How the English language became such a mess

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

An exposition of general cupidity and laziness.

 

While English is the official language of this site, we have many members whose first language is something else.  Did you ever wonder how English spelling got so weird?  A thousand years of conquest and general stupidity, I suppose.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

I hope English falls out of favor in the future. The 2 most difficult languages happen to be the most widely spoken. Italian is an easy language that uses Latin letters and Hangul is an easy Asian language. If I could alter history, I would have kept the scientific progress of the Helenistic period going and enhanced by Carthage and Rome with a Simplified Latin eventually becoming a dominant language.

--Ocram

[MandelSoft 2,775]

According to this research, English is grammatically the #33 weirdest language in the world¹. The research has identified 279 languaes, so English is quite near the top.

However, all other languages I can speak have even weirder grammar. My native tounge is Dutch (#12), but I can also speak German (#10) and Swedish (just below German on the list, but not enough samples).

 

So, not only is English weird by spelling, but also by grammar.

 

I do have the idea that German, Dutch and Swedish are more consistent with spelling.

 

¹ from all the languages they have enough sample size to draw conclusions.

[Titanicbuff 1,262]

I'd love to learn Gaelic. Beautiful language. 

[feyss 1,981]

I think the french spelling, with its silent letters and homophones, is more complicated (even for a native speaker) than the english one, and I think the same for the conjugation.

[dazza262 133]

I'm currently learning Polish, which is quite tricky, but it's the grammar that makes it difficult. The fact that they do not use definite and indefinite articles is quite hard to get your head round.

[AkemiAzula 280]

English is all I know. I tried learning Latin and French but got nowhere alas.

I have always felt our tongue to be worthiest and normallest but maybe I am full of vice...

I think things like strange spellings and borrowed terms make the language interesting and characterfull, but naturally I have no idea how those coming to us find it

There is however a certain pride (much nicer term than snobbery) taken in those arts whose skill is more demanding

[crishy 57]

English is probably one of the most irregular languages, when it comes to the pronounciation of words, out there. But gramatically is rather simple, compared to the romance languages.

 

I think it is much easier than French, though it may be because I am used with Portuguese, which, together with Japanese (actually even more so for the latter), pretty much have fixed and fairly simple spelling/pronounciation rules for letters/syllabes. Sure, French, like the other romance languages, has a rather standardized pronounciation, but has so many silent and merged syllabes/letters... Spanish would be in between PT and FR.

 

Mandarin and Cantonese are pretty straightforward, but then, they are not, with multiple words/characters having very similar pronounciations with only differences in tone/accent.

 

There are some calls for a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_spelling_reform spelling reform (an article that, ironically, I took notice recently, even discussed with others who rejected it vehemently, they were non native English speakers I might add) but I rather maintain English as it is, as it shows the history and multicultural background behind the origin of its vocabulary, and because I am rather conservative when it comes to these so called language reforms - I still write in pre 2005 or so reform Portuguese (not that much was changed anyway, but still), as well as traditional Chinese characters .

 

In any case, difficulty of learning languages is highly subjective, and what may be easy to someone may be hard to someone else. Chinese is very simple when it comes to verbs, so when a native speaker tries to learn verb conjugation in a romance language, which are highly irregular, more so than English, it can be very hard as well.

 

Given the increased global connectivity of the world, a "default" language is needed and English just happens to be it because of historical reasons. Maybe Mandarin, but it has very limited use outside East Asia + SG and immigrant Chinese communities, and is hell to write electronically. English is not falling as lingua franca any time soon, but maybe seeing other languages increasing in use, or at least appreciation for other languages, would be nice, because in many, if not most, online forums and game servers are language restricted to one specific language, which may restrict online connectivity to other groups, IMO.

[QuantumChicken 89]

I am trying to learn machine language, does that count as a language?

[Buffalonian2 6]

If I remember correctly, while English is a complicated and difficult language, it is also one of (if not the) most articulate languages in terms of how detailed and specific you can get when it comes to painting a picture with words.

