Kerfluffle
Brouhaha is its twin brother!
Only has one “l”
Kovfefe?
Flabbergasted
I suppose technically it’s Latin, but I’ve always been fascinated with “syzygy”.
That looks like something Snoop Dogg would say.
I really only know of this word because of Scott Manley
Be, is, are, was, am, were, being, been… are all the same word.
Same with “go” and “went”.
I god.
I came
“be” is an irregular verb in all languages, so it’s not unique to English. Bonus fun fact: Russian doesn’t have the verb “to be”.
Yes, and I feel like it’s even more irregular in Russian than just not existing. It’s not used in present tense as a copula, so in most cases where you would expect it in English. However it absolutely exists – быть – and is used like normal verbs in both past and future tense.
For example: «я здесь» – “I am here” (same word order, but this sentence has no verb), but «я был здесь» – “I was here”
And in the cases where it is used in present tense, there is a single conjugation regardless of subject: есть (in contrast to all other verbs, I assume at least, which all have distinct conjugations for 1/2/3rd person singular/plural).
A simple example for this would probably be sentences with “there is”, affirming the existence of something, as in “there is a bathroom” – «ванная есть». Contrived example for sure but I can’t think of something better right now.
Was going to reply that, it’s not that Russian doesn’t have it, it just gets omitted in the most common form.
But also one interesting thing is that from the examples you gave I can know your gender, because the verb to be is gendered in the past in Russian, which is very unique, I don’t know of any other language where verbs are gendered.
Not in Turkish. It is “olmak” but the actual “to be” as it is used in “I am, they were, etc.” is, now unused “imek”. it has become a suffix and it is completely regular. Just i + person suffix.
“To be” being highly irregular il a common feature of a lot of Indo-European languages. But there’s worse. In Spanish, “ser” and “estar” both mean “to be”, but have wildly different meanings and cannot be substituted for one another.
“To be” averbs, at least in romance languages usually have a bunch of different forms. “To have” usually too but English is a bit of an exception there.
Or not to be…
Or not to have…
Languages that conjugate every verb for every person:
I love salubrious as it sounds like the exact opposite of what it is (health giving or healthy.)
I don’t know about weirdest, but here are some quirky words:
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inflammable means the same thing as flammable
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“the/a”. If you’re a native English speaker, like me, it probably doesn’t look unusual. I was listening to a lecture series on linguistics and it wasn’t until then that I learned that most languages out there don’t have a mandatory definite/indefinite article. In most languages, if you want to say “cat”, you can say “cat”. English requires you to say “a cat” or “the cat” – the presence of an article to indicate whether the thing you’re talking about is unique or not. That’s an unusual feature for a language to have. It’s baked into how I think, but a lot of the world just doesn’t work that way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_(grammar)#Crosslinguistic_variation
Articles are found in many Indo-European languages, Semitic languages (only the definite article)[citation needed], and Polynesian languages; however, they are formally absent from many of the world’s major languages including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, many Turkic languages (including Tatar, Bashkir, Tuvan and Chuvash), many Uralic languages (incl. Finnic[a] and Saami languages), Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi, Tamil, the Baltic languages, the majority of Slavic languages, the Bantu languages (incl. Swahili). In some languages that do have articles, such as some North Caucasian languages, the use of articles is optional; however, in others like English and German it is mandatory in all cases.
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“data”. It used to normally be the plural of datum, but within living memory has normally become a mass noun, like “water” or “air” or “love”. It’s not the only word to do this, but it’s unusual.
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“deer”. It’s not the only word to do this either, but it’s one of a small number of words in English where the plural and singular form can be (and traditionally, needed to be) identical. Today, it looks like regular forms of these are increasingly being considered acceptable, at least in American English (“deers”, “fishes”, etc).
Although using “data” as both singular and plural is acceptable in modern English, I once sat through an online training stating “[there can be] negative consequences if data are misused or falls into the wrong hands” which is just so cringe!
