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Sorry to say this (and I might get some flak for this) but English is a pretty dumb language. I am no linguist and not even a native English speaker and thus th

by Bhilai 3y ago

Sorry to say this (and I might get some flak for this) but English is a pretty dumb language. I am no linguist and not even a native English speaker and thus this may be my ignorance speaking. I am happy to learn from you all and change my current opinion on English. I am native Hindi speaker and at no time in Hindi can you have a different pronunciations from how the word is written (cache, knowledge, repertoire...) You can also never have a word pronounced differently in different tense (for example, Read.) Furthermore, there are no words to my knowledge which sound the same but have different written spelling! (Write, Right, Rite.) English grammar has some quite unnecessarily complex rules (imperfect perfect tense says hi!) remembering from when I use to cram from this book called Wren and Martin back in the day. I am sometimes sad that quite a large portion of the world has chosen English to the language of business when there are better languages out there which not only have less complex and confusing rules but are much more expressive and scientific.

harperlee 3y ago
In spanish, for example, there's two ways to deal with foreign words: you either substitute for a new native one (balompié instead of football), or you localize its spelling (fútbol instead of football). Once this is done, football jumps from being an extranjerismo to a barbarismo, and its usage is shunned. But it is quite easier to push this with a language governing authority, and even with one it does not always work, as they always come with standardization after usage is widespread (a particular one that I liked that failed was cederrón for CD-ROM).
- oneshtein 3y ago
  Create an app or plugin for spanization of English words, please. Huge thanks in advance.
avgcorrection 3y ago
English orthography is terrible—quite correct.
alserio 3y ago
English is the c++ of languages. Wildly useful and used, has accrued eons of complexity, has original sins coming from its parents' and everybody uses it differently
- j45 3y ago
  Maybe JavaScript sans frameworks
- ta23 3y ago
  >has original sins coming frome its parents Not really. Its biggest sin is melting-potting too many parents, resulting in an irredeemable mess. And even totally unrelated to the parents: The languages around the globe largely agree on the five vocals. There may be one or two missing at times, but they are pretty much the same everywhere you go, European-descent or not, and then you got fucking English. Where an "a" is more often than not an "e" (or even an "o" like in "ball"). Where an "e" is usually an "i". Where an "i" is pronounced as if it had an "a" in front of it, and where "u" for some fucked up reason has a "y" or "j" in front of it. Granted, "o" is fine as long as you don't double it ("oo") and it becomes an "u". And that's regular British English. American English makes things even worse. English is more like Visual Basic.
  - Aloha 3y ago
    ... or PHP Yeah, english is a lot like PHP.
    - coffeebeqn 3y ago
      JavaScript . Everyone has to know it but no one who learned it really loves it
  - OkayPhysicist 3y ago
    The chaos that is English vowel spelling comes from the fact that vowels in English are relatively unimportant in differentiating words, and thus allow for a lot drift before becoming unintelligible. If you replace all the sounds in the previous sentence with a long 'a' as in "cane" you'll sound ridiculous, but pretty much intelligible. Even more so if you replace all the vowels with some sort of "shwa" vowel. This creates a lot of English accents, which fundamentally disagree about the pronunciation of different vowels. Even if the accepted spelling accurately represents how the writer speaks, it could be absolutely different from how the reader speaks. It also creates a tendency to let unemphasized vowels slip into a generic "au"-ish sound, which is where the "o" in "ball" comes from.
davidivadavid 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth
didgeoridoo 3y ago
You’re right that English is a total mess. It’s partly the result of mashing up two totally separate language families (Romance and Germanic). But that also makes the language extremely flexible, forgiving, and adaptable. English contains a vast number of (mostly) mutually-intelligible dialects, each with its own rich history, beauty, and shibboleths. You’ve got to take the bad with the good, I guess.
- harperlee 3y ago
  Jorge Luis Borges had an interesting opinion on the matter here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJYoqCDKoT4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJYoqCDKoT4
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
benj111 3y ago
>cache, knowledge, repertoire Tbf English is quite consistent on 'kn' having a silent k. The other 2 are french imports.
- mkingston 3y ago
  You and I know that, but it's not important or useful to a non-French speaker learning English. To those people, those are merely English words. And indeed, they are English, even if they're French imports. I think even a lot of English speakers don't realise the depth of this: "cul de sac" is a fun example that a lot of people I ask don't realise comes from French (or another language, for that matter).
  - dfawcus 3y ago
    I always preferred "Dead End", but "Cul-de-sac" seems to have taken over with the road sign planning departments since the 70s.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago
      I've seen both, with an apparent fairly-consistent consistent semantic distinction: a “cul-de-sac” has a rounded turnaround at the end which is convenient for reversing direction without entering any driveway off the road, a “dead end” has a straight end which doesn't provide that affordance.
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    Meanwhile in France they generally don’t call it a “cul de sac” anymore but rather an “impasse”. You’ll see a mix of the two in Quebec. That red octagon sign in France will say “STOP”, but in Quebec, “Arrête”.
    - Izkata 3y ago
      In English (or at least the US), a cul-de-sac doesn't end with the red stop signs. Those are dead ends. Cul-de-sacs are where a street ends in a pseudo-roundabout like the image here: https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/cul-de-sac-pros-cons-36972433 https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/cul-de-sac-pros-cons-369724...
mind-blight 3y ago
A lot of this complexity is historical. English has a number of languages with wildly different roots in it (Germanic and Latin). One example: why do we call the animal a pig, but the meat pork? Because when William the conqueror was French. When he conquered England a little after 1000AD, the aristocracy required their English cooks to use French words for food. The farmers however kept using the original English word. A thousand years later, and now we have a weird language rule that was created due to millennia old politics
mkingston 3y ago
As someone who is currently learning French and (amateur) teaching English I agree in general with your take on English. The frequency with which I say "yes, it doesn't really make sense to pronounce it that way" is high. English is full of crazy inconsistencies and I feel lucky to have learned it as a native speaker. Here's a nice illustration/example of what you've written: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti I really appreciate that French is much more consistent with pronunciation but it's very challenging in some other ways. There are numerous conjugations that sound the same but are spelled differently, meaning you have to infer from context where possible. This is quite challenging as a learner. Il / elle parle ("he/she speaks") Ils / elles parlent ("they speak") Both of the above are pronounced exactly the same. It's not such a problem when reading, but when listening and especially when transcribing this is quite challenging. Also, I haven't taken any time to think about it but so far I have the impression that there are far more conjugations of a given verb in French than in English. I've questioned a little lately whether conjugation gives more than it takes. Context, with the occasional "clue" word, seems like a pretty adequate mechanism. In English for example, we don't differentiate between you (singular) and you (plural). But when it's not clear from context we'll say e.g. "you all". This seems to me easier and more sensible (and I'm correspondingly enamoured with the French gerondif), but I do wonder if it's tricky when coming from languages where there would be a difference between the singular and plural. Which is all to say: I'm very sympathetic to, and I agree with your reservations about English. And I'm also glad that French isn't the language in its place.
- hotnfresh 3y ago
  One of my French professors said (and I think she was serious?) that the French have conjugation-bees, not spelling bees, because French spelling is too easy to be able to build a contest around it. If you can say it, you can almost certainly spell it. Too few exceptions to that to make spelling bees work.
  - mathieuh 3y ago
    It's the other way around, if you can see a word written you can pronounce it, but French notoriously has a large number of homophonous syllables.
hotnfresh 3y ago
English orthography being terrible is basically the standard opinion, even among native English speakers. You’re not likely to find many English teachers who disagree, certainly.
btilly 3y ago