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

Over the centuries, English has lost many of the peculiarities that some of the Romance languages retain.  For example, polite forms.  In Italian, the polite form is the third person feminine singular, and from observation only it appears to be the same with German.  French wants the second person plural, which seems a little strange 'you all', but Italian takes the cake.  Apparently this is derived from the medieval expression of greeting to a noble 'spero che la vostra signoria e bene' which has become 'come state lei?'  'Signoria' -- Highness happens to be feminine.  English has pretty much lost gender of nouns, or pays little attention to it.

 

I don't recall, as a lifelong English speaker, any particularly polite forms of address other than Sir, Miss and Madam for ordinary folks.  In Canada, the furthest you can generally go is 'your Excellency' for the Governor General.  We hardly ever see the Queen (your Majesty on first greeting then ma'am).  There are various forms of pomp and circumstance for the judiciary and legislators, but only used in the formal presence.  Of course, we have no 'nobility' so such things are out here.  In the U.K. they still have the House of Lords as well as other titles such as those pertaining to knighthood.  Then, of course, nobility can be a fleeting thing.  See 'At Noon Mr. Byng Was Shot'.

[TekindusT 3,809]

My teacher of Scientific Writing in English told us that "English is a bastard language". In his opinion, English incorporated, without an apparent criterium, anything from other languages that could be useful to expand the language: from Germanic languages, Latin, French...

 

At the same time, it "sacrificed" some core features of the languages it comes from, that made them more complex. I'm thinking about the case declesion one can find in German and the 16 different articles that should be used in modern German. In English, there is only one article: "the". This case, while it makes the language lose its "purity", it also makes it easier to learn. Same thing happens with a hundred features I can't remember now.

 

The fact that English is nowadays our lingua franca depends on the British Empire colonizations, on the USA influence in the 20th Century... but also because it is a fairly easy language to learn.

[Alejandro24 575]

The problem with English is it doesn't have an academy to moderate the evolution of the language.

[timmie 988]

 

The fact that English is nowadays our lingua franca depends on the British Empire colonizations, on the USA influence in the 20th Century... but also because it is a fairly easy language to learn.

English is fairly easy to learn, that is: the basics, because you don't need a lot of words. But it's difficult when you want to speak or write it good (vocabulary, for example: there are a lot of words in English). Usually people in Belgium are too optimistic about their knowledge of English.

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

 

The fact that English is nowadays our lingua franca depends on the British Empire colonizations, on the USA influence in the 20th Century... but also because it is a fairly easy language to learn.

English is fairly easy to learn, that is: the basics, because you don't need a lot of words. But it's difficult when you want to speak or write it good (vocabulary, for example: there are a lot of words in English). Usually people in Belgium are too optimistic about their knowledge of English.

Yep.  Timmie, my friend, you needed the other form of 'good' up there.  The correct usage is  'speak or write it well'.  English is full of traps like this where there are many words that convey slightly different semantic meanings.  One of the examples using this is the motto of all corporations which should be: 'Doing well while doing good.'   Here 'well' is an adverb and 'good' is a noun (objective case, and we usually don't have case endings).  But there are still archaisms that persist, where we have nominative 'who' and objective 'whom'.  There are some vicious left-overs from the Roman and Norman conquests.

As for standards, there is the Oxford English Dictionary and Fowler's English Usage both by the Oxford University Press.  In the United States, English is not spoken, but General American and in Canada, General Canadian.

[timmie 988]

 

The fact that English is nowadays our lingua franca depends on the British Empire colonizations, on the USA influence in the 20th Century... but also because it is a fairly easy language to learn.

English is fairly easy to learn, that is: the basics, because you don't need a lot of words. But it's difficult when you want to speak or write it good (vocabulary, for example: there are a lot of words in English). Usually people in Belgium are too optimistic about their knowledge of English.

Yep.  Timmie, my friend, you needed the other form of 'good' up there.  The correct usage is  'speak or write it well'.

There you have it. Proved my own point

[TekindusT 3,809]

That was also my point. I wasn't speaking about the language learning of the native speakers, but the learning by foreigners, who will use it as a lingua franca. The more you learn a foreign language, the more aware you are that you will never speak it as a native.

