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IMO, the weirdest thing about English is something every speaker does but probably never thinks about.
Whenever multiple adjectives describe a single noun, there's a particular order in which they must go. If you have big tractor that's also green, you would call it a "big green tractor" but you would never call it a "green big tractor". Not only does it sound wrong, it's grammatically incorrect.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/one-weird-trick-for-adjective-order
100% this. No one is ever taught it as a rule in school. You're never tested over it. But all native English speakers intuitively know it.
Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac.
Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How To Turn the Perfect English Phrase
Pronunciation of same letters differently.
Rough. Bough. Cough. Sough. Lough. Dough. Though. Tough.
I also think the way we insert curse words is abso-fucking-lutely unique.
My favorite example: Lead and lead are both spelled the same, but pronounced differently and don't rhyme with each other. They do, however, rhyme with read and read, which are also spelled identically but don't rhyme with each other.
I still think this is less bullshit than languages with gendered nouns, however. Who the fuck gets to decide if a chair is masculine or feminine, and how is this decision reached? Why do different languages determine the gender of a chair differently? We already have plenty of human beings in the world with gender dysphoria, we do not need to be giving it to inanimate objects.
I also tried to learn German and I remember this about gendered nouns:
The man = der mann (masculine)
The woman = die frau (feminine)
The boy = der junge (masculine)
The girl = das mädchen (neutral)
Not even genders themselves have the genders you'd expect lol
Also in French once you get past about 60 the numbers turn insane. E.g. 97 = Quatre-vingt-dix-sept, or literally Four-twenty-ten-seven.
Mädchen being neutered is because it is, in its origin, a diminutive. It literally meant “little maid”. It comes from the word Magt (maid, virgin, miss) with the suffix -chen, meaning “little”.
And all diminutives are, you guessed it, neuter.
Diminutives are interesting, I think it would be nice if English still had them. You can express that something is small without using the words “little“ or “small”, which gives it a different nuance. Sometimes you can do this in English with -y or -let (kitty, booklet) but it’s not very common.
Why do different languages determine the gender of a chair differently?
I believe it's due to the endings of the different words and those are described as male or female. Just a term to describe a binary, kind of like how quarks have "colours" that aren't actually colours. Not many people actually a table is assigned male or female! And I think the gendered nouns can differ, something in French could be female while in Italian it's male, since the word endings are a bit different.
I like that different pronunciations and spellings are a history of integrating different languages and cultures. Especially now with all the hatred, spite and racism, at least I get to be amused that the language they claim as their own has a fundamental “diversity, equity and inclusion “
And no the Brit’s can’t claim to be the mother language - maybe they were the melting pot that spawned its birth, but as long as their fanny’s are on the wrong side …
(As someone who has historically been too sheltered so thought some societal issues were over dramatized, nothing could make me so pro “diversity, equity, and inclusion” like today’s US politics.)
I mean, fanny has been the front bits since long before the yanks started using it as slang in ww1.
"Colonel" is pronounced "ker-nel."
HOW THE HELL IS THERE AN R SOUND IN THAT?!
Italian sourced spelling with French sourced pronunciation. So not an English word, just a bastardized loan word.
I always thought the celestial bodies thing was just another case of proper nouns. Jupiter is always capitalized because it’s a proper name.
But “the Moon” can be either. “the Moon” is the proper name of Earths natural satellite so should be capitalized, but “the moon” is a description of any planetary body’s natural satellite so should NOT be
Similar for “the Sun”. “the Sun” is the proper name of Earths star, but “the sun” is any solar system’s star. I like that in so much science fiction they’ve figured this out and use a distinct proper name, “Sol”
I would say orthography and/or the great vowel shift. Or, further, that it's very weird as Germanic languages go. Or, even further, the mix of old Norse and the various Saxon/jute/angle languages before the Normans came along (itself Norman french with old Norse admixture). Then throw various Celtic languages on that mess
The more I learn other languages, the more annoyed I get at the Great Vowel Shift in English. We could've been aligned with so many other languages, but no, we just had to be different.
It's wild, since English has such a vast vowel inventory that we can pronounce a lot of words in other languages, but since we read letters differently, many people end up with accents that don't need to exist. Consider people pronouncing Spanish words with English vowels, even though all standard Spanish vowel sounds are already part of the standard English repertoire.
You can verb pretty much any noun you like and get away with it, when used in such a manner the verbnoun takes on the typical action of the noun.
"Gunned down" is an example.
It's so prevalent we can literally say "I'll verb your noun" and it still gets the point across.
It's possible to do so in other languages as well, we rarely need to because we have other words for things though.