English is what you got when Anglo-Saxon peasants were forced to serve French speaking nobles. Which is why basic grammar and simple words are Germanic in origin, while words for food, laws, and various complex things have Romance origins. And then went on to become traders who borrow words from everywhere. Add to that constantly shifting pronunciation rules. To pick an example that is only mostly complete, "wear" and "where" are now homonyms for most people. But a century ago they mostly were not. The spelling captures the historical pronunciation, not the current one. But it could be worse. At least we've dropped the insanity of gender from the language. Old English had 5 genders, that generally didn't match what French had. But still if you want a flavor of what English might have sounded like without being mangled by French, read Uncleftish Beholding: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/110/docs/uncleftish_beholding.html https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/110/docs/uncleftish_beh.... It explains basic atomic theory using only Germanic based words (eg Beholding) and made up words with Germanic roots. So, for example, atoms can't be split or cleft, and so are uncleft is an atom. And Ymir has a mythological role parallel to Uranus, so uranium became ymirstuff. It is surprisingly readable, but sounds quite different than English usually does.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  This feels like reading German.
  - OnlyMortal 3y ago
    Well yes. My dialect is somewhere towards German (more so Dutch). I write, “learnt” rather than “learned”. Past perfect and past imperfect from a Germanic view. “I learnt” and “I have learned”. “I learned” sounds wrong. Source: Yorkshuh.
    - stevekemp 3y ago
      Only this evening I was trying to explain to my child that "telt" was the same as "told", with extra emphasis and implied overtones.. Source Yorkshuh and Scottishland!
crazygringo 3y ago
As far as I'm aware, every language out there is dumb, and English isn't especially dumb. Yes, its particular wart is pronunciation, and then also phrasal verbs especially [1]. But what are the dumb things English doesn't have? Noun genders (why?). A hundred different suffixes for regular verb conjugations (ugh). Subjunctives all over the place (maddening). A character-based script that isn't phonetic at all (e.g. Chinese). Insanely complicated grammar. Word forms that change based on the social status of the speaker relative to the listener. And so forth. Truth be told, English is actually one of the easier languages out there. And while learning pronunciation is annoying, it turns out it's actually not a big obstacle in practice at all. In terms of what students struggle with in ESL (English as a Second Language) classrooms, it's basically bottom of the list. Students struggle way more with the present perfect, for example (when to use "I've eaten" instead of "I ate"). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phrasal_verbs#Distinguishing_phrasal_verb_types https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phrasal_verbs#Distingu...
- gilcot 3y ago
  > Truth be told, English is actually one of the easier languages out there. Sure …when, as native, you don't have to spent years leaning it that easier language …like others. Oh wait, you dunno toki-pona nor esperanto :(
- Aloha 3y ago
  The hardest part about english as far as I know is vocabulary - which is vast - something like 1/3rd larger than other languages because of the dual parentage of English and French - and thats before you get into words that have three or four definitions. The one nice thing about English is you can totally munge it, wrong tenses, slightly wrong words, wrong word order, and its still intelligible. Like, you can transliterate spanish or french (or any number of languages) into english, and it will be perfectly understandable in most cases to a native speaker.
  - HPsquared 3y ago
    It's still intelligible* (Unless that's the joke)
wodenokoto 3y ago
> Furthermore, there are no words to my knowledge which sound the same but have different written spelling! (Write, Right, Rite.) That’s a feature though. Makes reading much easier. A common argument against removing kanji from Japanese and just use kana is that it removes the written difference between homonyms.
beeforpork 3y ago
> English is a pretty dumb language Don't mix up language and spelling. Spelling is man-made. Language is not dumb.
- addaon 3y ago
  > Don't mix up language and spelling. Spelling is man-made. Language is not dumb. Are you suggesting that language is /not/ man-made?
  - psychoslave 3y ago
    I guess he mean that written form is often thought as coming from a few érudits through an intensely conscious endeavor, while oral language is evolving mostly in the wild and result mostly from internalized unconscious conventions. I mean, these views can be debated, but are probably what was referred to here.
clauderoux 3y ago
Among European languages, English is maybe the language with the less consistency, when it comes to writing, but it is far from being the only one. French is another one, and English borrowed not only a lot of French words, but a lot of them were borrowed with their old French spelling. To understand why English and many other European languages have such weird spelling rules, you have to start with the initial reason: religion. Most Western European countries used to be Catholics, and the main language of the Church was Latin. The Latin alphabet was designed to write down... Latin. The Romans modified and adapted the Etruscan alphabet, which was borrowed from the Greek, who borrowed it from the Phoenicians , etc. to their own language. However, when European languages developed as national languages, they faced a real issue, which was to adapt the Latin alphabet, which was ubiquitous in Western Europe, to their own languages. If you compare the spelling system of Hindi to Latin, you immediately see the problem. The Latin alphabet is very poor and is composed of only 26 letters. And many sounds in Germanic languages do not have their counterpart in Latin. People started to use combinations of letters to represent their own specific sounds, which were pretty unique to each country. For instance, you cannot read Dutch if you apply English rules to it. In the case of English, the problem is even more complicated. For one, the official language of England up to the 15th century was French, which explained why 40% of a text in English is composed of French words. Second, when people started writing in English, there was no government body to enforce a common spelling. So, printer shops all over England came up with their own ways to spell out words, and the result is this hogwash of spelling that is English today. The last problem, which is a problem that many international languages, such as Spanish, German, French and Portuguese are faced with, is that every decision to change the spelling of your language should be the result of international comities. And since, there are so many different accents today, it has become quite difficult to come up with a regular pronunciation, and hence, a regular spelling for any of these languages. I can tell you that as a Frenchman, speaking Parisian French, I would have a hard time convincing Belgian or Quebecers that my accent is the right one... :-) Now, a language usually becomes an international language when the country who speak it reaches some kind of dominance, it has nothing to do with any qualities this language might have. In Europe, this was the case for Greek, Latin, then Italian, French, German and now English. Machine translation might change this situation, but I doubt it, since English is so much ingrained into science and technology now. And the US, and most English speaking countries, have little interests to see their language loosing their prominence. We French speakers went this route after the Second World War... So we know the drill... Economically, this is a real bonanza, you can attract the best students, the best researchers, the best journals etc... You can impose your movies, your literature and of course your values... Why do you think Paris was the capital of arts and literature during the XIXth century? Language... Now it is New York or London... Language again.
darkflame91 3y ago
As a native Kannada speaker, I agree. With most Indian languages, spelling bees are a laughable concept. They generally have about 35 alphabets, each associated with a specific sound and organized by type of sound. So there's no ambiguity with spelling, and pretty much any verbal sounds can be expressed in written form.
bazoom42 3y ago
> much more expressive and scientific. While I agree English can be inconsistent and weird (esp. pronouncuation), I doubt any other language could be more expressive or “scientific”, whatever that means. Unless by “scientific” you mean regular.
dontlaugh 3y ago
You're right, but English is not that rare. Hindi, like my native Romanian, is part of a relatively small group of languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography#Comparison_between_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography#Compariso...
AmericanChopper 3y ago
I agree that English is pretty stupid, and the fact that it’s completely non-phonetic is one of my biggest objections to it. But Hindi has some massively frustrating (and mostly useless) complexity as well. Having to pluralise both the adjective and noun in a sentence, and having different plural forms for feminine and masculine words is incredibly tedious to learn. Indonesian is the best language I’ve come across in this respect, it’s very simple and entirely phonetic. It’s so phonetic that the casual written form basically doesn’t even have the concept of “correct spelling”.
tivert 3y ago
