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Unsurprisingly, there are many articles published about "The Awful English Language", such as: [1], [2], [3] Some examples from [2]: Let's face it -- English

• forinti 5y ago
  If you look at an eggplant in its early stages, you will understand the name.
  • imtringued 5y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v9hvK3rdxA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v9hvK3rdxA So nope, not "an" eggplant, some eggplants, and those only may look like eggs in their early stages. They may also look like plums. Do we call the purple eggplants plumplants because they resemble plums at some indeterminate stage in their growth?
    • burnished 5y ago
      ..do you not?
    • Symbiote 5y ago
      In Britain (and most Western European languages), we call them aubergines. The origin is the "Sanskrit word vātin-gāna denoted 'the class (that removes) the wind-disorder (windy humour)': that is, vātin-gāna came to be the name for eggplants because they were thought to cure flatulence" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggplant#Aubergine-type_names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggplant#Aubergine-type_names
      • mbg721 5y ago
        I'm sure someone in the US makes and sells salads of eggplant, zucchini, and arugula just to see if they can induce an involuntary twitch in Britons.
        • Symbiote 5y ago
          Your forgot the protein, which is shrimp, and the cilantro garnish. Serve with a side of fries. Dessert is jell-o with a crushed cookie and granola topping.
          • mbg721 5y ago
            Yes, I'll bring it back to the apartment in the elevator after I'm done pushing the stroller along the sidewalk, avoiding the trucks.
  • blahedo 5y ago
    More importantly, they were historically egg-shaped and (off-)white; the large and phallic purple variant that now dominates is the result of selective breeding over centuries.
    • trompetenaccoun 5y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggplant#/media/File:Eggplant_with_chicken_eggs.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eggplant#/media/File:Eggplant_... Thanks for that, I had no idea!
  • yongjik 5y ago
    That was one weird word when I learned it in Korea, because Asian eggplants look nothing like eggs. They look more like zucchinis. At least the US variant looks like giant purple eggs, if you squint a bit.
• NaturalPhallacy 5y ago
  >boxing rings are square They used to be round!
  • nine_k 5y ago
    But now they are box-shaped!
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• sorokod 5y ago
  and books, e.g. "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue"
  • Causality1 5y ago
    McWhorter's an amazing author. Highly recommend getting any of his audiobooks.
• russellbeattie 5y ago
  I have to admit still being confused about sweetmeats. If a Brit uses the word, are they talking about a specific type of candy, made in a specific way, from a specific type of shop? Does it need to be baked? Or have flour? Or does a Snickers bar count as a sweetmeat? Or a gumdrop? Hard candy? Or is it more like something from a bakery? Indian sweetmeats also seems to be a thing (from an image search right now). What's the difference, if any? Is any of this related to Turkish Delights? I don't understand the connotation of the word, as much as the meaning of it.
  • cameronh90 5y ago
    As a Brit, I've never heard of sweetmeats. Is it not an American thing?
    • jacobr1 5y ago
      Americans have an odd view of the UK that merges both historical periods and regions. We are just likely to consider something we read in a Jane Austin novel British (which it might indeed have been ... 1-200 years ago!) as more recent media like the film Notting Hill. My understanding is that sweetmeat is just an older word for candy, sweets or confections, archaic to both the UK and US english.
  • Symbiote 5y ago
    If a Brit (like me) uses the word, we're probably dressed up in old-fashioned clothes and trying to sound authentic while serving cakes to the LARP group. Or running a traditional restaurant/café[1]. I couldn't give a good definition without referring to a dictionary. Indian English retains several archaic terms, little used since the early 20th century. An Indian probably can give a good definition. [1] https://theoriginalmaidsofhonour.co.uk/collections/types?q=SWEET%20FARE%20%2F%20Biscuits%20%26%20Sweetmeats https://theoriginalmaidsofhonour.co.uk/collections/types?q=S...
• wheels 5y ago
  Hamburger is "from Hamburg", not "made from ham", and is borrowed from German. "Frankfurter" (from Frankfurt) and "Wiener" (from Vienna, Wien, in German) have the same etymology. All languages have the sort of contradictions that are pointing out there, and English isn't especially bad (in fact, most of the examples there are directly inherited from German). Most of the difficult things in English come from it being a Germanic language with a bunch of French bolted onto it. That's why its spelling is so atrocious and there are a lot of duplicated words with very similar meanings in common use. But, blessedly, English does have the simplest grammar of probably any European language. (I've occasionally heard that Swedish is the closest in simplicity, also being a Germanic language that's dropped most of the complexity, but isn't quite as inundated with loanwords.) Aside from a couple of concepts (the gerund, specifically, which isn't common in some European language families), most grammatical structures in English have direct equivalents in all other European languages. However, going the other way is difficult: most European languages have formal and informal voices, gendered nouns, some have irregular plurals (German, notably), subtler and more verb tenses (Romance languages), and complex case structures (German and even worse, Slavic languages). If you're a native English speaker that doesn't know what cases are, for example the word for "the" in German changes based on which of the three genders the noun is and how it's used. It could be "die", "der", "das", "den", "dem" or "des", and the endings of words that need to be in agreement with it change as well. The main reason English became the modern lingua franca is the British Empire, but it does help that it's also a very easy language.
  • schoen 5y ago
    > But, blessedly, English does have the simplest grammar of probably any European language. The deceptive thing, though, is compound tenses and phrasal verbs; in both cases you express a meaning with multiple words that couldn't have been predicted from the meanings of the constituent words alone. These are both pervasive in English and both very tricky for learners, but they often don't feel like "grammar" because they're not inflectional. (Well, phrasal verbs are more like lexicon.)