It is not too difficult to see people from different nations having a conversation in a somewhat incorrect English (sometimes it is broken English directly) but nevertheless, they can understand each other without much trouble. Try to do that with any other language, with one with more grammatic complexities or one where the words pronunciation makes a big difference, and you'll see.

[Duke87 1,070]

The problem with English is it doesn't have an academy to moderate the evolution of the language.

I question how meaningful this is. Just because you create a body of bureaucrats to decide what's proper doesn't mean people will listen to them. Especially in an era where anyone can publish anything, it isn't limited to professional entities with copy editors and educated writers to do so (I'm publishing something right now!). French has l'Académie française, but that doesn't mean the average French speaker follows their standards.

Also consider that there are many different English-speaking countries in the world, so an academy formed in one is not necessarily going to be recognized in the others. The US, certainly, is going to defy anything that any other country sets up. English does have the Oxford Dictionary, though - so we have some standard that is widely recognized as official.

 

As for the thousand years of conquest and all that, it has also given the English language something else - an exceptionally large and robust vocabulary, with many synonyms and different words to provide extra distinction that other languages lack. For example, in English, a dish and a bowl are not at all the same thing, but in Italian they only have one word which is used for both - "piatto", which one could literally translate as "plate" (there's another synonym!). This allows us to keep our writing interesting by using different words rather than repeating the same ones over and over. It also makes English an amazing language for humor because the opportunities for puns and wordplay are endless.

Maintaining a lot of this distinction does, however, become difficult when effort is not put in. So you get people typing things like "you've peaked my interest" when the proper spelling in this context is "piqued". Given these sort of trends I imagine there will come a time when "piqued" will be considered an archaic spelling, like "cheque" already is in American English.

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

Also, wordplay like this: Oscar Wilde's note to George Bernard Shaw on one of his plays production -- "I am sitting in the smallest room of my house.  I have your review before me.  Soon, it will be behind me."

Or the exchange of compliments between Shaw and Winston Churchill when Shaw sent WSC two tickets to one of his openings: "Here are two tickets to my new play.  Bring a friend, if you have one"  WSC "Sorry, can't attend.  Send tickets for the following night, if there is one."

  Edited June 21, 2015 by A Nonny Moose  
Add second anecdote.

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

BTW, the default authority on the English language seems to be the Oxford English Dictionary.  New words just added.

Even 'meh' is now included.  Meh!

[Linoa06 1,374]

Meh!

English is not half as hard or weird as people make it out to be - but its history of borrowing words is complicated and that reflects in the lexicon used today. The vocabulary is large, usually words have large semantic expansion, and compared to other languages the spelling matches the pronunciation quite a lot less - but at the same time it doesn't have hundreds of orthography rules. (One could make some up, though)

Seriously, though - the grammar is one of the simplest you will find, though a lot is left to modality - no declensions or conjugations, barely any genders (and when there are genders they most usually make natural sense), only two tenses and three aspects which you can combine at will (I had been doing this for half an hour when a T-Rex came out of the fridge) - and no, "will" / future is not even a tense, just add "will" and you're good to go... Most verbs are regular, and irregular verbs are easily sorted by phonology (if more teachers of English as a foreign language would realise that instead of insisting on teaching them alphabetically, students would master them much faster). Not to mention how there are few irregularities, I mean sure, the plural of mouse is mice, but check out German plurals if you think that's hard. 

Granted, relying on such a strong and varied vocabulary and on extensive modality makes English rather implicit to understand and I would say it is a harder language to master when one gets to the finer details of the language - but for everyday communication it is a rather easy L2. And as for native speakers...honestly I don't think a native English speaker has nothing to whine about, and I find a typical English confusion such as there/their completely unacceptable. Everyone makes mistakes, some mistakes even become common usage! But somebody that consistently can't tell the difference between your and you're just comes across as lazy, petulant and spoiled - and in dire need of teaching. Somehow I doubt texting makes this a lot better (though that question is a lot tricker and should deserve some sociolinguistic studies of its own - I would love to know if there is such thing as an increasing use of writing, whereas people a hundred years ago didn't really write all that much even if they knew, and people even before were lucky to know how to write, and so on.)

