y ago
      Chinese was my first language, and although I can make out those relationships between parts of characters, sometimes, I think usually in my mind the mapping between characters and their meanings is just a giant hash table. I find the relationships between each part of each character un-systematic. Perhaps subconsciously I make use of those relationships but conciously it's all 'I just know what that character means'.
pazimzadeh 11y ago
Having learned English as my third language (after French and Farsi) I found it more streamlined, full of shortcuts and easier to pick up than any other language. Not sure if that counts as weird.
- keerthiko 11y ago
  I think that's more a function of easy exposure and constant bombardment by English medium content that makes it less strenuous on your brain's language center to make the necessary connections to retain it effectively. I felt the same way about Japanese because I consumed a lot of anime and other Japanese media as hobbies I enjoyed. However, it is objectively a harder-to-learn language than Korean, which I had markedly less success with. And I don't think I have some kind of untraditional language processing algorithm in my brain.
  - wodenokoto 11y ago
    Objectively harder than korean? I've always been told Korean is more difficult than Japanese in terms of grammar. Obviously it has a simpler writing system, but I'm not sure that counts as the language, fundamentally. More as a gateway to the language.
Mithaldu 11y ago
As a german the commentary here strikes me as sadly defensive. I'm in contact with and kinda familiar with a lot of languages, and out of the ones i know English is the weirdest one, if only by its most basic property: English text does not remotely map to english pronounciation. This may sound weird to native english speakers, but it's the truth. To give a more concrete example: With many languages in movies, it is easy for me to listen to them, i.e. in a movie, even when whispered, and accurately transcribe them into script; even when i don't actually speak them. English movies consistently keep me getting subtitles because i can't make out what's being said even at normal volume. His mention of the existence of a "spelling bee" as a sign of how weird english is was spot-on.
- m12k 11y ago
  Here's a contrived but hilarious example of just how wrong you can get it, if you assume pronunciation and spelling are aligned in English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
- switch007 11y ago
  As a native English speaker, I struggle with many modern movies. I find the speech very muttered and scripts full of quick, short retorts. English /can/ be perfectly clear. There must be other explanations.
  - Mithaldu 11y ago
    Maybe it's a bit of both? If you're curious, try having a listen to this and transcribe some of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpawK7gm2tM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpawK7gm2tM I'm sure you'd get most of it correct.
  - nommm-nommm 11y ago
    I know quite a few non hard of hearing native English speakers who watch movies with the closed captioning on for that reason as well. Movies are unique in that sense, not sure what it is about them.
ericschmidt 11y ago
What a conceptually interesting article. There are a few cool framing devices in here. I like how is using English to describe how English is weird. That's like using a spray can to illegally graffiti the phrase "vandalism is dumb" on a building. The author is "going meta" to English, while using English. Respect to that strange and thoughtful recursive writing technique Gosh this comment is weird
raverbashing 11y ago
English is the PHP of languages It has its weirdnesses, but in the end it's easier to learn than other languages (and thankfully, unlike PHP, natural languages don't have issues with maintainability or addition of new features)
- wodenokoto 11y ago
  It's in no way easier to learn. It's just more ubiquitous.
  - eva1984 11y ago
    Hardest part is what the author has mentioned: vocabulary. Those french words drive me crazy when I tried to memorize them for the sake of GRE. Very little pattern, and the pronunciation is also different, some of them I don't even know how to start, e.g. cliché.
    - raverbashing 11y ago
      GRE?
      - wodenokoto 11y ago
        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_Record_Examinations https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_Record_Examinations It's one of those tests American takes to get into university.
  - atomwaffel 11y ago