> Sorry to say this (and I might get some flak for this) but English is a pretty dumb language. I am no linguist and not even a native English speaker and thus this may be my ignorance speaking. I would hazard to say it's a pretty common feeling to think every language is dumb except your own. You're so used to the weirdness of your own language you don't even notice it, but weirdness in other language is always grating. > I am native Hindi speaker and at no time in Hindi can you have a different pronunciations from how the word is written (cache, knowledge, repertoire...) IMHO, the only dumb thing about English is the cultural tendency of its speakers to not modify spelling of foreign words as they are imported, even when those languages have completely different sound assignments (see Pinyin). However, once a word has a standard spelling, it makes sense to keep it even as pronunciation changes. > You can also never have a word pronounced differently in different tense (for example, Read.) That's the remnant of an old grammar rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_ablaut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_ablaut. It's from Proto-Indo-European and was apparently still present in Sanskrit. > Furthermore, there are no words to my knowledge which sound the same but have different written spelling! (Write, Right, Rite.) There's a good reason for that: to help disambiguate homophones in writing.
- bestouff 3y ago
  I dunno. I'm French and perfectly aware that my language is difficult to master. I wouldn't say it's dumb but it's just because I'm stupidly proud of my country.
  - HappMacDonald 3y ago
    What I've learned about french is that the end of many words are a mash of keyboard letters including at least a few vowels with bonus points for the hardest consonants that exist (x, k, j, z, p, go wild!) which regardless of its contents is always pronounced as a vowel sound halfway between English "ew" and English "uh". Seems to happen more frequently in last names and place names than anywhere else, as well.
    - monknomo 3y ago
Shish2k 3y ago
English is the PHP of human languages: Random vaguely-useful-looking bits from other languages copied & duct-taped together with no sense of consistency in either the syntax or the standard library...
canjobear 3y ago
> English grammar has some quite unnecessarily complex rules (imperfect perfect tense says hi!) remembering from when I use to cram from this book called Wren and Martin back in the day. English grammar is fairly simple as these things go. If you want to see some serious linguistic complexity, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_grammar or even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_verbs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_verbs
- Asraelite 3y ago
  Not true at all. There is a general tendency for languages to trade grammatical complexity in their morphology for complexity in their syntax. English is morphologically simple, but syntactically very complex. Syntactic complexity isn't as easy to notice at first glance as morphology, especially if you're a native speaker. This leads to the common misconception that analytic languages like English are necessarily simpler overall.
swatcoder 3y ago
Dumb is too vague a word. On the whole, English trades elegance for adaptability. You can compose elegantly in it, but as you note, it has many irregularities. So elegant phrases take effort and practice, where some other languages carry that elegance naturally in everyday speech. (Admittedly: as a writer, poet, singer, or orator, the challenge of making English truly pretty provides job security) But the widespread irregularities of English are part of what gives it a knack for incorporating foreign words, phrases, and idioms. All kinds of weird alien things can be made to fit. Bizarre neologisms and imports can be deciphered relatively easily. Secondary to the accidents of history, this adaptability seems to be a part of why its been "chosen" as one of the main global commerce languages. When Hindi, Arabic, etc need to pick up chonky Germanic words or convey the tonal detail of Mandarin, it disturbs their elegance. But when English has to do it, it just adds the hodgepodge stew that we're used to.
silvestrov 3y ago
My biggest problem with English is the lack of different "you"s. If I say "you can't do that", what does this mean? 1) "you" as a concept: nobody at all can do this. 2) "you" as a specific person: only one person can't do this. Other people can do it. 3) "you" as a group: Nobody in the group (or the group as a whole) can do this.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lotsofspots 3y ago
  I like how the phrase "I didn't say she stole my wallet." changes meaning completely depending on which word(s) you emphasise.
  - computator 3y ago
    It's fun to spell out 7 the different meanings you can get: - I didn't say she stole my wallet. Tom saw it happen and he's the one who said she stole my wallet. - I didn't say she stole my wallet. You're making up something I never said. - I didn't say she stole my wallet. Maybe I suspected her, but I never actually said it. - I didn't say she stole my wallet. Someone stole it, but I don't know who it was. - I didn't say she stole my wallet. She took it, but for safekeeping after I forgot it at the restaurant. - I didn't say she stole my wallet. I did see her steal a wallet, but it wasn't mine. - I didn't say she stole my wallet. She stole my money but left the wallet exactly where it was. It's a great example of how written speech doesn't capture all the nuance of spoken words. Well, italics helps, but hearing it makes a bigger impact.
  - OJFord 3y ago
    I believe this is because/relates to English being a 'stress-timed' language; others (such as Hindi) have 'emphatic particles' that emphasise the word they're attached to, and make more use of words like 'too' in 'I too would like some water' for this effect.
- mnw21cam 3y ago
  Number one on that list is covered by the word "one". That usage has mostly fallen by the wayside, and I think that's an indication that we didn't really need to make that distinction. There are also other ways to word it to make the meaning clear.
Scoundreller 3y ago
> at no time in Hindi can you have a different pronunciations from how the word is written (cache, knowledge, repertoire...) You can also never have a word pronounced differently in different tense (for example, Read.) Furthermore, there are no words to my knowledge which sound the same but have different written spelling! (Write, Right, Rite.) Slavic languages are generally like this. Almost 100% phoenetic. If you can say the alphabet, you can read anything out aloud and everyone will understand what you’re saying. Unsure if there’s even such a thing as a Russian or Serbian spelling bee. Family that has moved from there to North America generally have atrocious spelling in English. And when I read/speak (bad) French, people think I must be Russian because I default to over pronunciation of everything.
gherkinnn 3y ago
One's own language is never dumb. It is always the other's. Same applies to tech. My stack is great, but what you're using is dumb. Also JS is stupid and now watch me write a CSS-in-RuSt compile to WASM monstrosity. I smell a pattern here. I wish people would stop calling what is unknown dumb. It stinks.
screamingninja 3y ago
> I am sometimes sad that quite a large portion of the world has chosen English to the language of business when there are better languages out there which not only have less complex and confusing rules but are much more expressive and scientific. Majority of the global decisions today are made through political, and by extension, military dominance. If we resorted to scientific debate in making grand decisions, imagine what kind of a place our world would be!
firebat45 3y ago
>I am sometimes sad that quite a large portion of the world has chosen English to the language of business when there are better languages out there which not only have less complex and confusing rules but are much more expressive and scientific. It is precisely because English is the language of business that it is such a mess of rules and exceptions. The complexity of English is due to all the loanwords and influence it gets from other languages, when native speakers of those languages start using English and put their own spin on it. If the world had chosen some other language instead of English, that language would be equally confusing and English would be much simpler than it is today.
drivers99 3y ago
I was googling whether Hindi is 100% phonetic. Is this accurate? https://old.reddit.com/r/IndiaSpeaks/comments/hrl6lp/comment/fy86cck/ https://old.reddit.com/r/IndiaSpeaks/comments/hrl6lp/comment... I thought to check because if you look into Spanish for example, it is often thought to be phonetic but it really isn't 100% phonetic either.
- Arc_Orion 3y ago
  I assume you're asking if the orthography is a completely accurate representation of the phonetic utterances? If so, then no language is 100% "phonetic". Spoken languages inherently adopt phonemes - which represent single perceived "sounds", which are actually represented in speech by several different sounds. The specific sounds will be different allophones of a single phoneme. These will vary for each speaker depending upon language, dialect, and other factors. A language might possibly have an orthography that is 100% accurate to the phonemic inventory, but only for a single dialect. As soon as the dialect changes or another dialect emerges, the orthography will have to change to be 100% accurate. For example, when I say "butter" with my North American English accent, I typically say the -tt- part with an voiced alveolar tap. It's represented by "ɾ" in IPA. This sounds close to a "d" sound, but faster. However, if you ask me to slow down and repeat "butter", I'll likely respond with a full on [voiceless alveolar plosive], represented by a "t" in IPA. (Look familiar?) Both [ɾ] and [t] are allophones of the /t/ morpheme in NA English. They're specific sounds that are perceived of as a "t". Now, I am not an expert on Hindi at all, so I cannot make any specific claims myself regarding particular sounds, but if Wikipedia is reliable here, an example of similar allophony is [w] and [v]. * Side note, I'm condensing a bunch of things in here, so it leaves out some complexity, but it should hopefully express the point that no language will have all of its sounds represented perfectly in orthography. Voice Alveolar Taps - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_and_alveolar_taps_and_flaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_and_alveolar_tap... Voiceless Alveolar Plosives - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_plosives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_... w/v allophony in Hindi - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_phonology#Allophony_of_[v]_and_[w] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_phonology#Allophony...