Edit: typos
fishes
Fun fact! Fishes means multiple types of different species of fish
Japanese doesn’t have articles or account for number with something as simple as an s (some words could take -tachi or -ra as a plural marker, but not all, and often it isn’t even used when plural unless there’s specific need for it). Often, we learn something is plural by other inference or a number given. My wife has a hell of a time with articles and the like when trying to speak English.
I’m also learning modern hebrew (Arabic’s writing system seemed a bit much plus all the dialects vs written MSA, so that’s now a later goal) and they only have definite articles so the indefinite is the default state.
English requires you to say “a cat” or “the cat”
Generally true but not for abstract nouns and mass nouns: “The water’s warm”, “I’d like a water”, “Water is a liquid”.
PS. It’s called the zero article.
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queue
Most “Q” words are weird to start with, then just adding a bunch of silent vowels at the end doesn’t make it any less so.
It’s a Q: a bunch of vowels are lined up behind it!
God damn it. That’s good.
I knew an English speaking American born well off white dude that pronounced this as “kway”. It was the most annoying thing that came out of his mouth besides all of the bragging and “I’m smarter than everyone” attitude.
Thank the French for this one
oiseau – for when consonants are overrated. (it means bird).
Eau - for when consonants are unnecessary
How is that pronounced?
You can toss it into google translate and listen to audio. It would probably be better than any attempted typing I can do here.
Wiktionary has a lot of audio transcriptions too: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oiseau
wazo
Ah the french…alwaysbeencelebrated for it’s…excellence!
Kumquat
Myrrh
I think thats just the sound a cat makes when it wakes up.
Here Baby Jesus, we brought you some nice smelling stuff, pretty shiny metal, and a kitten.
Damn. I wish someone got ME a kitten for my birthday. I would be like “Hey! Kitten! Why you so cute???” and she would just look at me, because she’s a kitten and doesn’t speak english. She might meow though.
Gerrymandering sounds like some sort of magic class.
I always thought it sounded like Jerry Seinfeld between takes/shoots just hanging around the set. Not doing anything. Just ignoring everything around him. He’s just gerrymandering around the studio.
Gerry meandering
It’s from a political cartoon depicting a corrupt districting plan as a salamander.
A plan proposed by a man named Elbridge Gerry.
“Rhythm” doesn’t rhyme with anything and doesn’t contain a letter that’s always a vowel.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_without_rhymes#Masculine_rhymes
I wanted to double-check, but I don’t see any other words here that have that property, so it’s probably unique!
Y is always a vowel! I don’t know why they tell children it isn’t.
A vowel is the core of a syllable. Y is not always that, as in “yes” - it works as a consonant in that word.
It’s part of a diphthong with E in that word, two or more vowels making a sound in combination.
It’s a consonant. Specifically it’s the voiced palatal approximant represented as ⟨j⟩ in IPA.
Schism?
Written. Ridden.
In my dialect, written doesn’t work quite as well, probably because that double ‘t’ turns into a glottal stop.
Found the londoner
General American speaker from Ohio, actually. Bottle, though, is boddle for me. Not sure why some words get it
With them?
Apparently, there’s an obsolete English word “smitham” that means (or meant) “small lumps of ore random people found.” They were exempt from taxation by English nobility so large mine owners started breaking up large chunks into “smitham” to avoid taxation. Apparently, the Duke of Devonshire put a stop to that in 1760 and the word fell out of use.
So, I think rhythm still counts as weird. Noah Webster was 2 years old in 1760 and the modern Merriam-Webster dictionary doesn’t have it.
“People say the word orange doesn’t rhyme with anything”
The Etymology of Orange.
:-D
Orange ( Anglo-Saxon ? English language )
Oranj. ( Slavic? European? etc language )
Naranj. ( Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, Persian language )
Narang. ( Hindi , Sanskrit Indic language )
Narthangai. ( Tamil - South Indian language )
:-D
That’s not rhyme, that’s assonance.
I can’t say for certain, but it’s probably one of these.
Indubitably
My friend used to always say this to mean “definitely”. He was wrong, but it sounded sophisticated.
Moist
pork
From French porc from Latin.
Same as beef from boeuf.