In my experience, nouns and verbs are generally strictly separate concepts in Romance languages, making this not viable, although there are exceptions.
You might not be a native to Roman languages, but it's very easy to "vebify" a word for natives just like you would in English.
Tell me a noun you think can be verbed in English but not in Roman languages and I'll give you an example of how it looks like.
I think what is exceptional for English is that negation and forming a question require a modal verb. You can say "I love apples" but not "*I not love apples", nor "*Love I apples?". This is rare in a language. (An exception for negation could be "Apples, I love not", but this does not sound like everyday speech.)
Fun fact: "Love I apples?" and "Apples, I love not" are how German works, and English used to be like that (back when it was still turning into English)!
(edit: actually oops it'd be more "I love apples not", see also "she loves me / she loves me not" – V2 word order, verb goes second)
-- Frost
One I always find weird is how often we reuse the exact same word with the same spelling and pronunciation to mean wildly different things. For example, the word 'jam' can mean:
Or 'saw', which can be to look at something in the past tense or to cut wood. The word 'run' apparently has over 600 different meanings!
We also have contronyms, which is when a word also means the opposite of itself. For example 'dust', which can mean to add dust or remove it. Or 'left', which can mean remaining ("I only have three left") or departing ("They left.")
A door can get jammed on the door jamb
I remember my English teacher telling me the word "set" was the worst example of this, with over 200 definitions in the unabridged Oxford dictionary.
Probably spelling, but there's one quirk in English that makes it so you can build the arguably weirdest sentence in any language. Here's the short version and explanation for people unaware of the 3 meanings of the word (which I'll use 3 different spellings to make it easier to understand):
Buffalo is a city in USAbuffalo is another name for an animal also known as a bisonBUFFALO means to bother, or bully.So a Buffalo buffalo is a Bison from the city of Buffalo. If a Bison from Buffalo were to bother another Bison from Buffalo, you get the common example of this phrase which is Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo buffalo which means Buffalo bison BOTHERS Buffalo bison. You can add an extra Buffalo at the start to make it a headline of a newspaper telling you where this happened, but that only gives you Buffalo, Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo buffalo....
But we can make it better. See, in English you can add specifiers to a noun, the way we're doing with Buffalo to specify this is a Bison from Buffalo, but the specification can be a full sentence. For example if we wanted to say that specify that the bison is known to bother other bisons you can call him a "bison bully" bison, or even if he's from Buffalo and only bullies other bisons from Buffalo he's a Buffalo "Buffalo bison bully" bison, or a Buffalo "Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO" buffalo.
Cool, so if a Bison from Buffalo known for bullying other bisons from Buffalo is bullying yet another Buffalo bison you can say that a "Buffalo Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo buffalo".... But what if the bison it's bullying is also known to bully other bisons from buffalo? Then Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo buffalo
But our bison might actually EXCLUSIVELY bully bisons that bully other bisons, so he's a Buffalo bison BULLY BULLY, and if he's from the city of Buffalo he's a Buffalo Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO BUFFALO. So if our heroic bison made a mistake and bullied another Bison who only bullies bullies then: Buffalo Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO BUFFALO buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO BUFFALO
And you can keep making the sentence infinitely long by specifying that tach bison in the story is a Buffalo bison Bully bison.
Chinese has something a bit like this too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den
Per formal linguistics, it's "respectively".
Like: Bob, Alicia, and Siobhan are a teacher, plumber, and electrician, respectively.
We know this means Bob is a teacher and Siobhan is an electrician, but trying to write rules for how English works that account for this usage is thorny.
Let me try writing a rule for it.
"Given two lists, the word "respectively" indicates the n-th item in each list corresponds to the n-th item in the other list."
It's not that it's hard to write a rule for "respectively". It's that it needs its own rule, specifically. The general rules don't cover it.
German has this too, "beziehungsweise", but it replaces the "and" instead of being added to it. It is common enough that it's usually abbreviated "bzw.".
The disparity between written English and its pronunciation. Identically written words represented with vastly different sounds, and no real and consistent system whatsoever.
I agree. I like it (the spelling often shows the history of the word, relationships between words) but for an allegedly phonetic system it's nonsense. Not sure it's worse than French, but Spanish is so phonetic I can read aloud stuff I don't even understand!
I learned to read as I was learning to talk, more like a language than a skill - kids learning in school are taught phonics, and I would despair if that was how I was taught.
Once. Really? The word Wonss is spelled Once?
Mandatory reference here: The Chaos (Poem)
Dearest creature in creation, The weirdest part is pronunciation...