  - 3y ago
Tao3300 3y ago
English is the most cobbled together language. It has a fascinating history. You can trace some of its words back to the Proto-Indo-European language that also branched off into Sanskrit. It has marks of conquest in it that cause it to have Anglo names for some animals, but Norman French names for their meat. However pronunciation in it is incredibly screwed up and inconsistent. To the point where we actually have Spelling Bees where children train like mad to get on stage and shake and sweat in a competition to demonstrate their mastery of this mess. The winner is always celebrated like they are a genius, when they've essentially accomplished the intellectual equivalent of knowing where more of the potholes are on the nation's highways than the other kid.
- hinkley 3y ago
  We've known for some time that English began as a pidgin language, but about ten, fifteen years back some linguists declared that they had convinced themselves that the pidgin that became English started as another pidgin language itself. It's a melting pot language full of borrowed words. There's a theory in cognitive science that the language you speak in can affect what thoughts you can have. English speakers as a whole seem to have intuited this long ago. If a complex idea has a word in another language, we just steal it. Math and Science tend to limit themselves to latin, but then higher education in Europe used to be taught in Latin. I suppose to make it easier (or at least more fair) to bring students in from other countries, and send trained teachers out (or to poach them).
  - mrkstu 3y ago
    Yep, I always think of schadenfreude in this context. A single word that we've stolen for something that would take multiple English words to express. Why come up with our own new English word, when there is a perfectly cromulent one right over there in German? Meanwhile the French have to continually consult their academics to create new French words that their citizens keep trying to borrow from other languages (mostly English)...
    - hinkley 3y ago
graypegg 3y ago
I think people value their language being up-to-date enough to describe their own slice of human history MORE than how confusing it is for a new learner. Loan words/all new words/complex grammar rules brought into languages aren’t done for fun, it’s because there’s a concept that they need to describe. (Or a class divide they need to define) No commonly spoken language has ease-of-learning its priority. Just not as important as building on the language you have now.
Koshkin 3y ago
The variability in pronunciation is a blessing in disguise. How else would one distinguish between 'a row' and 'a row', or tell 'a sow' from 'to sow'? The American English is an infinite source of pride for me, because of how different it is from other related languages. Where everyone else is using 'ss' to stress the need for the sound 's', we proudly say 'z' when we see 'ss'. Scissors: 'sizerz'! I even hear 'azum' (assume) once in a while.
- callmeal 3y ago
  >How else would one distinguish between 'a row' and 'a row', or tell 'a sow' from 'to sow'? You have different words for those meanings?
  - fragmede 3y ago
    row: a line of items (vs column) row: a fight bonus (to) row: verb meaning to propel a boat with oar(s) (a) sow: female pig (to) sow: scattering seeds for planting bonus (a) sow: block of metal ingot
- ahoka 3y ago
  You guys get it all wrong: it’s not that different words are pronounced the same, but some words sound like each other, but written differently.
coldtrait 3y ago
But I hate that Hindi has gender for objects and a bunch of other languages have this rule too which makes it unnecessarily complex. Cool username btw. A buddy of mine is from there.
signal11 3y ago
> English is a pretty dumb language… I am native Hindi speaker Pretty much every one of your criticisms is true for every human language. Calling any of them “dumb” is more a reflection of yourself than of the language. Eg Hindi has grammatical gender, which could be pretty wtf to say, Bengali speakers, or speakers of Hungarian, but that doesn’t make Hindi “dumb”. > better languages out there which not only have less complex and confusing rules but are much more expressive and scientific “Scientific” … sigh. Human languages are not scientific. All of them have quirks. All. You want a “scientific” (ish) language, learn Lojban. Then you can speak with other Lojban speakers. English isn’t “special” by any means, and history and politics — and also the history of technological progress — have played a role in what it is today. Arguably many other languages could have played this role: French, Mandarin, anything. But what matters is that people can, and do learn it as a second language enough to make it useful as a de-facto link language. If you’re actually interested in learning why English is the way it is, I recommend the “History of English” podcast. It starts with PIE so you may even learn something about Sanskrit and Hindi along the way.
Beijinger 3y ago
I am not native speaker but I find English a superior language. And if other languages are better for business, why do the Angelsax countries outperform the world? I take it you already know Of tough and bough and cough and dough? Others may stumble, but not you, On hiccough, thorough, lough and through? Well done! And now you wish, perhaps, To learn of less familiar traps? Beware of heard, a dreadful word That looks like beard and sounds like bird, And dead: it's said like bed, not bead - For goodness sake don't call it deed! Watch out for meat and great and threat (They rhyme with suite and straight and debt). A moth is not a moth in mother, Nor both in bother, broth in brother, And here is not a match for there Nor dear and fear for bear and pear, And then there's dose and rose and lose - Just look them up - and goose and choose, And cork and work and card and ward, And font and front and word and sword, And do and go and thwart and cart - Come, come, I've hardly made a start! A dreadful language? Man alive! I'd mastered it when I was five!
retrac 3y ago
It is what happens when a language freezes its orthography in time. English is spelled as it was 350 years ago. There's a great weight of history. How it was spelled in Greek, French or Latin has an impact. Other languages do this. French spelling is heavily informed by etymology. Whether it is c or s depends how it was spelled for Latin. But more! The Latin word for finger is digitus. Today the French word for finger is pronounced something like /dwa/. But because Latin spelled it 'digitus', French spells this as "doigt". The g and t are both silent. Japanese before the mid-20th century reforms, used kana spellings based on medieval Japanese pronunciation. So you would write the kana, which if read individually would have the value Tōkiyau - but you pronounced it Tōkyō. The writing system for the Tibetan language is an abugida, another off-shoot of the Brahmi script, a sister I suppose of Devanagari. The spelling of Tibetan was fixed over a thousand years ago. Modern Tibetan has lost almost all its consonant clusters, yet written Tibetan includes clusters like བསྒྲུབས "bsgrubs" (i think pronounced just /tsup/ today?) The Tibetan or French historical etymologies might be a bit more elegant than English, really. But same idea.
kashunstva 3y ago
> Sorry to say this (and I might get some flak for this) but English is a pretty dumb language. I don't completely understand this. It's not a constructed language; it's a language that evolved and continues to evolve like other natural languages according to pressures exerted by a host of factors, practically none of which are consciously-decided. Exceedingly complex in some ways, vague and ambiguous in others; it's a stretch to classify English as "dumb" For natural languages, the idea of better and worse languages seems like asking whether a maple tree is better than an oak tree. Every natural language has its quirks. For English, pronunciation, as you point out is the most notable. But take Russian: its pronunciation is much more predictable, but the non-native speaker has to contend with declensions, verbal aspect, verbs of motion, etc. Chinese orthography is daunting. Trade offs abound...
hfhdjdks 3y ago
The language is not dumb. The writing system that people chose is...not that great (and you can call it dumb if you like). There was a choice between respecting phonetics or maximizing some other objective (respecting etymology or being consistent with older pronunciation or whatever). Being based on a latin script maybe wasn't ideal, but languages like swedish or german did a better job and invented letter when needed. If you take the distribution of writing systems, I'm not sure English is particularly bad (the modern version has spaces and punctuation! Not bad, right?). It's not great either.
TacticalCoder 3y ago
> Sorry to say this (and I might get some flak for this) but English is a pretty dumb language. I don't know if a language can be "dumb". Accents, on the other hand...
GuB-42 3y ago
Is there any language that is not "dumb" in some way? Maybe Esperanto, but that's a constructed language. And Esperanto would probably be a better choice for an universal language, but no one really "chose" to use English. The US being the big winners of WW2 combined with the UK being a major colonial power at the time international trade developed probably helped.
scarface_74 3y ago
Did you ever have to learn “Order Force” when learning English? https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/sentence-order-adjectives-rule-elements-of-eloquence-dictionary https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/senten...