Now, of course this is all a matter of perspective and a Japanese or Arabic native speaker would probably have more trouble learning English, but I doubt they would find German that much easier.

 

  Edited June 26, 2015 by Linoa06  

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

The basic problem in learning any language is the "map".  What normally kills off people who want to learn an oriental language is the semantics.  Meaning in some languages is often convoluted to someone who doesn't speak it and isn't living in it.

Then there are English dialects, some of them inherited.  I had one uncle who had been in Canada for many years, he was from Devon and was as thick when he died as when he came out on the boat.  All in all, I think he would have been well understood in Newfoundland, where the language has some of the map of the Devon accent.  The example I can easily think of is "Tell me where he's at and I'll go where he's to".

  Edited June 26, 2015 by A Nonny Moose  
fixing typos. Should use preview more often.

[metarvo 712]

I guess English is this way because it is trying to be a "living" language — that is, it continually adapts, borrowing from other languages and current trends as needed.

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

The British Empire, now defunct, is certainly responsible for much of the polyglot nature of the English Language.  English is full of dialects that make some difficulties for people whose first language is not English, just as some other languages have similar problems.  The ones I know well tend to have language divisions, for example in France we have Langue d'Oui (Parisian), and Langue d'Oc (Aquitaine).  Italian can be even worse, where local usages vary from village to village and from the north (Florence) to the south (Sicily).  Siciliano is really hard because it is full of Greek since it was a Greek colony for centuries.  Trying to read Pirandello in the original if you know Florentine is a struggle because even the spelling is different.

[FrenchThom 27]

The problem with English is it doesn't have an academy to moderate the evolution of the language.

I question how meaningful this is. Just because you create a body of bureaucrats to decide what's proper doesn't mean people will listen to them. Especially in an era where anyone can publish anything, it isn't limited to professional entities with copy editors and educated writers to do so (I'm publishing something right now!). French has l'Académie française, but that doesn't mean the average French speaker follows their standards

Man , as a French native speaker form France , I can tell you : That's for sure ! You just can't imagine how much our familiar-daily speech is different from the one that the Académie Française wants us to use !

[Linoa06 1,374]

Oh yes, maybe that's why English evolves so much : it has no such thing as an academy, or any other prescriptivist body (dictionaries are descriptivist).French is tightly regulated, though yeah, nooot many people speak Academie french XD

[matias93 7,535]

In my opinion as an spanish native speaker, English has two big complexities: its irregular pronunciation rules (mainly in the vowels, due to the aforementioned vowel shift), and the complex words (like the ones formed combining 'get' plus a preposition).

In every other aspect, English is one of the simpler languages that is useful to learn in order to know a lingua franca. The classic and most significative example is the verbal conjugation: in English, there around ten different conjugations for each verb, in my native spanish, there are literally hundreds of conjugations for each verb, and that's even without considering the irregular verbs. If you have a lot of free time and mental resilience, look at how the Royal Spanish Academy of the Language (RAE) explains this.

One of the reasons why Engilsh is simpler than most languages is because it was discarded as cultivated language by their national elite: the royal court of England, after the normand conquest of the Isles, stablished continental languages (that went directly into prefering french), relagating English to the villains and serfs. They, as less cultured people, that didn't speak about complex concepts, reduced the elements of the language and its grammatical rules. When the english court finally decided that they need to speak and write in their national language, they recovered what they have at the moment: the English of the serfs. In the long run, that proved to be an advantage to the language, allowing its dispersion and learning all over the world.

P.D.: just as an exercise, I'll show you how strange is to an spanish speaker to use the english vowels: I'll rewrite one of the sentences I've write in the way I would pronounce it.

Ouoan o tdaʰe rísons vguai ínglij eʰis seimpleʰr tdaeʰn moaʰst lánguaeʰchs eʰis bicós it guoʰas discoʰaerdt aeʰs kiultiveidt lánguaeʰch bai tdeʰiar náeʰtchional aelít.

