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re: For those who know foreign languages, what are some weird things about English?
Posted on 7/1/20 at 3:10 pm to HailHailtoMichigan!
Posted on 7/1/20 at 3:10 pm to HailHailtoMichigan!
My wife's first language is Spanish and she learned English when her family immigrated here when she was 5 or 6. She said the toughest thing was learning words that sounded the same but had different meanings.
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Posted on 7/1/20 at 3:15 pm to HailHailtoMichigan!
It's weird that English has no official 2nd person plural pronoun. I vote that "y'all" be made official.
Posted on 7/1/20 at 3:15 pm to HailHailtoMichigan!
how much french is in our language
Posted on 7/1/20 at 3:18 pm to HailHailtoMichigan!
English is my mother tongue but I am also fluent in Afrikaans and can speak decent Spanish.
One of the weirdest aspects of English is our word order of Subject - Verb - Object (SVO), which is the opposite of other germanic languages (German, Dutch, Afrikaans, etc.) of Subject - Object - Verb.
Sometimes when I speak Afrikaans for a while and I switch back to English, my mind subconciously waits for the verb at the end of the sentence. This is really tough to explain but anyone who knows a germanic language can relate.
Another really tough aspect of English is the incredibly long list of verb/preposition combinations.
Do you walk down an alley, through an alley, up the alley, etc.
One of the weirdest aspects of English is our word order of Subject - Verb - Object (SVO), which is the opposite of other germanic languages (German, Dutch, Afrikaans, etc.) of Subject - Object - Verb.
Sometimes when I speak Afrikaans for a while and I switch back to English, my mind subconciously waits for the verb at the end of the sentence. This is really tough to explain but anyone who knows a germanic language can relate.
Another really tough aspect of English is the incredibly long list of verb/preposition combinations.
Do you walk down an alley, through an alley, up the alley, etc.
Posted on 7/1/20 at 3:25 pm to LSURussian
quote:That’s not unique to English.
It was pointed out to me by a few Russians that English has many words which are pronounced the same way but have totally different meanings, i.e., might (maybe & strong) & mite, "desert" (a dry barren land) and "desert" to abandon someone.
And sometimes English words are spelled the same but are pronounced differently depending on how they are used in a sentence, such as "read" (present tense) and "read" (past tense), "bat" as in baseball and "bat" as in the flying mammal. Other examples, "fair," "lie," "lead," "minute," "refuse," "project" and "fine."
They told me how difficult it is for them to learn English when words are so hard to use correctly.
And don't even get me started about how the word "ball" can have different meanings...
Posted on 7/1/20 at 3:28 pm to barbapapa
quote:
how much french is in our language
Yeah there are a lot.
The weirdest things about our language is the diversity of word origins. Most other languages evolved more independently but we've adopted words from nearly every language.
Also comparing idioms from different languages is interesting.
Chouette means owl but can also mean cool
French call cotton candy "barbe à papa" which translates to "papa's beard"
What we call hungover they call being board-faced.
Posted on 7/1/20 at 3:28 pm to whoa
quote:
before she’s learned b, j
Posted on 7/1/20 at 3:34 pm to HailHailtoMichigan!
Tons of weird things. The fact that we have languages within languages isn't talked about enough, as the Latin/Germanic word origin distinction often served as an invisible class marker. We have a series of grammar rules from Latin which make no sense in English, we have contronyms, homographs, numerous instances of rule breaking, and the ability to make nearly every foreign word English through use alone, absent of its original context.
Posted on 7/1/20 at 3:35 pm to Azazello
quote:
One of the weirdest aspects of English is our word order of Subject - Verb - Object (SVO), which is the opposite of other germanic languages (German, Dutch, Afrikaans, etc.) of Subject - Object - Verb.
A holdover from Latin and the Norman invasions.
Posted on 7/1/20 at 3:36 pm to Kafka
quote:
One of the curious thing about English is turning nouns into verbs
gerunds? i thought other languages had these.
Posted on 7/1/20 at 3:37 pm to TDsngumbo
quote:
you/your/you're
their/there/they're
to/too
Most English speakers don't realize the difference between those vocabulary words.
And it is maddening, but it makes it easy to spot the....less-educated.
Posted on 7/1/20 at 3:37 pm to whitetiger1234
quote:
Tacocat spelled backwards is also Tacocat
As is:
A man, a plan, a canal, panama
English is one of the hardest languages to learn because of all our fricked up rules. As evidenced by so many Americans who cannot speak it properly.
Spanish is one of the easiest to learn because of all its rules.