by Bhilai 3y ago

harperlee 3y ago

In spanish, for example, there's two ways to deal with foreign words: you either substitute for a new native one (balompié instead of football), or you localize its spelling (fútbol instead of football). Once this is done, football jumps from being an extranjerismo to a barbarismo, and its usage is shunned. But it is quite easier to push this with a language governing authority, and even with one it does not always work, as they always come with standardization after usage is widespread (a particular one that I liked that failed was cederrón for CD-ROM).

oneshtein 3y ago
Create an app or plugin for spanization of English words, please. Huge thanks in advance.

avgcorrection 3y ago

English orthography is terrible—quite correct.

alserio 3y ago

English is the c++ of languages. Wildly useful and used, has accrued eons of complexity, has original sins coming from its parents' and everybody uses it differently

j45 3y ago
Maybe JavaScript sans frameworks
ta23 3y ago
>has original sins coming frome its parents Not really. Its biggest sin is melting-potting too many parents, resulting in an irredeemable mess. And even totally unrelated to the parents: The languages around the globe largely agree on the five vocals. There may be one or two missing at times, but they are pretty much the same everywhere you go, European-descent or not, and then you got fucking English. Where an "a" is more often than not an "e" (or even an "o" like in "ball"). Where an "e" is usually an "i". Where an "i" is pronounced as if it had an "a" in front of it, and where "u" for some fucked up reason has a "y" or "j" in front of it. Granted, "o" is fine as long as you don't double it ("oo") and it becomes an "u". And that's regular British English. American English makes things even worse. English is more like Visual Basic.
- Aloha 3y ago
  ... or PHP Yeah, english is a lot like PHP.
  - coffeebeqn 3y ago
    JavaScript . Everyone has to know it but no one who learned it really loves it
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  The chaos that is English vowel spelling comes from the fact that vowels in English are relatively unimportant in differentiating words, and thus allow for a lot drift before becoming unintelligible. If you replace all the sounds in the previous sentence with a long 'a' as in "cane" you'll sound ridiculous, but pretty much intelligible. Even more so if you replace all the vowels with some sort of "shwa" vowel. This creates a lot of English accents, which fundamentally disagree about the pronunciation of different vowels. Even if the accepted spelling accurately represents how the writer speaks, it could be absolutely different from how the reader speaks. It also creates a tendency to let unemphasized vowels slip into a generic "au"-ish sound, which is where the "o" in "ball" comes from.

davidivadavid 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth

didgeoridoo 3y ago

You’re right that English is a total mess. It’s partly the result of mashing up two totally separate language families (Romance and Germanic). But that also makes the language extremely flexible, forgiving, and adaptable. English contains a vast number of (mostly) mutually-intelligible dialects, each with its own rich history, beauty, and shibboleths. You’ve got to take the bad with the good, I guess.

harperlee 3y ago
Jorge Luis Borges had an interesting opinion on the matter here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJYoqCDKoT4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJYoqCDKoT4
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benj111 3y ago

>cache, knowledge, repertoire Tbf English is quite consistent on 'kn' having a silent k. The other 2 are french imports.

mkingston 3y ago
You and I know that, but it's not important or useful to a non-French speaker learning English. To those people, those are merely English words. And indeed, they are English, even if they're French imports. I think even a lot of English speakers don't realise the depth of this: "cul de sac" is a fun example that a lot of people I ask don't realise comes from French (or another language, for that matter).
- dfawcus 3y ago
  I always preferred "Dead End", but "Cul-de-sac" seems to have taken over with the road sign planning departments since the 70s.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago
    I've seen both, with an apparent fairly-consistent consistent semantic distinction: a “cul-de-sac” has a rounded turnaround at the end which is convenient for reversing direction without entering any driveway off the road, a “dead end” has a straight end which doesn't provide that affordance.
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  Meanwhile in France they generally don’t call it a “cul de sac” anymore but rather an “impasse”. You’ll see a mix of the two in Quebec. That red octagon sign in France will say “STOP”, but in Quebec, “Arrête”.
  - Izkata 3y ago
    In English (or at least the US), a cul-de-sac doesn't end with the red stop signs. Those are dead ends. Cul-de-sacs are where a street ends in a pseudo-roundabout like the image here: https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/cul-de-sac-pros-cons-36972433 https://www.apartmenttherapy.com/cul-de-sac-pros-cons-369724...

mind-blight 3y ago

A lot of this complexity is historical. English has a number of languages with wildly different roots in it (Germanic and Latin). One example: why do we call the animal a pig, but the meat pork? Because when William the conqueror was French. When he conquered England a little after 1000AD, the aristocracy required their English cooks to use French words for food. The farmers however kept using the original English word. A thousand years later, and now we have a weird language rule that was created due to millennia old politics

mkingston 3y ago

As someone who is currently learning French and (amateur) teaching English I agree in general with your take on English. The frequency with which I say "yes, it doesn't really make sense to pronounce it that way" is high. English is full of crazy inconsistencies and I feel lucky to have learned it as a native speaker. Here's a nice illustration/example of what you've written: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghoti I really appreciate that French is much more consistent with pronunciation but it's very challenging in some other ways. There are numerous conjugations that sound the same but are spelled differently, meaning you have to infer from context where possible. This is quite challenging as a learner. Il / elle parle ("he/she speaks") Ils / elles parlent ("they speak") Both of the above are pronounced exactly the same. It's not such a problem when reading, but when listening and especially when transcribing this is quite challenging. Also, I haven't taken any time to think about it but so far I have the impression that there are far more conjugations of a given verb in French than in English. I've questioned a little lately whether conjugation gives more than it takes. Context, with the occasional "clue" word, seems like a pretty adequate mechanism. In English for example, we don't differentiate between you (singular) and you (plural). But when it's not clear from context we'll say e.g. "you all". This seems to me easier and more sensible (and I'm correspondingly enamoured with the French gerondif), but I do wonder if it's tricky when coming from languages where there would be a difference between the singular and plural. Which is all to say: I'm very sympathetic to, and I agree with your reservations about English. And I'm also glad that French isn't the language in its place.

hotnfresh 3y ago
One of my French professors said (and I think she was serious?) that the French have conjugation-bees, not spelling bees, because French spelling is too easy to be able to build a contest around it. If you can say it, you can almost certainly spell it. Too few exceptions to that to make spelling bees work.
- mathieuh 3y ago
  It's the other way around, if you can see a word written you can pronounce it, but French notoriously has a large number of homophonous syllables.

hotnfresh 3y ago

English orthography being terrible is basically the standard opinion, even among native English speakers. You’re not likely to find many English teachers who disagree, certainly.

btilly 3y ago

English is what you got when Anglo-Saxon peasants were forced to serve French speaking nobles. Which is why basic grammar and simple words are Germanic in origin, while words for food, laws, and various complex things have Romance origins. And then went on to become traders who borrow words from everywhere. Add to that constantly shifting pronunciation rules. To pick an example that is only mostly complete, "wear" and "where" are now homonyms for most people. But a century ago they mostly were not. The spelling captures the historical pronunciation, not the current one. But it could be worse. At least we've dropped the insanity of gender from the language. Old English had 5 genders, that generally didn't match what French had. But still if you want a flavor of what English might have sounded like without being mangled by French, read Uncleftish Beholding: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/110/docs/uncleftish_beholding.html https://www.ling.upenn.edu/~beatrice/110/docs/uncleftish_beh.... It explains basic atomic theory using only Germanic based words (eg Beholding) and made up words with Germanic roots. So, for example, atoms can't be split or cleft, and so are uncleft is an atom. And Ymir has a mythological role parallel to Uranus, so uranium became ymirstuff. It is surprisingly readable, but sounds quite different than English usually does.