    I'd say that English is easier to learn than most languages (precisely because of that ubiquity), but harder to master. The analogy to PHP holds: PHP is everywhere (a lot of websites run on it), learning material is easy to come by, and it's widely understood (most commodity web servers will just take your .php files and run them without any trouble on your part), but it will take years until you stop tripping over its quirks.
  - 11y ago
ekianjo 11y ago
Obviously whoever wrote this is far from being a luingist or even familiar with several languages. So many of his statements are completely false.
- crishoj 11y ago
  According to the byline, "John McWhorter is a professor of linguistics and American studies at Columbia University."
  - ekianjo 11y ago
    Well then i would avoid learning anything from him.
- intopieces 11y ago
  Which statements are completely false?
beefhash 11y ago
> What’s the difference? It’s that -ful and -ly are Germanic endings, while -ity came in with French. French and Latin endings pull the accent closer – TEM-pest, tem-PEST-uous – while Germanic ones leave the accent alone. As someone learning English as a second language, I must say that I'm really grateful to have read that passage. This spares me a lot of learning accents by rote.
acqq 11y ago
"In Old English, however, ‘Ving-Thor was mad when he woke up’ would have been Wraþmod wæs Ving-Þórr/he áwæcnede. We can just about wrap our heads around this as ‘English’" That particular example doesn't appear to be so hard: Wrath-mad was Ving-Thor, he awokend.
- gpvos 11y ago
  I'd say wrath-mood and awakened, but yes.
asgard1024 11y ago
I think you could find the similar problems with many languages (for example, my native Czech has a unique sound that's quite difficult to learn, and all the different declensions and conjugations will make your head spin). But I also take the issue with: "Spelling is a matter of writing, of course, whereas language is fundamentally about speaking." I think with English it's not the case, English is like modern Latin, more people write/read in English than those who speak it.
pandaman 11y ago
Regarding spelling bees being unique to English. While it's probably true, spelling competitions exist in other languages but in a form of dictation. Do a search for "national dictation contest" to see it happening in multiple countries and, I imagine, searching in different languages will reveal more. I figure the reason why spelling single words is not practiced in other languages is that many languages inflect words in irregular ways so being able to correctly spell a default form of a word is not a very impressive skill. But I would be very surprised if a form of spelling bee does not exists in China.
adimitrov 11y ago
While this article has surprisingly little of it, there's still some bæd linguistix here. Among others, comparing the utterly conservative Icelandic, spoken on a remote island by (today!) merely 300,000 people, with the language of England, which was invaded from every which way every couple of centuries until the 1400s. That's just ridiculous. To take a much more adequate example: To most Germans, the Nibelungenlied in its original rendition is just about as understandable as Beowulf is to modern English speakers. English is in dire need of a spelling reform (the Celts have you one-upped here, Scottish and Irish have had very successful reforms,) but I don't think it is "weirder" than many other languages of peoples that have had widespread linguistic contact to other societies. French, German, Spanish, all have their oddities, on a similar scale of magnitude as English.
gpvos 11y ago
Hmm, I heard several times that English has almost a double-size vocabulary[0] since it imported almost all of French on top of Anglo-Saxon, but this guy says it was only about 10,000 words, and there was a bit of Latin too. Now which is it? Note that most other European languages also imported roughly the same scientific vocabulary from Latin and Greek. [0] compared to other somewhat comparable languages such as German and French, and assuming you can find suitable criteria for determining what a word is; e.g., discounting compound words such as the Dutch roltrommelhuisvuilophaalwagen.
anon4 11y ago
I would love it if I could say groundwrought, endsay and saywhat. It would be very good if we could make a pressed together work and come up with a word list of other ways to say words of French root.
amai 11y ago
German is far ahead in weirdness compared to english. It is the 10th most weird language in the world. English is only on place 33. See http://idibon.com/the-weirdest-languages/ http://idibon.com/the-weirdest-languages/