I vote for standardisation. So it's 'wierd.' I before e. It's more Germanic that way too. Food, moon, and good all pronounced the same way. Etc
The wierdest thing? That it's used in so many places instead of good, solid, consistent Latin
English was screwed by the advent of the printing press.
From the beginning of the renaissance up to the 1700's, English underwent a vowel shift which saw a lot of words change pronunciation. When the printing press arrived in England in the late 1400's, there was a push to set standard spelling. But because the printing press arrived while the vowel shift was still ongoing, the new pronunciation of some words was revised with updated spelling (consistent with other words at the time) but other words would receive new pronunciations after their spelling was already set in stone.
If a language undergoes a vowel shift after its spelling is standardized, the phonetic rules remain mostly intact because they will trend towards changing consistently. If a language completes a vowel shift before its spelling is standardized, then the new spelling will just reflect its current phonetics. English was unlucky enough to be locked in time during its blunder years.
Is it the fact the way something is written almost has no bearing on how it's pronounced?
For me as someone who speaks english as a 2nd language this is definitely a big one
Though on the topic of the definite article, as a kid I found articles in general to be weird as my native language has none, so there were just these "untranslatable" words in front of some nouns for some reason
Though on the topic of the definite article, as a kid I found articles in general to be weird as my native language has none, so there were just these "untranslatable" words in front of some nouns for some reason
Funny you mention this, cuz I have been trying to learn japanese lately and it not having articles is a big obstacle for me.
You know, I never thought about the opposite being a problem lol.
It's mildly interesting to think about
I vote spelling. English spelling makes less sense than French or Danish and they take mothereffing liberties as well. No naturally occurring, alphabet using language will probably score perfect on that but I suspect English will be in the relegation zone of that table.
Beware of meat and great and threat, they rhyme with suite and straight and debt…
It's hard, can be understood through tough thorough thought though.
Final boss: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ruize-rijmen/De_Chaos
It's that it's being driven by influencers and popularity, and not being improved incrementally according to consistent rules and patterns.
Other languages have steering committees; we have vapid tiktok influencerati trash steering the evolution of English.
Fucking hell.
Some countries have organisations that supposedly dictate the use of some official language, the French being a notable example, but whether anybody listens to them is a whole other story and frankly I think that's probably for the best. Languages have always been influenced organically by the cultural forces at play, they serve and reflect the speakers not the other way around. They need to adapt to the experiences and lives of people that are using them and no steering committee is going to be able comprehend nor account for the totality of that. Maybe they're useful for like helping a publication produce a style guide since they can defer to something "official" but that's about it.
I don't think articles, definite or indefinite are the weirdest things about English, if only because other languages have the same features.
There have to be weirder things that are specific to this one language, but it's hard to find something that isn't shared by any other language, especially not the closely related ones. German goes one step further with the whole capitalisation thing, for example, where all nouns are capitalised, not just those that are names.
Perhaps we could go for how vowels all become, or at least move towards schwa in unstressed positions. That's the vowel at the end of "the" when unstressed and before a consonant. (German has some of this with final -e (and to some extent, the same with older French pronunciation), but it's not necessarily the same thing going on there.)
Consonant aspiration might be another oddity. Aspiration depends on position in a word in English and doesn't hold any semantic or grammatical meaning, but in other languages, an aspirated consonant can completely change the meaning of a word. I think Korean is one such language. They even have different letters for the different sounds.
If you don't know what aspiration is, it's the burst of air that follows some consonants. English speakers generally don't even know they're doing it. The often-used example is "pin" versus "spin", where the leading "p" of "pin" has far more air after it than it does in "spin".
Aspiration depends on position in a word in English and doesn’t hold any semantic or grammatical meaning, but in other languages, an aspirated consonant can completely change the meaning of a word.
It reminds me of how Hindi/Urdu use v and w. Which sound is produced depends on where it is in a word, but to native speakers, both v and w may sound the same. That's why Hindustani ESL speakers tend to switch between the two in ways that don't make sense to native English speakers.
It helps me wrap my mind around it to think of how English has two different ways of pronouncing L - there's "light" L at the beginning of words (love, listen, like.) Then there's "dark" L used at the end or sometimes in the middle (full, ball, visible.) The word "little" provides an example of both types (and if you pronounce it with a glottal stop for the "tt", such as in a Cockney accent, the word is basically "light L, glottal stop, dark L.")
Of course, aspiration itself also works as a way to understand it, since aspirated sounds make a difference in Hindustani, but English spelling treats them interchangeably. However, that difference is too hard for many of us to distinguish, so I find that comparing L sounds is easier for English speakers to recognize as a comparison.
Im just going to say "The English themselves" , and leave it at that.