Clarification Edit: for people who speak English natively and are learning a second language
I don’t feel it’s particularly broken honestly. Some languages are more consistent with their rules and therefore easier to learn but English is surprisingly consistent in practice/sound throughout the world. You also don’t need to memorize the gender of a washing machine…
For what it’s worth, you don’t memorize the gender of things. It’s just difficult, when you learn another language that does it differently. And that’s true for every language you learn, the difficulty lies in how it’s different of your own.
I mean, you do memorise them, you just don’t realise you’re doing it because you’re a baby or toddler and babies and toddlers are language sponges, and not very aware of how their own minds work.
When learning a gendered language as an adult you definitely have no option but to memorise what gender each word uses, since there’s generally no specific rule, just how the language happened to evolve. (And this can be particularly hard if your native language is gendered, but you’re trying to learn one that genders words differently, for instance when learning German coming from a Romance language, or vice versa.)
No, you don’t memorize it. You memorize the words and how they sound, then based on how their endings sound, you know their gender. You don’t have to maintain a dictionary of words to their gender. There are a few exceptions and you memorize those, but for the most part all you need to memorize is a few rules.
you don’t memorize it. You memorize the words and how they sound
Potahto potayto. 🤷♂️
Not really. In case you’re not catching the implication, it means there is no more memorization of words’ gender in Spanish than there is in English, for instance.
You simply do not need to memorize gender as it can and is derived on the spot from other memorized info, ie the word itself.
You don’t really need to memorize the gender in Spanish either. The gender is signaled by the word ending. It’s a maquina; that’s a feminine noun. As you’re speaking you can see “maquina” coming up and arrange for the gender without having to memorize the word’s gender.
Someone learning Spanish as a second language will have to remember that it’s máquina and not máquino when speaking or writing it, though (and will then probably be quite confused if they ever meet some guy nicknamed El Máquina, which would somehow be a perfectly cromulent nickname in Spanish).
Confusing genders when speaking or writing is one of the most common mistakes amongst people new to the language, because while everything else has some form of rule, this doesn’t (sure, when reading or listening you can most of the time use the word ending, and you’ll probably have an article, too, but when you are the one speaking or writing you have no option but to just know a word’s gender, or how it ends, which is the same thing).
I don’t feel it’s particularly broken honestly.
There are five (5) ways of pronouncing oo, if you people haven’t added a sixth one since the last time I looked.
Radii, fiancé, and façade are apparently perfectly cromulent English words that native English speakers who’ve never seen an ii, an é, or a ç are supposed to be able to pronounce correctly…
Your words for food animals come from completely different and unrelated languages depending on whether the animal is alive or dead (since the people who tended to the farms and the people who actually ate their meat spoke different languages)…
There are probably more irregular verbs than regular ones… (again, probably because of English really being three different languages in a trenchcoat)…
At some point in the sixteenth century you apparently just up and decided to randomly switch the pronunciation of all your vowels… without changing how you wrote them…
While most languages have developed some form of standard and regulative body, English seems like it’d rather leave the whole grammar, orthography, pronunciation, and whatnot situation as an exercise for the
victimspeaker, writer, or reader…Yeah, no, not particularly broken at all… 😒
There are five (5) ways of pronouncing oo
That’s a good thing. Vowels are enormous in the range of ways they can be pronounced. Any vowel can become any other vowel before it’s done being pronounced, and then you can chain that effect. You can tell where people are from by their vowels. Vowels convey analog information whereas consonants convey digital. Vowels therefore have bandwidth to carry extra information. And so not only do we have lots of vowel pair sequences with their own rules for pronunciation, we have tons of rules for how surrounding consonants change those vowels. And then finally we have all sorts of cultural understandings about how altered vowels indicate mood and intent.
It’s good we don’t try to pretend there are only a handful of vowels.
That’s a good thing.
Nah, man. That’s the abused justifying the abuser. That’s pure Stockholm syndrome.