 

  Edited July 3, 2015 by matias93  

[A Nonny Moose 8,263]

Then there are languages that can't survive without diacritical marks because for some reason they've been coerced into using the Latin alphabet.  Sometime take a look at something in a Scandinavian language.  Sprinkled with all sorts of meaningful fly specks.  There must have been a different alphabet at one time.

English has discarded a couple of letters from its alphabet and substituted Roman equivalents.  I don't think this character set includes 'yot' and 'thorn' (þ) which have been chucked.  Yot has become the letter J for the most part, but can also be seen as 'dg' as in hedge.  Thorn has been replaced by the light 'th' sound as in thin.  A number of old English characters have shifted to fit the Roman alphabet, but the pronunciations have survived in several dialects.

I suppose, all things being equal, that as a lingua franca English (Basic English that is) is as good as any.  Unfortunately for allophones, most English speakers don't even have Basic English.

[mrsmartman 200]

One of the amazing features of English is the possibility to create complex sentence structure with multiple clauses, which is often used by students in attempt to impress the markers in general high school writing exam.

[MandelSoft 2,775]

^^ This is not a feature solely linked to English, but also a feature in many Germanic languages like Dutch and German, both of which can produce sentences that are very long and complex and even spanning a whole paragraph before you'll ever find a period, with the only downside that these sentences can look pretty messy and hard to comprehend, which is why we use shorter sentences for better readability.

Dit is niet een eigenschap die alleen toepasbaar is op het Engels, maar ook een eigenschap die aanwezig is in Germaanse talen zoals Nederlands en Duits, die allebei ook ellenlange en complexe zinnen kunnen produceren die wel een hele alinea kunnen omvatten zonder ook maar één punt tegen te komen, met als enig nadeel dat deze zinnen rommelig lijken en moeilijk te bevatten zijn en juist daarom gebruiken we kortere zinnen voor betere leesbaarheid.

There, I demonstrated my point to write the exact same text in both English and Dutch.

Then there are languages that can't survive without diacritical marks because for some reason they've been coerced into using the Latin alphabet.  Sometime take a look at something in a Scandinavian language.  Sprinkled with all sorts of meaningful fly specks.  There must have been a different alphabet at one time..

Scandinavian languages only use three extra diacritical markings: ä, ö and å (Swedish) or æ, ø and å (Norwegian and Danish). In fact, ä and ö are just a different way of writing æ and ø (more Germanic, so to say). All three change the sound of the given vowel. A normal a and o sound like the a and o in "after" and "dome". The ä sounds like the e in "best", the ö sounds like the u in "burn" (but not quite; there is a subtle difference, which is hard to express in English) and the å sounds like the o in "other". So, in brief, in Scandinavian languages (and in most Indo-European languages), these diacritical marks explicitly state how to pronounce a certain character, something I really miss in English; "read" and "read" are spelled the same, but their pronunciation is completely different whether you mean the present and past tense. Inversely, "red" and "read" (past tense) are written differently, but are pronounced the same. This is quite hard to grasp for foreigners, and the latter effect gets worse when foreigners try to pronounce English words; most Dutch speakers pronounce "bed", "bad", "bat" and "bet" exactly the same when they speak English.

Dutch uses these diacritical marks a bit differently. We do use the accent acute and accent grave, but this doesn't always changes the pronunciation of the vowel; it rather changes or adds emphasis at that point of the word. In some cases this can change the meaning of a word. For instance, een means a/an, but één specifically means one; vóórkomen means to occur, while voorkómen means to prevent. We also use the diathresis (called trema in dutch), which also don't change the sound of a vowel; instead, they explicitly determine a syllable split. The syllable is split just before the vowel with such a trema. For instance, reëel needs to be pronounced as re-eel, kopiëren is not pronounced as ko-pie-ren, but as ko-pi-ee-ren¹. It may be confusing at first, but there is clearly a system in this.

Best,

Maarten

 

¹ You also see the "double to single vowel"-rule in Dutch here. But that's something for another time