HPsquared 3y ago
This feels like reading German.
- OnlyMortal 3y ago
  Well yes. My dialect is somewhere towards German (more so Dutch). I write, “learnt” rather than “learned”. Past perfect and past imperfect from a Germanic view. “I learnt” and “I have learned”. “I learned” sounds wrong. Source: Yorkshuh.
  - stevekemp 3y ago
    Only this evening I was trying to explain to my child that "telt" was the same as "told", with extra emphasis and implied overtones.. Source Yorkshuh and Scottishland!

crazygringo 3y ago

As far as I'm aware, every language out there is dumb, and English isn't especially dumb. Yes, its particular wart is pronunciation, and then also phrasal verbs especially [1]. But what are the dumb things English doesn't have? Noun genders (why?). A hundred different suffixes for regular verb conjugations (ugh). Subjunctives all over the place (maddening). A character-based script that isn't phonetic at all (e.g. Chinese). Insanely complicated grammar. Word forms that change based on the social status of the speaker relative to the listener. And so forth. Truth be told, English is actually one of the easier languages out there. And while learning pronunciation is annoying, it turns out it's actually not a big obstacle in practice at all. In terms of what students struggle with in ESL (English as a Second Language) classrooms, it's basically bottom of the list. Students struggle way more with the present perfect, for example (when to use "I've eaten" instead of "I ate"). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phrasal_verbs#Distinguishing_phrasal_verb_types https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_phrasal_verbs#Distingu...

gilcot 3y ago
> Truth be told, English is actually one of the easier languages out there. Sure …when, as native, you don't have to spent years leaning it that easier language …like others. Oh wait, you dunno toki-pona nor esperanto :(
Aloha 3y ago
The hardest part about english as far as I know is vocabulary - which is vast - something like 1/3rd larger than other languages because of the dual parentage of English and French - and thats before you get into words that have three or four definitions. The one nice thing about English is you can totally munge it, wrong tenses, slightly wrong words, wrong word order, and its still intelligible. Like, you can transliterate spanish or french (or any number of languages) into english, and it will be perfectly understandable in most cases to a native speaker.
- HPsquared 3y ago
  It's still intelligible* (Unless that's the joke)

wodenokoto 3y ago

> Furthermore, there are no words to my knowledge which sound the same but have different written spelling! (Write, Right, Rite.) That’s a feature though. Makes reading much easier. A common argument against removing kanji from Japanese and just use kana is that it removes the written difference between homonyms.

beeforpork 3y ago

> English is a pretty dumb language Don't mix up language and spelling. Spelling is man-made. Language is not dumb.

addaon 3y ago
> Don't mix up language and spelling. Spelling is man-made. Language is not dumb. Are you suggesting that language is /not/ man-made?
- psychoslave 3y ago
  I guess he mean that written form is often thought as coming from a few érudits through an intensely conscious endeavor, while oral language is evolving mostly in the wild and result mostly from internalized unconscious conventions. I mean, these views can be debated, but are probably what was referred to here.

clauderoux 3y ago

Among European languages, English is maybe the language with the less consistency, when it comes to writing, but it is far from being the only one. French is another one, and English borrowed not only a lot of French words, but a lot of them were borrowed with their old French spelling. To understand why English and many other European languages have such weird spelling rules, you have to start with the initial reason: religion. Most Western European countries used to be Catholics, and the main language of the Church was Latin. The Latin alphabet was designed to write down... Latin. The Romans modified and adapted the Etruscan alphabet, which was borrowed from the Greek, who borrowed it from the Phoenicians , etc. to their own language. However, when European languages developed as national languages, they faced a real issue, which was to adapt the Latin alphabet, which was ubiquitous in Western Europe, to their own languages. If you compare the spelling system of Hindi to Latin, you immediately see the problem. The Latin alphabet is very poor and is composed of only 26 letters. And many sounds in Germanic languages do not have their counterpart in Latin. People started to use combinations of letters to represent their own specific sounds, which were pretty unique to each country. For instance, you cannot read Dutch if you apply English rules to it. In the case of English, the problem is even more complicated. For one, the official language of England up to the 15th century was French, which explained why 40% of a text in English is composed of French words. Second, when people started writing in English, there was no government body to enforce a common spelling. So, printer shops all over England came up with their own ways to spell out words, and the result is this hogwash of spelling that is English today. The last problem, which is a problem that many international languages, such as Spanish, German, French and Portuguese are faced with, is that every decision to change the spelling of your language should be the result of international comities. And since, there are so many different accents today, it has become quite difficult to come up with a regular pronunciation, and hence, a regular spelling for any of these languages. I can tell you that as a Frenchman, speaking Parisian French, I would have a hard time convincing Belgian or Quebecers that my accent is the right one... :-) Now, a language usually becomes an international language when the country who speak it reaches some kind of dominance, it has nothing to do with any qualities this language might have. In Europe, this was the case for Greek, Latin, then Italian, French, German and now English. Machine translation might change this situation, but I doubt it, since English is so much ingrained into science and technology now. And the US, and most English speaking countries, have little interests to see their language loosing their prominence. We French speakers went this route after the Second World War... So we know the drill... Economically, this is a real bonanza, you can attract the best students, the best researchers, the best journals etc... You can impose your movies, your literature and of course your values... Why do you think Paris was the capital of arts and literature during the XIXth century? Language... Now it is New York or London... Language again.

darkflame91 3y ago

As a native Kannada speaker, I agree. With most Indian languages, spelling bees are a laughable concept. They generally have about 35 alphabets, each associated with a specific sound and organized by type of sound. So there's no ambiguity with spelling, and pretty much any verbal sounds can be expressed in written form.

bazoom42 3y ago

> much more expressive and scientific. While I agree English can be inconsistent and weird (esp. pronouncuation), I doubt any other language could be more expressive or “scientific”, whatever that means. Unless by “scientific” you mean regular.

dontlaugh 3y ago

You're right, but English is not that rare. Hindi, like my native Romanian, is part of a relatively small group of languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography#Comparison_between_languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonemic_orthography#Compariso...

AmericanChopper 3y ago

I agree that English is pretty stupid, and the fact that it’s completely non-phonetic is one of my biggest objections to it. But Hindi has some massively frustrating (and mostly useless) complexity as well. Having to pluralise both the adjective and noun in a sentence, and having different plural forms for feminine and masculine words is incredibly tedious to learn. Indonesian is the best language I’ve come across in this respect, it’s very simple and entirely phonetic. It’s so phonetic that the casual written form basically doesn’t even have the concept of “correct spelling”.

tivert 3y ago

> Sorry to say this (and I might get some flak for this) but English is a pretty dumb language. I am no linguist and not even a native English speaker and thus this may be my ignorance speaking. I would hazard to say it's a pretty common feeling to think every language is dumb except your own. You're so used to the weirdness of your own language you don't even notice it, but weirdness in other language is always grating. > I am native Hindi speaker and at no time in Hindi can you have a different pronunciations from how the word is written (cache, knowledge, repertoire...) IMHO, the only dumb thing about English is the cultural tendency of its speakers to not modify spelling of foreign words as they are imported, even when those languages have completely different sound assignments (see Pinyin). However, once a word has a standard spelling, it makes sense to keep it even as pronunciation changes. > You can also never have a word pronounced differently in different tense (for example, Read.) That's the remnant of an old grammar rule: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_ablaut https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_ablaut. It's from Proto-Indo-European and was apparently still present in Sanskrit. > Furthermore, there are no words to my knowledge which sound the same but have different written spelling! (Write, Right, Rite.) There's a good reason for that: to help disambiguate homophones in writing.