56 points by nkurz 11y ago

jugad 11y ago

Almost any largely spoken old language will have unique quirks of its own... stating some unique and weird points of english don't suddenly make it extra unique.

irakli 11y ago

Fun read, but alas factually inaccurate. Article says: "almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European – and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way." 1. There're quite a few languages in Europe that do not belong to Indo-European: Basque, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, Hungarian, Turkish... 2. It is not true that English is the only Indo-European language the nouns of which don't have gender. Armenian for instance, does not and there are probably others.

robotresearcher 11y ago
You ignored the word 'almost'.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  You didn't read the quote. > almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European This is where we see "almost". Basque, for example, is a European language, but famously does not belong to the Indo-European language family. > and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way No qualifier here. Armenian is an Indo-European language with no grammatical gender (making it even less gendered than English), which the quote states, boldly and without qualification, to be impossible. You could make the argument that he ignored the word "European", because to you Armenian is an Asian language and not a European one -- but saying "English is the only language within an oddly-shaped geographic region to have some special feature" is a very strange way to assign significance. Saying "English is the only descendant of Proto-Indo-European to have mostly lost its grammatical gender" gets the idea of "what might be interesting" right -- it makes more sense to compare English to sister languages than to compare it to unrelated languages that happen to lie within the same weird gerrymander outline you drew on a map -- but it isn't true.
  - Mithaldu 11y ago
    "them" in that case is the group of languages belonging to the family "Indo-European". He was selecting a group of language from the european ones and then making a statement about that group.
    - thaumasiotes 11y ago
      You're agreeing with me. Where "them" is the family of Indo-European languages, the claim "of all of them, English is the only one that doesn't assign genders that way" is false, and is not qualified with the word "almost". Where "them" is the special-pleading-based group of Indo-European languages currently spoken within "Europe", the claim is less false than otherwise (but still not great), and it's still not qualified with the word "almost".
      - Mithaldu 11y ago
        Yeah, i misunderstood you a little. Nevertheless your initial complaint is mistaken. Honestly, this is a nice example of attribution of responsibility in message comprehension. As a professor he constructs elaborate structures to convey meaning and puts the responsibility to understand on the reader. As an internet commentor you put the responsibility to express himself clearly on him. You considered it ridiculous that he may have meant "European" languages, but he clearly constructed the group out of those.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
blowski 11y ago
It seems that the article found some bits of the language which are genuinely unique ("in conjugation only third-person singular changes") but these are so specific as to be irrelevant. If English had no way of expressing the conditional, for example, that would be genuinely interesting. As it is, it reads like a teenager talking about their uniqueness because only they like eating peanut butter and ice cream while listening to Leonard Cohen.
noamyoungerm 11y ago
Also: Scots is a mutually intelligible language On the other hand, just like trying to explain programming to someone who only knows how to use MS Word, trying to explain linguistics to someone without formal training is bound to end in misunderstandings and inaccuracy.
- Turing_Machine 11y ago
  "Also: Scots is a mutually intelligible language" That's very strongly dependent on your native dialect. I know people who have to put on the subtitles to understand the movie Trainspotting, and (I think) that's not even full-blown Scots.
guard-of-terra 11y ago
Armenia is located in Asia. Of course it is a formal distinction but it is there.
- irakli 11y ago
  Doesn't matter. Even if it were on Mars, the language is qualified as part of the Indo-European group in all classifications.
  - guard-of-terra 11y ago
    You're right, the article is kind of vague on the exact set of languages which all assign genders to nouns.

oska 11y ago

I found this article mediocre and its conceit, that English is “weirdly different”, not well justified. But what I have discovered recently, on the same subject, is a podcast called The History of English [1]. It's very, very detailed. So far there have been 69 episodes made, each about 45 minutes long, and the creator has only just got up to the Norman Invasion. I've listened to the first 22 episodes and in the last two episodes it's only just started discussing Old Germanic. So maybe more detailed than most people want but it's very good and quite easy to listen to. [1] http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/ http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/

hasenj 11y ago

All languages are not normal in that same sense. Study any language and you will be struck with "weird" all the time.

