3 ms·

I think you're glossing over an important phrase in your quote: "to master". English is relatively straightforward to learn to a good enough level where everyon

I think you're glossing over an important phrase in your quote: "to master". English is relatively straightforward to learn to a good enough level where everyone can understand you. Mastering English is being really good at internalizing the inconsistencies of the language, of which there are plenty. Most recent one I encountered was a non-native speaker on a comment thread saying "childs" instead of "children", and there's really no general rule about english grammar that would indicate "ren" being the pluralizing qualifier here. You just have to memorize these things. How do you pronounce "read"? That depends on if you interpreted the word as past tense or present tense. How do you pronounce "lead"? That depends on if you interpreted the word as the heavy metal or the verb meaning taking charge of an effort. The "o" in lose sounds exactly like the one in choose, but the "o" in loose sounds nothing like the one in chose.

LudwigNagasena 7y ago
Due to Zipf's law of words frequency there is only so much irregularity a language can handle. And English is not special in this regard. Irregularities are not hard to master, it is one of the easiest things actually, it's rote memorization. For someone whose native language is without articles it would be a struggle to learn a language with them for the first time. Or, for an English native speaker it would be really hard to learn how to construct naturally-sounding Japanese sentences. If instead of being concerned with articles, tenses, relative clause positioning, noun-verb argreement, topic and focus expression, morphosyntactic alignment, negative coordination, discourse markers, grammatical mood, grammatical genders / noun classes, coverbs, preverbs, measure words, etc you are being concerned with how to pronounce read, it means you learn an easy language (for you), because, probably, your native language shares lots of features with English.
jcranmer 7y ago
> there's really no general rule about english grammar that would indicate "ren" being the pluralizing qualifier here. Old English weak noun declension. Hence brethren, oxen, children. Which are the only three examples in common use, so it's easier to learn as an exception. The change in vowels found in several "irregular" inflections are also holdovers from Germanic vowel changes. For example mouse/mice or goose/geese (for nouns), or sing/sang/sung (for vowels). But again, these are usually taught as lists of exceptions rather than trying to educate people as to the etymology to figure out how to inflect it correctly. We've done a great disservice to the language by adopting foreign words and then insisting on inflecting them according to the foreign inflection patterns... and sometimes mangling even that (cf. 'octopus', where people sometimes insist that the proper Latin plural is 'octopi' when it is in fact 'octopodes').
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LudwigNagasena 7y ago

Due to Zipf's law of words frequency there is only so much irregularity a language can handle. And English is not special in this regard. Irregularities are not hard to master, it is one of the easiest things actually, it's rote memorization. For someone whose native language is without articles it would be a struggle to learn a language with them for the first time. Or, for an English native speaker it would be really hard to learn how to construct naturally-sounding Japanese sentences. If instead of being concerned with articles, tenses, relative clause positioning, noun-verb argreement, topic and focus expression, morphosyntactic alignment, negative coordination, discourse markers, grammatical mood, grammatical genders / noun classes, coverbs, preverbs, measure words, etc you are being concerned with how to pronounce read, it means you learn an easy language (for you), because, probably, your native language shares lots of features with English.

jcranmer 7y ago

> there's really no general rule about english grammar that would indicate "ren" being the pluralizing qualifier here. Old English weak noun declension. Hence brethren, oxen, children. Which are the only three examples in common use, so it's easier to learn as an exception. The change in vowels found in several "irregular" inflections are also holdovers from Germanic vowel changes. For example mouse/mice or goose/geese (for nouns), or sing/sang/sung (for vowels). But again, these are usually taught as lists of exceptions rather than trying to educate people as to the etymology to figure out how to inflect it correctly. We've done a great disservice to the language by adopting foreign words and then insisting on inflecting them according to the foreign inflection patterns... and sometimes mangling even that (cf. 'octopus', where people sometimes insist that the proper Latin plural is 'octopi' when it is in fact 'octopodes').

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