bestouff 3y ago
I dunno. I'm French and perfectly aware that my language is difficult to master. I wouldn't say it's dumb but it's just because I'm stupidly proud of my country.
- HappMacDonald 3y ago
  What I've learned about french is that the end of many words are a mash of keyboard letters including at least a few vowels with bonus points for the hardest consonants that exist (x, k, j, z, p, go wild!) which regardless of its contents is always pronounced as a vowel sound halfway between English "ew" and English "uh". Seems to happen more frequently in last names and place names than anywhere else, as well.
  - monknomo 3y ago

Shish2k 3y ago

English is the PHP of human languages: Random vaguely-useful-looking bits from other languages copied & duct-taped together with no sense of consistency in either the syntax or the standard library...

canjobear 3y ago

> English grammar has some quite unnecessarily complex rules (imperfect perfect tense says hi!) remembering from when I use to cram from this book called Wren and Martin back in the day. English grammar is fairly simple as these things go. If you want to see some serious linguistic complexity, check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_conjugation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_grammar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_grammar or even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_verbs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_verbs

Asraelite 3y ago
Not true at all. There is a general tendency for languages to trade grammatical complexity in their morphology for complexity in their syntax. English is morphologically simple, but syntactically very complex. Syntactic complexity isn't as easy to notice at first glance as morphology, especially if you're a native speaker. This leads to the common misconception that analytic languages like English are necessarily simpler overall.

swatcoder 3y ago

Dumb is too vague a word. On the whole, English trades elegance for adaptability. You can compose elegantly in it, but as you note, it has many irregularities. So elegant phrases take effort and practice, where some other languages carry that elegance naturally in everyday speech. (Admittedly: as a writer, poet, singer, or orator, the challenge of making English truly pretty provides job security) But the widespread irregularities of English are part of what gives it a knack for incorporating foreign words, phrases, and idioms. All kinds of weird alien things can be made to fit. Bizarre neologisms and imports can be deciphered relatively easily. Secondary to the accidents of history, this adaptability seems to be a part of why its been "chosen" as one of the main global commerce languages. When Hindi, Arabic, etc need to pick up chonky Germanic words or convey the tonal detail of Mandarin, it disturbs their elegance. But when English has to do it, it just adds the hodgepodge stew that we're used to.

silvestrov 3y ago

My biggest problem with English is the lack of different "you"s. If I say "you can't do that", what does this mean? 1) "you" as a concept: nobody at all can do this. 2) "you" as a specific person: only one person can't do this. Other people can do it. 3) "you" as a group: Nobody in the group (or the group as a whole) can do this.

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lotsofspots 3y ago
I like how the phrase "I didn't say she stole my wallet." changes meaning completely depending on which word(s) you emphasise.
- computator 3y ago
  It's fun to spell out 7 the different meanings you can get: - I didn't say she stole my wallet. Tom saw it happen and he's the one who said she stole my wallet. - I didn't say she stole my wallet. You're making up something I never said. - I didn't say she stole my wallet. Maybe I suspected her, but I never actually said it. - I didn't say she stole my wallet. Someone stole it, but I don't know who it was. - I didn't say she stole my wallet. She took it, but for safekeeping after I forgot it at the restaurant. - I didn't say she stole my wallet. I did see her steal a wallet, but it wasn't mine. - I didn't say she stole my wallet. She stole my money but left the wallet exactly where it was. It's a great example of how written speech doesn't capture all the nuance of spoken words. Well, italics helps, but hearing it makes a bigger impact.
- OJFord 3y ago
  I believe this is because/relates to English being a 'stress-timed' language; others (such as Hindi) have 'emphatic particles' that emphasise the word they're attached to, and make more use of words like 'too' in 'I too would like some water' for this effect.
mnw21cam 3y ago
Number one on that list is covered by the word "one". That usage has mostly fallen by the wayside, and I think that's an indication that we didn't really need to make that distinction. There are also other ways to word it to make the meaning clear.

Scoundreller 3y ago

> at no time in Hindi can you have a different pronunciations from how the word is written (cache, knowledge, repertoire...) You can also never have a word pronounced differently in different tense (for example, Read.) Furthermore, there are no words to my knowledge which sound the same but have different written spelling! (Write, Right, Rite.) Slavic languages are generally like this. Almost 100% phoenetic. If you can say the alphabet, you can read anything out aloud and everyone will understand what you’re saying. Unsure if there’s even such a thing as a Russian or Serbian spelling bee. Family that has moved from there to North America generally have atrocious spelling in English. And when I read/speak (bad) French, people think I must be Russian because I default to over pronunciation of everything.

gherkinnn 3y ago

One's own language is never dumb. It is always the other's. Same applies to tech. My stack is great, but what you're using is dumb. Also JS is stupid and now watch me write a CSS-in-RuSt compile to WASM monstrosity. I smell a pattern here. I wish people would stop calling what is unknown dumb. It stinks.

screamingninja 3y ago

> I am sometimes sad that quite a large portion of the world has chosen English to the language of business when there are better languages out there which not only have less complex and confusing rules but are much more expressive and scientific. Majority of the global decisions today are made through political, and by extension, military dominance. If we resorted to scientific debate in making grand decisions, imagine what kind of a place our world would be!

firebat45 3y ago

>I am sometimes sad that quite a large portion of the world has chosen English to the language of business when there are better languages out there which not only have less complex and confusing rules but are much more expressive and scientific. It is precisely because English is the language of business that it is such a mess of rules and exceptions. The complexity of English is due to all the loanwords and influence it gets from other languages, when native speakers of those languages start using English and put their own spin on it. If the world had chosen some other language instead of English, that language would be equally confusing and English would be much simpler than it is today.

drivers99 3y ago

I was googling whether Hindi is 100% phonetic. Is this accurate? https://old.reddit.com/r/IndiaSpeaks/comments/hrl6lp/comment/fy86cck/ https://old.reddit.com/r/IndiaSpeaks/comments/hrl6lp/comment... I thought to check because if you look into Spanish for example, it is often thought to be phonetic but it really isn't 100% phonetic either.

Arc_Orion 3y ago
I assume you're asking if the orthography is a completely accurate representation of the phonetic utterances? If so, then no language is 100% "phonetic". Spoken languages inherently adopt phonemes - which represent single perceived "sounds", which are actually represented in speech by several different sounds. The specific sounds will be different allophones of a single phoneme. These will vary for each speaker depending upon language, dialect, and other factors. A language might possibly have an orthography that is 100% accurate to the phonemic inventory, but only for a single dialect. As soon as the dialect changes or another dialect emerges, the orthography will have to change to be 100% accurate. For example, when I say "butter" with my North American English accent, I typically say the -tt- part with an voiced alveolar tap. It's represented by "ɾ" in IPA. This sounds close to a "d" sound, but faster. However, if you ask me to slow down and repeat "butter", I'll likely respond with a full on [voiceless alveolar plosive], represented by a "t" in IPA. (Look familiar?) Both [ɾ] and [t] are allophones of the /t/ morpheme in NA English. They're specific sounds that are perceived of as a "t". Now, I am not an expert on Hindi at all, so I cannot make any specific claims myself regarding particular sounds, but if Wikipedia is reliable here, an example of similar allophony is [w] and [v]. * Side note, I'm condensing a bunch of things in here, so it leaves out some complexity, but it should hopefully express the point that no language will have all of its sounds represented perfectly in orthography. Voice Alveolar Taps - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_and_alveolar_taps_and_flaps https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiced_dental_and_alveolar_tap... Voiceless Alveolar Plosives - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_plosives https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_dental_and_alveolar_... w/v allophony in Hindi - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_phonology#Allophony_of_[v]_and_[w] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_phonology#Allophony...
- 3y ago

