Or do Japanese: There are two main types; the one where you and everyone else neatly follows the immutable rules which you speak to superiors and to strangers by default, and the one where everyone blurts out whatever words in whatever order they come up in their brain, aka what's spoken between friends and to acquainted inferiors
Perhaps other people have said it but this is the quote I'm familiar with:
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
Its taught me all languages are broken in some way. Romance languages have words that have arbitrary gender needing conjugation. Some have two genders, some three! Then the Romanian language comes in with its own tricks.
Chinese (Mandarin and Cantonese) lack an alphabet so words are conjunctions of smaller words, or sometimes worse the phonetics of smaller words without the meaning of the word.
Starbucks (the coffee company) in Mandarin is 星巴克. 星 is the literal translation of Star. So far so good. However 巴 can mean "to hope". 克 can mean "to restrain". The reason they use 巴克 for the second half of Starbucks is that when you pronounce them they vaguely sound like "bahcoo" (buck). So the first half is the traditional use of direct translation ignoring what it sounds like phonetically, but the second half ignores direct translation and instead uses the phonetics of the second two characters to sound like "buck".
Esperanto isn't the only constructed language, and I think it is more Western-oriented, for good or ill. It does do a lot of things right within that framework, though, with certain rules that make everything explicit while removing other rules for structure that are no longer needed due to the explicit nature of the language.
What I appreciate about Spanish over English is the ease of spelling and pronouncing new words. What I appreciate about English over Spanish is the ease of creating new words.
I have some limited ability/understanding in other languages, but not enough to judge. Except for French.
Languages with phonetic writing in the modern day likely achieved that through a language standardization process that included spelling reforms.
English's changes in spelling and grammar are mostly legitimized through influential works of the language, hence why you all gotta learn Shakespeare in highschool, you're being taught the history of how the language we speak today evolved.
There is no centralized academy of English grammar, and official dictionaries in English for the most part add words descriptively to reflect how the lexicon is changing in real time.
Put together this all means that the English language isn't remotely broken, it's just old, older than most modernly written languages by a couple of centuries actually.
Funniest part is if you study immigrant settlements in the Americas from all those countries that underwent standardizations, they're all about as "broken" as English looks too, because they're forms of those languages preserved from before standardization came to their homelands.
Japanese and Italian are especially funny since the standardization came into enforcement recently enough that native speakers from Japan and Italy will be bewildered by speakers from the Americas because the speakers from the Americas speak in a way that sounds like their grandparents or great grandparents if they recognize the dialect at all to begin with.
With Japanese, it's more-so that the standardised version is widely used in politics, to strangers, to acquainted superiors, and just in general by default
It's only between friends, within most families (and to acquaintances who regard you as their superior) that you speak... Whatever, really.
Learning a second language AND professionally teaching English to speakers of said language. English is not broken. English is actually much better than many alternatives. We don’t need to worry about noun gender. We don’t have to worry about tones. We have precise ways to indicate number and time. Formality levels are not baked into word construction. The pronunciation of words can generally be inferred from the spelling, despite learning this skill being a little complicated— but that complicated nature even has its usefulness.
We rag on English, but it is by far not the worse out there, not even close. It’s just contempt for the familiar.
Exceptions on exceptions on exceptions, on top of grammar rules that vary based on what language the word you're using was originally from, except even then you can't know because it can be a word came to English from French even though it's originally Latin and then the way the French pronounced it carries over to the English.
As someone who's native language is Finnish and you literally know how a word is pronounced when you see it. If you know how to use the phonetic alphabet, then you basically know how to pronounce Finnish. Compare English words and their IPA to Finnish words and their IPA:
As a native German speaker, I really dislike the formality levels and hope someday everyone uses the informal level. In a big company it's really annoying to start with the formal level and then awkwardly switching to informal level when contacting someone for the first time.
It seems to me that you’re making a strange argument throwing bugs and features into the same pot. The fact that other languages have different complexities does not make one language more or less broken.
When I started learning Japanese I was impressed by how reliably phonetic their alphabets are, with only a few exceptions (and even the exceptions are phonetic, just by a different set of rules). I was like damn, would be real nice if English's letters were like this. Then I found out that Japanese wasn't always this way; prior to the 19th century reading it was a huge pain, with a lot of "i before e except after c..." rules to memorize, no diacritics to distinguish pronunciations, etc. At some point they had a major overhaul of the written language (especially the alphabets) and turned them into the phonetic versions they use today. Again I was like damn, would be real nice if English could get a phonetic overhaul of its written word. But it's a lot easier to reform a language only used in a single country on an isolated island cluster with an authoritarian government and questionable literacy rates... Can you imagine the mayhem if, say, Australia decided to overhaul the English language in isolation? It would be like trying to get all of Europe to abandon their native tongues in favor of Esperanto.