    • wheels 5y ago
      Which European languages don't have compound verb tenses? All of the four I'm reasonably familiar with do. Germanic languages lean on them more than Romance languages (which have a wider breadth of non-complex tenses), but the concept isn't unfamiliar. Again, aside from the gerund, there's an almost one-to-one mapping in usage between English and German tenses. I don't speak any other Germanic languages than those two, but I'd assume that to be more broadly true in that family.
• yrro 5y ago
  Quicksand is quick in that it seems to be living. See also quicksilver, another name for mercury.
  • tralarpa 5y ago
    Fun fact: the words "quick" and "zoo" have the same indo-european root.
• OJFord 5y ago
  > Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat. My favourite one, which I had the er pleasure of trying to explain to a vegetarian unfamiliar with mince pies; which might also be British English-specific is: - mince is meat * but mince *pies* contain no meat - mincemeat is not meat * and is the key ingredient in mince pies - minced meat is meat * and =mince * and could be used in the making of a pie * which would be extremely different from a mince pie
  • ojosilva 5y ago
    Mincemeat used to contain beef. Now, typically, it doesn't, although I recall having mince pie with beef and brandy in Swindon in another life. So maybe this is not good example of English being like a Mark Twain's German schizo language. Gastro-culture changed on it and the folks at Merriem-Webster didn't get the email, that's all.
    • memsom 5y ago
      Are you sure that is it? Meat[1] used to mean food in general. In Swedish, the cognate would be “mat”, and that still means meat, much like hund (hound) means dog, and djyr (deer) means animal. I rather thought that meat in mincemeat was from “minced [sweet]meat”. Or, just “minced food”. [1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/meat#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/meat#English
      • ojosilva 5y ago
        Mincemeat is (was) a way to preserve meat using sour, salty, alcoholic preserves and sweet flavoring.
        • stan_rogers 5y ago
          Um, no. It's a nice folk etymology, though.
          • joefourier 5y ago
• LatteLazy 5y ago
  English is this way because it doesn't really exist. English started as old German. Then vowels shifted. Then the Normans arrived and added a lot of French words on top. When German grammar proved too hard for them that was simplified too. On top of all that is a bunch of Latin and Greek added when England lead the scientific and industrial revolutions (in part because English couldn't logically supply words for new things). These kept their own rules grammatically. Or they didn't, pretty much randomly. None of these jobs were ever "finished", so nouns in English don't have genders (like they would in German) but actually some do still (mainly pronouns) and some words right next to each other come from different languages (Cow is German, Beef is French hence they sound nothing alike). Since England has not been conqoured or undergone unification since before all this started (except for the Norman conquests which were part of this) nothing has every been standardised. This is why spelling English words is all but impossible (German words are spelt almost exactly as they sound, English words almost never as they sound, you just have to memorise them, ALL of them). Compare this to German or French with logical spelling, strict, consistency in grammar and single root languages. English really is awful and quite an unusual language.
  • cmrdporcupine 5y ago
    English did not start off as "old German", that's factually incorrect. It started off as Old English aka Anglo-Saxon, that is the languages of the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes which emmigrated from the north sea and areas which are now in the Netherlands, Denmark and Schleswig Holstein. Not the same as "old German" which would be Old High Franconian, an entirely different branch of the Germanic family. German and English have almost 2000 years of separation. More than Italian and French and Spanish. But yes Old Norman (and Old Norse) modified the language extensively.
    • herewulf 5y ago
      So what did Old English and "Old High Franconian" (Old High German?) start off in common as, if not "Old German"? Linguists would call it Proto-Germanic though. The parent poster isn't factually incorrect though. And interestingly, there's a significant body of research showing mutual intelligibility between Old English and Old Norse, which are less similar than than Old English and Old High German. Old English texts have been found in (modern day) central and southern Germany (e.g.: Fulda), which implies that they were reading them there. This would be from the 7th to 10th century timeframe, IIRC.
• stan_rogers 5y ago
  Of course there's no ham in hamburger - it's a hamburger steak sandwich, where "hamburger" means "of Hamburg" or "Hamburg style". The generic "burger" is a back-formation from hamburger and is the thing that makes no sense.
  • chihuahua 5y ago
    It's a coincidence that the word "Hamburger" contains the English word "ham". But it's an odd coincidence: After some brief research, it seems that both the English word "ham" and the name of the town of Hamburg have their origin in the Old High German word "hamma" which means "hollow or bend of the knee". In the case of ham, it refers to part of the leg of an animal. In the case of Hamburg, it got its name from Hammaburg, which was the original fortification where the town was founded. In this case, "hamma" refers to some kind of feature of the piece of land, which was on a bend of the river.
• irrational 5y ago
  > One index, two indices? Huh, I do use indices for 2+ index. I guess I’ve been wrong. I’m surprised nobody has ever said anything in my nearly 50 years.
  • tebs1200 5y ago
    You're right to use "indices". The example is just provided to show how inconsistent plurals are in English. 90% of the time you just slap an "s" on the end of a word, but there's a crazy amount of exceptions to that rule.
    • herewulf 5y ago
      It's not a native English plural, it's Latin straight from the nominative plural <indicēs>. You will find that <indexes> is far more common in English. The supposedly "correct" plural, <indices>, is something that has to be learned through education, typically. There are a lot of Latin/Greek terms (typically scientific) whose plurals must be similarly learned because otherwise native English speakers will use the simple plural -s suffix with no concern whatsoever.