One of my favourites to think about is “How are you?”. Taken literally that question makes no sense. “How are you?” “Well one day my parents had sex and I sort of grew from there…”
I am back.
I am home.
I am out.
I am office. 🤔
adverb
adverb
adverb
noun
All languages have quirks, but English is awful.
I only realized that the more I studied other languages, making me reflect on English.
Like, English doesn’t have a future tense. It seems like a pretty basic thing, but in English you say “I’m going to X”. Why do you use the verb ‘to go’ there? Why is that the way English creates a future tense? If you’re headed to the store now: I’m going to the store. If it’s happening later: I’m going to go to the store. WTF is this bullshit? “going to go”? Just stop and think for a second about “going” and “go” in that phrase.
And the verb “to do”, why is that part of questions in English? Statement: You have a dog. Question: Do you have a dog? What does “to do” have to do with any of that? Why is “doing” the verb that somehow is used to turn a statement into a question?
And then there’s “to use”. Using is to take, hold, deploy, consume… so why is it sometimes part of the past tense. Sure, you can say “I walked to school”, but if you want to talk about habits or routines: “I used to walk to school”. Why is “to use” even involved there at all?
That’s not even accounting for spelling and pronunciation which is just ridiculous in English.
We have a letter ‘k’ that reliably makes a certain sound, and a letter ‘s’ that reliably makes another sound. But, a huge variety of words use “c” which can make a ‘k’ sound like cat, or an ‘s’ sound like city. The letter ‘c’ has no sound of its own, it’s just a randomizer machine for one of the other useful sounds. The letter ‘g’ has one sound that no other letter makes, in words like “grip” and “great”. There’s another letter “j” that makes a different sound, like in “jet” and the name “Jim”. But, for some reason, sometimes the “g” makes a “j” sound, so “Jim” and “gym” have the same sound but completely different spellings, leading to bullshit like the confusion over how to pronounce “gif”.
English has roughly 20 vowel sounds, depending on the accent, but the vowel letters are ‘a’, ‘e’, ‘i’, ‘o’, ‘u’, and sometimes ‘y’. So, you’d think that at least those 5/6 are sorted and the other 20 come from combinations, right? Nope. In British English, for some reason “can” and “can’t” get a different vowel sound for the ‘a’, despite “can’t” being a contraction for “can not”, which literally contains “can”. The letter “u” can sound different between “put” and “putt”, even though you’re just tacking a ‘t’ to the end of that combination of letters. If you tack an ‘s’ on the end it doesn’t change, but if you tack an ‘e’ on the end… whoa, an entirely new sound different from both “put” and “putt”.
I’m glad the world is slowly converging on one language that allows everyone to communicate with everyone else, but it sucks that the language that came out on top is English.
I will go to the store?
What does willpower have to do with it?
What does “going to” have to do with it? Do they need to spiritually travel to the motivation center of the brain before you go to the store? I’m just saying, if you say “going to go” over “will”, you’re gonna get tongue cramps, and for all intents and purposes, they mean the same thing. This is language that we’re talking about. All words are made up, so just try to keep up and you will be fine.
The annoying thing is that “I’ll go to work tomorrow” and “I’m going to go to work tomorrow” have subtly different meanings to English speakers, but good luck trying to come up with a rule to explain the difference to someone learning the language.
English at least has “going to” and “will” for future. In Estonian you just use present simple and the only way to know you’re talking about the future is if you hint it with some time related word.
You just say “I go to the supermarket” and it’s ambiguous. You say “I go to the supermarket tomorrow” and you know it’s talking about the future.
Do you know if that’s unique to Estonian, or also true of Finnish? AFAIK, Finnish (and Estonian) are a weird language branch in that most of Europe is Indo-European. Even distinct languages like Italian and German are more related to each-other than Finnish.
It’s the same way in Finnish.
Hey what’s the difference between put and putt?
Putt is shorthand for “put and only put”.
Verbose HTTP is looking great.
Phonetically, put: /pʊt/ vs. putt: /pʌt/
ʊ is the sound from words like “book”, “hook”, “pull” or "should.
ʌ is the sound from words like “gut”, “double”, “butter”, “luck”, etc.
Thanks! Yes it’s weird. Cut and put sound tutally different wile cut and putt are pronounced the same
Put is something you do to something (I will put this down), putt is a technique in golf (watch me land this putt).
Thanks!
I just want to point out that English’s future tense does exist, but it’s just non-distinct in many cases because, well, as you’ve said, English is fucked.
“We’re eating steak.”
You need context to determine whether this statement is talking about the present or the future. So much of the language is implied contextually that you can just drop off words and assume the listener will understand.
“What are we eating?” vs. “What are we eating tonight?”
It’s so funny because whereas a lot of other languages have rules with defined exceptions here and there, speaking English is more of a theoretical approach.
It feels like English just happened one day and we’re all trying to figure out why.
It’s so funny because whereas a lot of other languages have rules with defined exceptions here and there, speaking English is more of a theoretical approach.
I feel like this also makes it useful in that you can butcher the hell out of it, and still communicate somewhat effectively. I don’t feel that’s the case in some other languages, or maybe I’m willing to put up with my colleague’s broken English far more than they’re willing to put up with my broken German/Spanish/etc.
Yeah, it’s definitely convenient in most cases, I would say. Though it can also be inconvenient when messaging, because sometimes said need to add context can read very unnaturally in an otherwise grammatically correct sentence.
