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.
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_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.
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").
> 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.
> 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.)
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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...
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”.
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).
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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!
> 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.
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
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.
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.
Just as an example, did you know that the placement of a comma can change the pronunciation of a word? It can, and that poem has an example where it does!
I take pedantic exception to that - the comma isn't changing the pronunciation of a word, it's changing the structure of the sentence so that where before context made it clear that word A was meant, now it's homonym word B is the only option. It's not one word changing its pronunciation, it's two words that are written the same but pronounced differently. Very important distinction. It would be interesting to know if there was an actual case where a comma changed the pronunciation of a word.
I've been following Julien Miquel for most of this year. Not _actually_ following him, but occasionally checking out how his youtube channel has progressed. It started with my gf showing me one of his videos for a word that I had never even heard of. What struck me at first was how inadvertently sensual he had made that specific video. And then, how in a 30 second video he butchered incredibly common pronunciations of "this" (thaaas) and "word" (werd).
Not that it's a problem. I'm in awe of his ability to chunk up and produce so many videos. He's found a niche and is filling it. I wonder if it actually pays him that much. I'm not sure, since most videos have only tens of views.
He does troll pronunciations too, like for the word "XXXXXXXXXXX", where he just says the letter X over and over. Maybe that was a test video.
I'm so in awe of him and I was hoping to learn more, and this article doesn't actually contact him or interview him or anything. What a tease! And they even get the lead wrong. Do people _choose_ Julien Miquel? Or has he SEO'd his way into the top of google results? I argue the latter. To this day, I would not choose Julien's choice of how to pronounce any English word. I might let him be a part of many different informed options..
I recently saw the website on here for YouGlish. That's the same niche, solved so much better.
But for now, Julien Miquel is probably my favorite 2023 performance artist, whether he's trying to or not.
Related, one of my favourite jokes is to correct another person's pronunciation of pronunciation when they say to a third party "the correct pronunciation of <other word> is <foo>"
(Is pronunciation pronounced "pro-noun-see-ation" or "pro-nun-see-ation"?)
My biggest issue with English pronunciation is with foreign loanwords, and the modern equivalents of ancient words. I'm a native English speaker and it's hard to know how to handle the diphthongs sometimes.
Dionysus is pronounced nothing like the Greek Διόνυσος, particularly because of the English diphthongs. If one letter representing one vowel by itself simply made one sound, a whole host of pronunciation challenges in English would disappear altogether!
Fun fact: Spelling bees don't exist in Finland. The pronunciation matches the written language well enough that you can spell just about anything without thinking.
Not sure about English but I did learn tons of French wine pronunciation thanks to him, notably pouilly-fuisse and gevrey-chambertin which I was struggling
[+] [-] neonate|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bhilai|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] btilly|2 years ago|reply
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_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.
[+] [-] crazygringo|2 years ago|reply
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#Distingu...
[+] [-] signal11|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] tivert|2 years ago|reply
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. 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.
[+] [-] swatcoder|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Tao3300|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] retrac|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] alserio|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kashunstva|2 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] AmericanChopper|2 years ago|reply
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”.
[+] [-] harperlee|2 years ago|reply
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).
[+] [-] mkingston|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Beijinger|2 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] didgeoridoo|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] gherkinnn|2 years ago|reply
I wish people would stop calling what is unknown dumb. It stinks.
[+] [-] Scoundreller|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] silvestrov|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] screamingninja|2 years ago|reply
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!
[+] [-] drivers99|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] canjobear|2 years ago|reply
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/Navajo_grammar or even https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindustani_verbs
[+] [-] firebat45|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hfhdjdks|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Shish2k|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mind-blight|2 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] wodenokoto|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Koshkin|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] hotnfresh|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] graypegg|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] btilly|2 years ago|reply
Just as an example, did you know that the placement of a comma can change the pronunciation of a word? It can, and that poem has an example where it does!
[+] [-] amenhotep|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gilleain|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lainga|2 years ago|reply
Ԁɹ uᴉ ʇᴉ ƃuᴉpɐǝɹ ǝq oʇ pǝsoddns ǝɹ,noʎ ʇǝƃ noʎ ǝɔuo ʎsɐǝ sʇǝƃ ʇI ¿ʇsǝʇ lɐǝɹ ɐ ǝq oʇ pǝsoddns ʇᴉ sᴉ
[+] [-] wsinks|2 years ago|reply
I've been following Julien Miquel for most of this year. Not _actually_ following him, but occasionally checking out how his youtube channel has progressed. It started with my gf showing me one of his videos for a word that I had never even heard of. What struck me at first was how inadvertently sensual he had made that specific video. And then, how in a 30 second video he butchered incredibly common pronunciations of "this" (thaaas) and "word" (werd).
Not that it's a problem. I'm in awe of his ability to chunk up and produce so many videos. He's found a niche and is filling it. I wonder if it actually pays him that much. I'm not sure, since most videos have only tens of views.
He does troll pronunciations too, like for the word "XXXXXXXXXXX", where he just says the letter X over and over. Maybe that was a test video.
I'm so in awe of him and I was hoping to learn more, and this article doesn't actually contact him or interview him or anything. What a tease! And they even get the lead wrong. Do people _choose_ Julien Miquel? Or has he SEO'd his way into the top of google results? I argue the latter. To this day, I would not choose Julien's choice of how to pronounce any English word. I might let him be a part of many different informed options..
I recently saw the website on here for YouGlish. That's the same niche, solved so much better.
But for now, Julien Miquel is probably my favorite 2023 performance artist, whether he's trying to or not.
[+] [-] lozf|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nullhole|2 years ago|reply
(Is pronunciation pronounced "pro-noun-see-ation" or "pro-nun-see-ation"?)
[+] [-] wsinks|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlexAndScripts|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mike_hock|2 years ago|reply
study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
words like core, corpse, horse and worse ...
[+] [-] routerl|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jihadjihad|2 years ago|reply
Dionysus is pronounced nothing like the Greek Διόνυσος, particularly because of the English diphthongs. If one letter representing one vowel by itself simply made one sound, a whole host of pronunciation challenges in English would disappear altogether!
[+] [-] layer8|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gmuslera|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seabass-labrax|2 years ago|reply
The film adaptation on IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2543164
[+] [-] yencabulator|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] js2|2 years ago|reply
https://youtu.be/Mfz3kFNVopk?si=Kq9kImEedhQNlKs7&t=132
[+] [-] fakecrusade|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unstatusthequo|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] egberts1|2 years ago|reply