“Unite humanity with a living new language”
I speak german (the grammer (!), The koffer-words with possible lengths of tens of characters, the sheer amount of words/combinations in some millions), then I speak russian (for me the beautyfulst language in terms of expression. Grammer (!), the spelling of words is difficult), then I spoke french for a time (for me difficult to pronounce, grammer is difficult too for me), then I speak chinese - which is a picture-resque language. One talks in pictures and metaphors. So beautyful!!! and then, one could think of finnish. That's what I would call a weird language. But not english.
so I do not have a feeling english is weirdly different from other languages, as the other languages are more difficult to master. These other languages may not only be more difficult in their grammer, but also have different spelling of same characters indicating different tenses (finnish) or meanings (chinese) - just to name a true weirdness.
so long! Greetz from OG!
(I don't know if Chinese-only comments are allowed here; but I simply said "I agree. Chinese is quite beautiful!")
Examples:
German: man
Unclear: woman (not frau or kvinna)
German: white (weiss/vit/etc)
Unclear: black (bläck means ink in Swedish but?)
Swedish: up
Unclear: down (not undan or ner)
German: full (voll)
Unclear: empty (not leer or tom)
Agingcoder•9mo ago
The author has no clue - try French spelling ( there are no spelling bee competitions but grammar+ spelling ones). As a native speaker of multiple languages, I’m a bit surprised at the confidence with which the author writes things which are either wrong or obvious ( and don’t make English exceptional in any way ).
What is really odd is that the author is a professor of linguistics - maybe I’m missing something here?
MrJohz•9mo ago
In contrast, in English, pronunciation and orthography have drifted apart significantly more, which means that while there are rules to how any given phoneme might be written, there are a lot more possibilities for most phonemes, and there's a lot more overlap in terms of the spellings. All this means that it's usually much harder to correctly read aloud an English text containing words you don't know.
This is what makes spelling so difficult in English: it usually has more to do with a word's etymology than how it sounds.
samus•9mo ago
Agingcoder•9mo ago
Reading it is easier than English but writing it is very difficult because it’s irregular. A typical 13-14 year old cannot write a full page of French without making lots of mistakes ( source : my kids’ teachers in France , and my fellow pupils at school in France when I was growing up).
Just to give you a very simple example, the following words vin ( wine ), vingt ( twenty ), vain ( vain ) are pronounced exactly the same. And there are other variants for the same sound ( some kind of nasal i) spelled ein, or un. You can figure out how to read it up to a point, but writing it is very difficult.
cafard•9mo ago
Agingcoder•9mo ago
MrJohz•9mo ago
xenadu02•9mo ago
None of them are really that much easier than any other, they just slot into patterns your brain already recognizes from languages you know (oh that feature is easy) vs ones you don't (oh that feature is difficult).
My pet theory is the human brain is willing to deal with a certain amount of complexity in speaking and in reading/writing. Some languages consume their complexity budget in number of characters and their forms, others in their spelling. For spoken language some have lots of types of forms of address or lots of grammar cases. Others have significant formal and implied word order, use lots of accessory words, etc.
When there is too much complexity in certain dimensions people naturally simplify in others. The accelerated form of this is when there is a great upheaval in society or movement of people: speakers quickly start to simplify the rules they care the least for (or convert formal spelled/spoken rules into info inferred from context).