I love archaic inconsistent Japanese. 今日 (obviously きょう) used to be pronounced the same way but spelled... けふ. There's a Wikipedia page on historical kana orthography and the example the use on the page's main image is やめましょう spelled as ヤメマセウ. The old kana usage sticks around in pronunciation of particle は and へ.
There also used to be verbs ending in ず that turned into じる verbs like 感じる. Here's a post on Japanese stack exchange where somebody explains verbs that end with ず, づ, ふ, and ぷ.
Honestly I'm glad I don't have to learn historical inconsistent spellings, but part of me thinks that it's really cool and wishes it was still around.
It certainly does show how many traditions, with their own sets of rules, English pulls from. That said, watching my poor kid learning how to spell and read has been painful. All the rules only exist to be broken. An example today was him trying to pronounce AMC. A fun word for spelling that came up recent was skool.
Hehe. I don't think English is that broken. I mean it's definitely broken. But still one of the easier languages to learn. It's my second language, so my perspective might be a bit different. But I also had French in school. And oh my, that's a proper hassle to memorize all the articles, specifics and numerous exceptions to every rule there is... English was way easier (for me.)
ITT: Loads of monolingual native English speakers who has no knowledge of linguistics or even how their own language is not unique in all the ways that they think it is.
Well, I suppose it made me realise how useless articles are in a statement.
«где здесь кинотеатр?»
(where here movie theatre?)
"where is the movie theatre around here?"
Without articles the point comes across in a much simpler form. that being said, a lot of other languages also have a terrifyingly complex case system or pointlessly gendered language or both. I don't think any language is "broken" but they all definitely have quirks.
Learning Japanese (especially colloquial Japanese) also gives me a strong "why waste time say lot word, when few word do trick" vibes. Articles? Don't exist. Prepositions? Only if you want to sound like a dweeb. Subjects/Objects? Used unnecessarily you'll change the meaning of the sentence.
My friend told me that a whole lot of Japanese sentences are literally just exclamations of an adjective or adverb and apparently that's enough for most Japanese folks to intuit an entire sentence of meaning.
I think about how some languages like Japanese are like this, and then I think about how stereotypical “caveman” grammar in English is kind of structured like those languages, and I get a little uncomfortable at the implications…
It's made me aware of how much I appreciate reliable consistent pronunciation in Spanish (at least compared to English). And it's given me a huge amount of sympathy for people who are learning English and trying to speak to native English speakers :)
But I wouldn't say it's shown me how broken English is. I mean, I think it's more broken than Spanish, but that could just be a comment on how much I still have to learn about Spanish :P
Same with consistent pronunciation in Indonesian - it's so much better. I feel sorry for little kids learning to read English and getting told to 'sound it out'. Sure thing, which of the five to nine sounds shall I use for the letter 'a'?
This post kind of ignores basics of grammar instruction that we've known for centuries. Some people try to teach grammar from a prescriptive fashion. They tell us what the rules are, they have us memorize them, and then we can speak perfectly.
The problem is, that's not how language works in reality. Even if you had a perfect language to begin with, something with no exceptions of any kind, after 20 years people would have added their own changes. So then the original instruction that you gave, that wouldn't prepare future language learners for reality.
This is why we have to teach grammar and spelling descriptively. We're talking about what actually happens in the world when people actually speak and write in English. Of course it's nice to point out common customs and conventions, but we don't get to ignore all of the irregular things just because they're irritating to memorize.
And this is true for all languages that are used by even a medium-sized population over time. You cannot avoid it, you'll find it in every language, sorry.
Yeah, if humans use it long enough, any language becomes bastardized. Every generation comes up with new slang with only minor regard for the rules. Some of that slang becomes permanent.
I noticed how many of the verbs in English can mean different things depending on what word comes next, e.g.
Put
Put down
Put up
Put upon
Put on (wear)
English has so many words that mean the same thing, it's amazing, astonishing, bewildering and flabbergasting, there was a thief, mugger, robber, bandit... Who stole, robbed, nicked, thieved from me... I don't know how anyone ever learns all the English words for stuff, I honestly don't know how I have.
It also made me reflect on how languages are just noises we've all agreed to make at each other. The rules try to match the language and fail, not the other way around.
Recently I was also thinking about how interesting it is that some words we use are SO OLD, and we just... use them like it's no big deal, but if we we're transported back thousands of years, people were still calling vanilla something very similar to vanilla and arteries something very similar to arteries, and that is super cool to me.
English-learning books call those phrasal verbs and there are entire chapters focused on them. I remember them as the most hated part of English lessons.
Learning German taught me how messed up non-English languages are. Having to memorize if every noun is either male, female, or neuter just so you can use the right form of "the" with it is crazy.