There’s no world in which the oos in moon, book, door, blood, brooch, and cooperation (I had forgotten about this one. There are six. SIX! 😩) representing SIX different sounds is a good thing. There simply isn’t.
A sane language would replace some of those with u, ø, ō, ô, ö, õ, whatever, make some rule so that the poor sod attempting to decipher the written word could begin to know how to pronounce it… but not English. Not English. 😞
You forgot naïve. Why does it have a fucking umlaut???
It’s a dieresis, to let you know that the i is to be pronounced separately from the a.
Are there any other words that have it though? Also if the english spelling were consistent you would not need the dieresis
The New Yorker’s style guide requires markers for coöperate, coöpt, etc., but it’s non-standard outside of that one particular publication.
- Not sure
- 100% agree
I honestly wasn’t aware naïve had a dieresis in English.
I mean, it makes complete sense for it to have one in languages that use them, but I wasn’t aware it was a loanword (from French or Normand, I assume).
It’s from french although naive is also a valid spelling.
I’m just pointing out the consistency in spoken form. Your criticisms are valid from a technical perspective, the best kind of correct…
I knew English was broken well before I learned a second language
I learned Latin and in the process learned that quite a lot if what makes English fucked up was a movement a couple of hundred years ago to make it more like Latin.
Can you give an example?
Debt used to be spelled dette or simply det. We spell it with a useless silent “b” today because meddlers decided to bring it back to its Latin roots of debitum. This happened in French as well, even though neither language ever pronounced the “b” and had no business adding it. The same happened with words like doubt, plumber, subtle, indict, and island. French was sensible enough to reverse this through modern spelling reform, but I think English is stuck with it for the foreseeable future.
Who had the power to unilaterally decree that the spelling of multiple existing words must now be spelled differently?
EDIT
The links i found all just refer to “scholars in the middle ages” being the cause of this
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/why-is-debt-spelled-like-that
Yep. It’s a bit hard to fathom today, but in the Middle Ages few people had the ability to read and write, mostly either learned monks and clergy, or those wealthy enough to be taught by them. With such a small pool of people, it’s comparatively easy to influence the prevailing spelling through the actions of a few.
Well, and also one to make it less like Latin. And the same with French.
People have been beating this thing with a stick for many centuries. It’s part of the charm. And now it’s doing the same to every other language. That’s maybe less charming.
For me it was the inconsistency with sounds in the English language
Its taught me all languages are broken in some way. Romance languages have words that have arbitrary gender needing conjugation. Some have two genders, some three! Then the Romanian language comes in with its own tricks.
Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese) lack an alphabet so words are conjunctions of smaller words, or sometimes worse the phonetics of smaller words without the meaning of the word.
Starbucks (the coffee company) in Mandarin is 星巴克. 星 is the literal translation of Star. So far so good. However 巴 can mean “to hope”. 克 can mean “to restrain”. The reason they use 巴克 for the second half of Starbucks is that when you pronounce them they vaguely sound like “bahcoo” (buck). So the first half is the traditional use of direct translation ignoring what it sounds like phonetically, but the second half ignores direct translation and instead uses the phonetics of the second two characters to sound like “buck”.
I mean that makes sense because that’s kind of how it is in english too. “Star” makes you think of a star, but “bucks” at the end of the word doesn’t make you think of anything specific, it’s just a sound
Oddly enough, “starbuck” has nothing to do with stars. It comes from some Old Norse meaning “sedge river”. This became the place name Starbeck, a town in northern England. People then took that as a surname, and the spelling changed to Starbuck at some point. Herman Melville then gives a character in Moby Dick the surname Starbuck, and eventually the founders of the coffee chain picked it for no particular reason other than that they liked the sound of it
So the “buck” part is, I guess, “river”. Or “brook”, to pick the more closely-related English term. This doesn’t change anything you said, of course, as nobody actually thinks of it like that, I just found the winding path it took kinda interesting
Somebody who was aware of all this once invented a language that was supposed to fix all the problems. He called it Esperanto.