rustynails 11y ago
I learnt French, German and Italian in school. Those languages may have complexities (eg. In German, Gender for a table is male, a fly is female). However, if you heard a word, you could spell it and vice versa. English has many inconsistencies: Spelling vs pronunciation, completely different words for tenses (eg. Go/went), inconsistent pluralisation rules (look up fish vs fishes as one example), "me and" vs "and I" rules, etc. I've heard many people say that English is one of the hardest European languages to learn. Supposedly, Japanese and Chinese are a different league altogether.
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  Japanese and Chinese are in different leagues because they come from a completely different language root than european languages and require one to think differently. For example instead of common sound based words in writing, they use kanji, which effectively are either small, simple and time-corrupted little pictures, or combinations of less complex pictures. For example 新 consists of 7 "prime" pictures, of which three are easily recognizable, and as such can be remembered as "axe | standing-up, tree" => "new". ( http://jisho.org/search/%E6%96%B0%20%23kanji http://jisho.org/search/%E6%96%B0%20%23kanji ) This is easly memorized but cannot re-use latin-based language patterns and requires creation of entirely new language circuitry in the brain.
  - meric 11y ago
    Chinese was my first language, and although I can make out those relationships between parts of characters, sometimes, I think usually in my mind the mapping between characters and their meanings is just a giant hash table. I find the relationships between each part of each character un-systematic. Perhaps subconsciously I make use of those relationships but conciously it's all 'I just know what that character means'.

pazimzadeh 11y ago

Having learned English as my third language (after French and Farsi) I found it more streamlined, full of shortcuts and easier to pick up than any other language. Not sure if that counts as weird.

keerthiko 11y ago
I think that's more a function of easy exposure and constant bombardment by English medium content that makes it less strenuous on your brain's language center to make the necessary connections to retain it effectively. I felt the same way about Japanese because I consumed a lot of anime and other Japanese media as hobbies I enjoyed. However, it is objectively a harder-to-learn language than Korean, which I had markedly less success with. And I don't think I have some kind of untraditional language processing algorithm in my brain.
- wodenokoto 11y ago
  Objectively harder than korean? I've always been told Korean is more difficult than Japanese in terms of grammar. Obviously it has a simpler writing system, but I'm not sure that counts as the language, fundamentally. More as a gateway to the language.

Mithaldu 11y ago

As a german the commentary here strikes me as sadly defensive. I'm in contact with and kinda familiar with a lot of languages, and out of the ones i know English is the weirdest one, if only by its most basic property: English text does not remotely map to english pronounciation. This may sound weird to native english speakers, but it's the truth. To give a more concrete example: With many languages in movies, it is easy for me to listen to them, i.e. in a movie, even when whispered, and accurately transcribe them into script; even when i don't actually speak them. English movies consistently keep me getting subtitles because i can't make out what's being said even at normal volume. His mention of the existence of a "spelling bee" as a sign of how weird english is was spot-on.

m12k 11y ago
Here's a contrived but hilarious example of just how wrong you can get it, if you assume pronunciation and spelling are aligned in English: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti
switch007 11y ago
As a native English speaker, I struggle with many modern movies. I find the speech very muttered and scripts full of quick, short retorts. English /can/ be perfectly clear. There must be other explanations.
- Mithaldu 11y ago
  Maybe it's a bit of both? If you're curious, try having a listen to this and transcribe some of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpawK7gm2tM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xpawK7gm2tM I'm sure you'd get most of it correct.
- nommm-nommm 11y ago
  I know quite a few non hard of hearing native English speakers who watch movies with the closed captioning on for that reason as well. Movies are unique in that sense, not sure what it is about them.

ericschmidt 11y ago

What a conceptually interesting article. There are a few cool framing devices in here. I like how is using English to describe how English is weird. That's like using a spray can to illegally graffiti the phrase "vandalism is dumb" on a building. The author is "going meta" to English, while using English. Respect to that strange and thoughtful recursive writing technique Gosh this comment is weird

raverbashing 11y ago

English is the PHP of languages It has its weirdnesses, but in the end it's easier to learn than other languages (and thankfully, unlike PHP, natural languages don't have issues with maintainability or addition of new features)