As a German myself who tried to learn French a while ago, I gave up because that language has the same issue, but the genders for nouns are different and I just can't be bothered to memorize two different genders for every noun 💀
I learned Latin and in the process learned that quite a lot if what makes English fucked up was a movement a couple of hundred years ago to make it more like Latin.
Well, and also one to make it less like Latin. And the same with French.
People have been beating this thing with a stick for many centuries. It's part of the charm. And now it's doing the same to every other language. That's maybe less charming.
Gotten the hang of Southern Sotho at this point, and one thing that strikes me is how exact I can be with English and how I've always taken for granted how much access we have to things that allow us to give our words different meanings and implications. It just doesn't exist to that extent in many other languages. It's like when you hear the Eskimos have 50 words for snow or whatever. I don't know if it's true or not, but those words would describe different states or types of snow that speakers of that language recognize as distinct.
Are you sure this is not just your perception depending on fluency in a language? Your native will always feel more comprehensive than any second language.
A while ago, my dad (native german, fluent english) said something similar to me, that he believes german has so many more words to describe and to give different meaning to the things we say. I do disagree with that too. Now I always have to think about this, when coming across something I have more means to express something in english or german. And there are many examples in both languages.
Even if you are fluent in a second language, you probably always have more words and more nuance in your native language.
Great point! I considered that when I started learning and have spoken to it with my colleagues here who are also learning the language as well as Basotho- native speakers. Basotho who speak English fluently mostly agree that English has a broader vocabulary.
I've observed that Sesotho relies on tone and emphasis on parts of words more than English. There isn't a whole lot of writing in Sesotho so I can imagine that the language hasn't needed to develop ways to be descriptive that couldn't be delivered with one's voice.
Moreover, when I speak with Basotho that aren't very proficient in English, I notice they very freely use words that a native English speaker would consider extreme, such as "perfect," for mundane things because there is no explicit difference in Sesotho between "perfect" and merely "very good."
The video I linked gets into it a bit that English is helped by being an amalgamation of several languages, and thus inherits multiple ways of describing a concept.
I started learning Japanese 2 weeks ago but I already knew how fucked English was because I learned English first.
Japanese seems weird and hella foreign at first because the alphabet it uses, but it's way more straightforward than English. What's weird is being at a point where I know most of the alphabet, but barely any words or grammar. So I can sound out entire sentences and say them aloud but not know what it actually says lol
Not that it doesn't have its own problems... There are over 60 characters in the Unicode standard that, apparently, nobody knows the meaning of. And it's because there would be small communities or areas that have their own characters for things that have fallen into obscurity and also caused by things like photocopier artifacts, etc. So far 12 have been identified as meaning nothing at all.
At least most things are pronounced like they are written but not all.
n -> m is a common one such as in 新聞 because Japanese doesn't have standalone m.
Japanese also has 7 vowels: standard aeiou and devoiced i and u. It's the reason people say です (desu) like 'des'. A fun example of this playing out is 靴下 (kutsushita - socks). My wife (native Japanese speaker) didn't even realize this until I was watching a video about it.
I had wondered if it was just the text to speech engine sounding weird sometimes or if certain things get pronounced differently when put together in a complete sentence.
Like "hi to" hella sounds like "shito" on that thing sometimes, but not always. And "desu" sounds like "des" or "desu" just depending on which voice is speaking.
I started Russian Duolingo a while back. You can make English sentences that would take five or six words in two words under first impressions the language doesn't f*** around it gets right to the point.
But then I started getting to conjugations and it turns into a dumpster fire real quick.
Yeah it's broken, but y'all have tenses that sorta make senses (in Estonian we have present and past - future is implied by context!) and you don't need 14 noun cases because y'all have prepositions.
At the same time, English borrows words from over 9000 different languages, nothing is pronounced the way it's written, and to be quite honest, I never bothered learning any of the rules in school. The rule for ordering adjectives so they wouldn't sound off was impossible to remember, but because I've been terminally online since I was like 7, it just came naturally.
TL;DR: English is a great language to just know natively, horrifying one to learn systematically.
Learning a second language hasn't made me think English is broken. I already thought English was messed up but know a little of it's history so have a general idea why. Learning Spanish means learning the flaws of a second language.
I thinking all languages are flawed, but English just goes the extra mile.
Conversely, when we Spanish have to learn English, the thing we hate the most is that words are not pronounced the way they're written. In Spanish, however, we've got some weird rules with irregular verbs and articles, but the former is common to both languages
I know a few languages, English not being the first one. But I too have learned that not only might English be broken, but so might my mental and cultural skills with it. Though I figure priority one is whether what I say follows grammatical rules. Political manifestos, which this place is all too familiar with, don't even have that, yet people seem to understand what they're saying if people are going around saying how wise they are.