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tumblr post by seokoilua: it’s so wild to me that some people just speak english all the time… like they can’t switch it off to speak in a #real language when they need to

  • rnercle@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    171·
    2 days ago

    english is very practical and relatively easy

    trilingual here. No language is “dumb”.

    • YTG123@sopuli.xyzEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      relatively easy

      Very incomplete list of things about English which are not easy:

      • The sheer amount of vowel phonemes
        • French and German do “a lot of vowels” properly
        • Sometimes they’re diphthongs
        • Complete with arcane allophony
      • Stress timing ⇒ vowel reduction, weak forms
      • Adjective order???
        • Not actually difficult, it’s just weird that it even exists.
      • Sequence of tenses
        • Actually might be worse than Latin
      • The verbal system is messy, identical forms can specify different tenses/aspects/moods and can be treated differently by the syntax accordingly
        • There are somewhere between 2 and 12 tenses, and I’m genuinely not sure which is it.
        • English verbs are very expressive, but the forms are mandatory. Other languages also have a lot of markers, but they’re often optional.
      • Morphology is pretty easy for anyone who speaks a language other than the famously analytic Chinese, I guess.
      • Not technically a part of the spoken language, but spelling (at least three spelling systems not even trying to masquerade as one + GVS, also grammatical gender but only sometimes, e.g. blond/blonde).

      Some things are not difficult, but I find them endearing:

      • English is really afraid of hiatus and will do anything to avoid it
      • The GVS messed things up so hard that most English speakers (outside of Scotland and parts of England and Ireland) can’t even borrow monophthongs properly.
      • Do-support: to negate a verb, you need another verb, but the new verb has exactly zero meaning (but some verbs don’t require do-support).

      Not contesting the practicality though, and I agree that “dumb” is meaningless when it comes to language.

      • rnercle@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        21 hours ago

        thanks for taking the time to write a thoughtful comment.

        Can you elaborate on “English is really afraid of hiatus and will do anything to avoid it"? I can’t understand what you mean by this and i’m very curious. Sounds interesting.

        The sheer amount of vowel phonemes
        French and German do “a lot of vowels” properly

        i wouldn’t consider french vowels to be properly done with regional differences and nasal complications in addition to using 3 vowels to pronounce 1 with mute consonants here and there. What a mess. But i’ve met people who can see precision in that madness 🤷

    • NOT_RICK@lemmy.worldEnglish
      81·
      2 days ago

      I hate the number of exceptions to rules there are and situations like read/read/red, lead/lead/led, threw/through/throw. I guess there’s homonyms in many languages (thinking of Chinese especially where tonality is everything).

      I know a lot of the exceptions to pronunciation rules are just a result of English having so many different root influences. I’m comparing it to my (admittedly rudimentary) knowledge of Spanish where things are just pronounced how they’re spelled. I’m thinking back to my college Spanish courses where I asked my professor what kind of pronunciation exceptions there are and he said there weren’t really any. Then again, I suppose just like English, the exceptions come from words that are borrowed from other languages and he wasn’t looking at my question holistically. There’s a silent P in the word pterodáctilo borrowed from Greek in both languages, after all.

      Curious as someone with more skill than me what you feel makes English practical, if you don’t mind sharing!

        • NOT_RICK@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          2 days ago

          Thanks for sharing. It is a bit of a hassle trying to remember the gender of certain words (thinking of mano being feminine, or día being masculine) but I found that less weird than a lot of English’s grammar exceptions.

      • mycodesucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        2 days ago

        For basic, daily conversation, there are more irregular cases than cases that obey the rules.

        Past tense verbs for example.

        You add “ed” right?

        Except for go/went sleep/slept come/came see/saw eat/ate…

        Then for some topics, there ARE no rules. It’s just “remember how every verb works.” For instance, how to combine two verbs.

        For “like”, you can attach either the infinitive or the gerund.

         i.e. like to eat / like eating

        But some only take the infinitive.

         i.e. decide to eat

        And some only take the gerund.

         i.e. practice eating

        English is a mess.

        • addie@feddit.ukEnglish
          3·
          2 days ago

          Strictly, ‘like to eat’ and ‘like eating’ don’t mean the same either. ‘I (personally) like to eat’ and ‘I like eating (in general)’. Maybe you’re a chef and you enjoy watching others eating? Admittedly, that makes more sense when talking about eg. swimming or cycling, when you may enjoy the sport but not doing the activity.

          Nice observations on other ways that English is a mess, though - I’d not appreciated those before. You can make them worse by negating them - all those sentences need ‘do’ support, with different forms of ‘to do’ to agree with the rest of the sentence.

          • mycodesucks@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            2 days ago

            Oh, absolutely. They have different meanings. But in a purely syntactic sense, which is the first step before learning nuance of meanings, just learning what structures are VALID requires a huge amount of memorization. It’s rightfully very annoying to students.

    • Isolde@lemmy.worldEnglish
      52·
      2 days ago

      Yep, matter of fact let’s make pig Latin the global language, as it is not dumb at all, not even a bit.

      • rnercle@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        32·
        2 days ago

        Yep, matter of fact let’s make pig Latin the global language, as it is not dumb at all, not even a bit.

        says that it’s a “language game” and not a language