Posted on 7/1/20 at 3:38 pm to Fat Batman
quote:
The concept of "have" as a main verb trips up a lot of non-native English speakers. For instance, a French chick might say, "You are having a boner" instead of "You have a boner".
That is largely a relic of English's Germanic roots.
Du habst...
Ich habe...
Wir haben...
Modern English is tough because it's really a meld between the Germanic language family (Angle and Saxon) and the Romance Language family (Norman and Old/Middle French) more than any other rather being really tilted towards one or the other. Lots of Germanic structure with lots of Romance vocabulary.
This post was edited on 7/1/20 at 3:42 pm
Posted on 7/1/20 at 3:43 pm to Bunsbert Montcroff
quote:
gerunds? i thought other languages had these.
A gerund is a verb that is used as a noun. Yes other languages have gerunds.
Posted on 7/1/20 at 3:45 pm to HailHailtoMichigan!
How much of English is actually French/Latin/Greek. Not the structure of the sentence, but the individual words
Posted on 7/1/20 at 3:45 pm to HailHailtoMichigan!
Here's a sentence that drove my Hispanic crew insane trying to understand it:
"If I had wanted to have gone fishing Saturday, I would have had to have had all the yard work completed Friday."
They wanted to kill me!
"If I had wanted to have gone fishing Saturday, I would have had to have had all the yard work completed Friday."
They wanted to kill me!
Posted on 7/1/20 at 3:52 pm to LoneStarRanger
quote:
How much of English is actually French/Latin/Greek. Not the structure of the sentence, but the individual words
Wiki tells me that about half of the English language is French/Latin in origin ( link).
About a third is Germanic and about a sixth or so is other (Greek, other languages, proper nouns).
Posted on 7/1/20 at 3:57 pm to TigerDude80
quote:317537 spells LESLIE
58008 spells out BOOBS on a calculator when you turn it upside down.
Posted on 7/1/20 at 3:59 pm to LegendInMyMind
quote:
quote:
you/your/you're
their/there/they're
to/too
Most English speakers don't realize the difference between those vocabulary words.
quote:Especially when they continuously type out "would of/could of/should of" instead of would've/could've/should've.
And it is maddening, but it makes it easy to spot the....less-educated.
Posted on 7/1/20 at 4:05 pm to HailHailtoMichigan!
Homophones and homonyms aren't really unique to English. Living abroad teaching English the past 5 years, I can tell you a few things that I've become aware of. The first thing which is very unique is our use of "meaningless 'do'". Our usage of the word "do" primarily when we form questions, is nowhere to be found in other languages.
We added this aspect to the English language with the help of the Irish, who continue to use "do" more creatively than others even today. Their usage is actually a little similar to American urban usage.
Besides that, the phrasal verbs are varied and they are a challenge. Shut up, shut down, shut in, shut out, etc. But really that just takes memorization.
The spelling of words is terrible. English is the only major language not to use accent marks in the spelling of words. They could really help distinguish between read and read. And to help with subtle differences between words like contribute and contribution. I haven't seen any other language which fails so miserably at spelling.
However that's not totally our fault. Many words have changed pronunciation. For example knee and knife used to be pronounced ka-nee, ka-nife.
Adding onto that, it's silly how we pronounce or spell the past tense of standard verbs. Walked is walkt. Listened is listend. Netted is netted. However in the past we used to pronounce it as it read, with the final e sound.
The th sound is weird and extremely uncommon. It's like having a lisp.
Having said that, English is a basic language grammatically although it does have the largest dictionary of words.
We added this aspect to the English language with the help of the Irish, who continue to use "do" more creatively than others even today. Their usage is actually a little similar to American urban usage.
Besides that, the phrasal verbs are varied and they are a challenge. Shut up, shut down, shut in, shut out, etc. But really that just takes memorization.
The spelling of words is terrible. English is the only major language not to use accent marks in the spelling of words. They could really help distinguish between read and read. And to help with subtle differences between words like contribute and contribution. I haven't seen any other language which fails so miserably at spelling.
However that's not totally our fault. Many words have changed pronunciation. For example knee and knife used to be pronounced ka-nee, ka-nife.
Adding onto that, it's silly how we pronounce or spell the past tense of standard verbs. Walked is walkt. Listened is listend. Netted is netted. However in the past we used to pronounce it as it read, with the final e sound.
The th sound is weird and extremely uncommon. It's like having a lisp.
Having said that, English is a basic language grammatically although it does have the largest dictionary of words.
This post was edited on 7/1/20 at 4:19 pm
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