wodenokoto 11y ago
It's in no way easier to learn. It's just more ubiquitous.
- eva1984 11y ago
  Hardest part is what the author has mentioned: vocabulary. Those french words drive me crazy when I tried to memorize them for the sake of GRE. Very little pattern, and the pronunciation is also different, some of them I don't even know how to start, e.g. cliché.
  - raverbashing 11y ago
    GRE?
    - wodenokoto 11y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_Record_Examinations https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_Record_Examinations It's one of those tests American takes to get into university.
- atomwaffel 11y ago
  I'd say that English is easier to learn than most languages (precisely because of that ubiquity), but harder to master. The analogy to PHP holds: PHP is everywhere (a lot of websites run on it), learning material is easy to come by, and it's widely understood (most commodity web servers will just take your .php files and run them without any trouble on your part), but it will take years until you stop tripping over its quirks.
- 11y ago

ekianjo 11y ago

Obviously whoever wrote this is far from being a luingist or even familiar with several languages. So many of his statements are completely false.

crishoj 11y ago
According to the byline, "John McWhorter is a professor of linguistics and American studies at Columbia University."
- ekianjo 11y ago
  Well then i would avoid learning anything from him.
intopieces 11y ago
Which statements are completely false?

beefhash 11y ago

> What’s the difference? It’s that -ful and -ly are Germanic endings, while -ity came in with French. French and Latin endings pull the accent closer – TEM-pest, tem-PEST-uous – while Germanic ones leave the accent alone. As someone learning English as a second language, I must say that I'm really grateful to have read that passage. This spares me a lot of learning accents by rote.

acqq 11y ago

"In Old English, however, ‘Ving-Thor was mad when he woke up’ would have been Wraþmod wæs Ving-Þórr/he áwæcnede. We can just about wrap our heads around this as ‘English’" That particular example doesn't appear to be so hard: Wrath-mad was Ving-Thor, he awokend.

gpvos 11y ago
I'd say wrath-mood and awakened, but yes.

asgard1024 11y ago

I think you could find the similar problems with many languages (for example, my native Czech has a unique sound that's quite difficult to learn, and all the different declensions and conjugations will make your head spin). But I also take the issue with: "Spelling is a matter of writing, of course, whereas language is fundamentally about speaking." I think with English it's not the case, English is like modern Latin, more people write/read in English than those who speak it.

pandaman 11y ago

Regarding spelling bees being unique to English. While it's probably true, spelling competitions exist in other languages but in a form of dictation. Do a search for "national dictation contest" to see it happening in multiple countries and, I imagine, searching in different languages will reveal more. I figure the reason why spelling single words is not practiced in other languages is that many languages inflect words in irregular ways so being able to correctly spell a default form of a word is not a very impressive skill. But I would be very surprised if a form of spelling bee does not exists in China.

adimitrov 11y ago

While this article has surprisingly little of it, there's still some bæd linguistix here. Among others, comparing the utterly conservative Icelandic, spoken on a remote island by (today!) merely 300,000 people, with the language of England, which was invaded from every which way every couple of centuries until the 1400s. That's just ridiculous. To take a much more adequate example: To most Germans, the Nibelungenlied in its original rendition is just about as understandable as Beowulf is to modern English speakers. English is in dire need of a spelling reform (the Celts have you one-upped here, Scottish and Irish have had very successful reforms,) but I don't think it is "weirder" than many other languages of peoples that have had widespread linguistic contact to other societies. French, German, Spanish, all have their oddities, on a similar scale of magnitude as English.

gpvos 11y ago

Hmm, I heard several times that English has almost a double-size vocabulary[0] since it imported almost all of French on top of Anglo-Saxon, but this guy says it was only about 10,000 words, and there was a bit of Latin too. Now which is it? Note that most other European languages also imported roughly the same scientific vocabulary from Latin and Greek. [0] compared to other somewhat comparable languages such as German and French, and assuming you can find suitable criteria for determining what a word is; e.g., discounting compound words such as the Dutch roltrommelhuisvuilophaalwagen.

anon4 11y ago

I would love it if I could say groundwrought, endsay and saywhat. It would be very good if we could make a pressed together work and come up with a word list of other ways to say words of French root.

amai 11y ago

German is far ahead in weirdness compared to english. It is the 10th most weird language in the world. English is only on place 33. See http://idibon.com/the-weirdest-languages/ http://idibon.com/the-weirdest-languages/