Tao3300 3y ago

English is the most cobbled together language. It has a fascinating history. You can trace some of its words back to the Proto-Indo-European language that also branched off into Sanskrit. It has marks of conquest in it that cause it to have Anglo names for some animals, but Norman French names for their meat. However pronunciation in it is incredibly screwed up and inconsistent. To the point where we actually have Spelling Bees where children train like mad to get on stage and shake and sweat in a competition to demonstrate their mastery of this mess. The winner is always celebrated like they are a genius, when they've essentially accomplished the intellectual equivalent of knowing where more of the potholes are on the nation's highways than the other kid.

hinkley 3y ago
We've known for some time that English began as a pidgin language, but about ten, fifteen years back some linguists declared that they had convinced themselves that the pidgin that became English started as another pidgin language itself. It's a melting pot language full of borrowed words. There's a theory in cognitive science that the language you speak in can affect what thoughts you can have. English speakers as a whole seem to have intuited this long ago. If a complex idea has a word in another language, we just steal it. Math and Science tend to limit themselves to latin, but then higher education in Europe used to be taught in Latin. I suppose to make it easier (or at least more fair) to bring students in from other countries, and send trained teachers out (or to poach them).
- mrkstu 3y ago
  Yep, I always think of schadenfreude in this context. A single word that we've stolen for something that would take multiple English words to express. Why come up with our own new English word, when there is a perfectly cromulent one right over there in German? Meanwhile the French have to continually consult their academics to create new French words that their citizens keep trying to borrow from other languages (mostly English)...
  - hinkley 3y ago

graypegg 3y ago

I think people value their language being up-to-date enough to describe their own slice of human history MORE than how confusing it is for a new learner. Loan words/all new words/complex grammar rules brought into languages aren’t done for fun, it’s because there’s a concept that they need to describe. (Or a class divide they need to define) No commonly spoken language has ease-of-learning its priority. Just not as important as building on the language you have now.

Koshkin 3y ago

The variability in pronunciation is a blessing in disguise. How else would one distinguish between 'a row' and 'a row', or tell 'a sow' from 'to sow'? The American English is an infinite source of pride for me, because of how different it is from other related languages. Where everyone else is using 'ss' to stress the need for the sound 's', we proudly say 'z' when we see 'ss'. Scissors: 'sizerz'! I even hear 'azum' (assume) once in a while.

callmeal 3y ago
>How else would one distinguish between 'a row' and 'a row', or tell 'a sow' from 'to sow'? You have different words for those meanings?
- fragmede 3y ago
  row: a line of items (vs column) row: a fight bonus (to) row: verb meaning to propel a boat with oar(s) (a) sow: female pig (to) sow: scattering seeds for planting bonus (a) sow: block of metal ingot
ahoka 3y ago
You guys get it all wrong: it’s not that different words are pronounced the same, but some words sound like each other, but written differently.

coldtrait 3y ago

But I hate that Hindi has gender for objects and a bunch of other languages have this rule too which makes it unnecessarily complex. Cool username btw. A buddy of mine is from there.

signal11 3y ago

> English is a pretty dumb language… I am native Hindi speaker Pretty much every one of your criticisms is true for every human language. Calling any of them “dumb” is more a reflection of yourself than of the language. Eg Hindi has grammatical gender, which could be pretty wtf to say, Bengali speakers, or speakers of Hungarian, but that doesn’t make Hindi “dumb”. > better languages out there which not only have less complex and confusing rules but are much more expressive and scientific “Scientific” … sigh. Human languages are not scientific. All of them have quirks. All. You want a “scientific” (ish) language, learn Lojban. Then you can speak with other Lojban speakers. English isn’t “special” by any means, and history and politics — and also the history of technological progress — have played a role in what it is today. Arguably many other languages could have played this role: French, Mandarin, anything. But what matters is that people can, and do learn it as a second language enough to make it useful as a de-facto link language. If you’re actually interested in learning why English is the way it is, I recommend the “History of English” podcast. It starts with PIE so you may even learn something about Sanskrit and Hindi along the way.

Beijinger 3y ago

I am not native speaker but I find English a superior language. And if other languages are better for business, why do the Angelsax countries outperform the world? I take it you already know Of tough and bough and cough and dough? Others may stumble, but not you, On hiccough, thorough, lough and through? Well done! And now you wish, perhaps, To learn of less familiar traps? Beware of heard, a dreadful word That looks like beard and sounds like bird, And dead: it's said like bed, not bead - For goodness sake don't call it deed! Watch out for meat and great and threat (They rhyme with suite and straight and debt). A moth is not a moth in mother, Nor both in bother, broth in brother, And here is not a match for there Nor dear and fear for bear and pear, And then there's dose and rose and lose - Just look them up - and goose and choose, And cork and work and card and ward, And font and front and word and sword, And do and go and thwart and cart - Come, come, I've hardly made a start! A dreadful language? Man alive! I'd mastered it when I was five!

retrac 3y ago

It is what happens when a language freezes its orthography in time. English is spelled as it was 350 years ago. There's a great weight of history. How it was spelled in Greek, French or Latin has an impact. Other languages do this. French spelling is heavily informed by etymology. Whether it is c or s depends how it was spelled for Latin. But more! The Latin word for finger is digitus. Today the French word for finger is pronounced something like /dwa/. But because Latin spelled it 'digitus', French spells this as "doigt". The g and t are both silent. Japanese before the mid-20th century reforms, used kana spellings based on medieval Japanese pronunciation. So you would write the kana, which if read individually would have the value Tōkiyau - but you pronounced it Tōkyō. The writing system for the Tibetan language is an abugida, another off-shoot of the Brahmi script, a sister I suppose of Devanagari. The spelling of Tibetan was fixed over a thousand years ago. Modern Tibetan has lost almost all its consonant clusters, yet written Tibetan includes clusters like བསྒྲུབས "bsgrubs" (i think pronounced just /tsup/ today?) The Tibetan or French historical etymologies might be a bit more elegant than English, really. But same idea.

kashunstva 3y ago

> Sorry to say this (and I might get some flak for this) but English is a pretty dumb language. I don't completely understand this. It's not a constructed language; it's a language that evolved and continues to evolve like other natural languages according to pressures exerted by a host of factors, practically none of which are consciously-decided. Exceedingly complex in some ways, vague and ambiguous in others; it's a stretch to classify English as "dumb" For natural languages, the idea of better and worse languages seems like asking whether a maple tree is better than an oak tree. Every natural language has its quirks. For English, pronunciation, as you point out is the most notable. But take Russian: its pronunciation is much more predictable, but the non-native speaker has to contend with declensions, verbal aspect, verbs of motion, etc. Chinese orthography is daunting. Trade offs abound...

hfhdjdks 3y ago

The language is not dumb. The writing system that people chose is...not that great (and you can call it dumb if you like). There was a choice between respecting phonetics or maximizing some other objective (respecting etymology or being consistent with older pronunciation or whatever). Being based on a latin script maybe wasn't ideal, but languages like swedish or german did a better job and invented letter when needed. If you take the distribution of writing systems, I'm not sure English is particularly bad (the modern version has spaces and punctuation! Not bad, right?). It's not great either.

TacticalCoder 3y ago

> Sorry to say this (and I might get some flak for this) but English is a pretty dumb language. I don't know if a language can be "dumb". Accents, on the other hand...

GuB-42 3y ago

Is there any language that is not "dumb" in some way? Maybe Esperanto, but that's a constructed language. And Esperanto would probably be a better choice for an universal language, but no one really "chose" to use English. The US being the big winners of WW2 combined with the UK being a major colonial power at the time international trade developed probably helped.

scarface_74 3y ago

Did you ever have to learn “Order Force” when learning English? https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/sentence-order-adjectives-rule-elements-of-eloquence-dictionary https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/senten...