Which has its own myriad of issues
Reject language features, o kama toki pona
Esperanto isn’t the only constructed language, and I think it is more Western-oriented, for good or ill. It does do a lot of things right within that framework, though, with certain rules that make everything explicit while removing other rules for structure that are no longer needed due to the explicit nature of the language.
When you start a new language, you learn “The Rules” first, and wonder why your first language doesn’t have such immutable “Rules.”
Then when you get fluent, you realize there are just as many exceptions as your first language.
Or do Japanese: There are two main types; the one where you and everyone else neatly follows the immutable rules which you speak to superiors and to strangers by default, and the one where everyone blurts out whatever words in whatever order they come up in their brain, aka what’s spoken between friends and to acquainted inferiors
I’m doing Japanese and I beleive you are referring to polite and impolite (or formal and informal) Japanese
Learning English taught me how broken English is knight or phone is a good start.
All languages that are used are kinda broken, except the synthetic ones, like Esperanto.
The amount of exceptions and weird rules in non-English languages I speak (Lithuanian and Swedish) and kinda know (Russian) proves it.
Yeah, if humans use it long enough, any language becomes bastardized. Every generation comes up with new slang with only minor regard for the rules. Some of that slang becomes permanent.
Ghoti
It’s so broken it’s the current meta.
Devs, English is OP, please nerf.
quite simple: I learned english
Learning Mandarin. The stereotype of a Chinese person saying “Me no English” makes sense now considering the word is literally 我(Me)不(No)英文(English)
“Do you speak English?”
“I profusely beg your forgiveness, old chap, but my linguistic skills do not reach to the Anglican sphere and thus I am unable to converse in anything but my native language, Mandarin.”
“So… yes or no?”
" 甚麼?"
It’s 3 languages stacked up in a trench coat. The annoying thing about Gaeilge, it uses all the same letters but everything is pronounced differently
I started learning Japanese 2 weeks ago but I already knew how fucked English was because I learned English first.
Japanese seems weird and hella foreign at first because the alphabet it uses, but it’s way more straightforward than English. What’s weird is being at a point where I know most of the alphabet, but barely any words or grammar. So I can sound out entire sentences and say them aloud but not know what it actually says lol
Not that it doesn’t have its own problems… There are over 60 characters in the Unicode standard that, apparently, nobody knows the meaning of. And it’s because there would be small communities or areas that have their own characters for things that have fallen into obscurity and also caused by things like photocopier artifacts, etc. So far 12 have been identified as meaning nothing at all.
say them aloud
Wait 'till you learn about pitch accent :)
At least most things are pronounced like they are written but not all.
n -> m is a common one such as in 新聞 because Japanese doesn’t have standalone m.
Japanese also has 7 vowels: standard aeiou and devoiced i and u. It’s the reason people say です (desu) like ‘des’. A fun example of this playing out is 靴下 (kutsushita - socks). My wife (native Japanese speaker) didn’t even realize this until I was watching a video about it.
I had wondered if it was just the text to speech engine sounding weird sometimes or if certain things get pronounced differently when put together in a complete sentence.
Like “hi to” hella sounds like “shito” on that thing sometimes, but not always. And “desu” sounds like “des” or “desu” just depending on which voice is speaking.
Can you post or link to some of those obscure characters?
Well, I can certainly link the video I learned this from!
I started Russian Duolingo a while back. You can make English sentences that would take five or six words in two words under first impressions the language doesn’t f*** around it gets right to the point.
But then I started getting to conjugations and it turns into a dumpster fire real quick.
If you think that’s fun, just wait until you get to the verbs of motion.
The language has its issues, but the Cyrillic alphabet is great. Being able to sound out any word phonetically makes it easy to pronounce anything
Yeah that’s seriously like a super power, just reading names on social media feels so good