I think English allows you more different ways of doing things than most other languages. The future tense being “going to X” and one of the past tenses being “used to X” means that new English learners don’t need to spend as much time studying yet another verb tense.
OTOH, the spelling and pronunciation is such a massive hurdle compared to a simple language like Spanish.
My uneducated guess is that England had so many colonies throughout history that a lot of languages affected English and we have this Frankenstein of a language
That’s part of it, but I think a bigger part is all the countries that colonized the British Isles. English has elements of Germanic languages like German, Dutch, Old Norse, etc. It has elements of Latin languages from Latin itself to French. The British Empire definitely resulted in words being brought back from the various colonies, but the English they spoke then was fairly similar to what we know today. It was already this weird, bastardized Germanic / French language.
English’s future tense
There are various future tenses.
Future Simple / Simple Future: Will + [base form] – I’ll eat that later; or Going + [infinitive] – I’m going to eat that later.
Future Continuous: Will be + [present participle] – I’ll be eating that later.
Future Perfect: Will have + [past participle] – I’ll have eaten that later.
Future Perfect Continuous: Will have been + [present participle] – I’ll have been eating that later.
There’s also using the present continuous to talk about the future – I’m eating that tomorrow.
Also, the simple present – I eat that tomorrow.
English is flexible, but it’s also weird. There are a lot of distinctions that matter to native English speakers but that are really hard to put into rules. Like “will” vs. “going to”. They have slightly different meanings, but good luck coming up with an easy to understand rule about when to use each version.
As a dane, you have no idea how good you have it. Be happy that English became the lingua franca and not something worse.
What are some of the issues with Danish?
There’s so many it’s hard to think of them all.
Let’s start with the fact that Danish is practically two languages in one - the written language and the spoken language. There is very little connection between the two. You cannot look at a word’s spelling and know how it is pronounced, and often it is not pronounced how you would think it is pronounced by looking at the spelling.
The grammar is simple, but it’s so full of irregularities that you basically need to memorise a wide array of words and phrases.
The spoken language has more vowel sounds than the alphabet has vowels, even when Danish has added three extra (æ, ø and å). Each vowel can therefore be pronounced in different ways depending on the word. No, there is no system to tell you which sound is the correct one, you just have to know and memorize it.
Add to this the fact that the pronounciation is quite complicated and basically impossible for foreigners to learn without having a heavy or at least moderate accent.
The spoken language has more vowel sounds than the alphabet has vowels, even when Danish has added three extra (æ, ø and å).
That’s one thing I think English at least did right. Other languages added extra letters and/or diacritics to try to capture all the variations on vowel sounds. But, in most languages there are far more vowel sounds than there are vowels. So, don’t make things unnecessarily complicated by adding extra letters. The one language that seems to do it basically right is Spanish, where there are only about 5 vowel sounds and they use the accent character not to show that a letter is pronounced differently, but just to cue you in on which syllable is accented when it might not be the one you expect. (With a few minor annoying variations, like el and él).
This is a fun little bit of fluff on this subject- https://www.huffpost.com/entry/35-confusing-things-about-the-english-language_n_5b39b246e4b08c3a8f6b9a3b
“I feel like fish” 🤣
“I’m home” is also something say when they arrive in their birth country or birth city/village. It’s different from “I’m at home”.
No, actually it’s not even tickling any resemblance of confusion
The concept of multiple languages seems to confuse so many monolinguists.
It’s not intuitive if you don’t know several languages that some things in language are just how any human communicate, such as skipping words and stuff.
You’re clearly fluent if you describe “tickling any resemblance” of an effect. Learners would likely say something akin to “make me confused” or similar or less.
This happens a lot in English. Probably other languages too.
“Love you.”
“See ya.”
“Be right back.”
And more!
Te amo.
Nos vemos.
The top two are not too far out, the Spanish is similar - “you I love” “see us”. Be right back is so weird in English but funnier in Spanish, ya vuelvo, sounds like “I am already back”
It wouldn’t surprise me if this subject-dropping was introduced into English by non-native speakers? English is actually a bit peculiar as languages go in its wanting to put a subject in practically every sentence. It’s raining. It’s about time. What is the “it” here referring to? Linguists will tell you you’re looking at a subject placeholder that doesn’t convey any special meaning but simply completes the grammar. And people learning English from other languages that don’t need this fail to see the point. So they just start saying “About time we dropped that stupid it!” and then even native speakers start thinking yeah, why not ditch the subject if we don’t really need it?
It’s a thing that happens in most languages that create rules about sentence structure.
Basically, really important or frequently used statements will break the rules to… Save time.
Can you imagine that scene from scene from half bake, instead of “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, you’re cool, fuck you, I’m out!”
You’d get “I will fuck you, I will fuck you, I will fuck you, I will fuck you, I think that you are cool, I will fuck you, I will leave now.”
Something like ‘Im going to the store’ only becomes ‘going to the store!’ in contexts of urgency and familiarity, like yelling it on the way out the door to your spouse. You wouldn’t likely do that in your workplace.
https://youtube.com/shorts/5CceU7oR22s
This kids great if you like language nonsense.
I always thought that “Fuck you” was a command (“You fuck you”).
Yeah, one context in which a subject is not required even with proper English grammar is in imperatives, which makes sense given the implied urgency. If “Watch out!” had to be something more long-winded like “You must watch out!” you’d probably be dead.
Yes it does. I think it’s that way because it’s in locative case even though it doesn’t make the word itself look any different. English sort of has cases and doesn’t.
It works similarly in Latin. You don’t say ad domum. You only say domum.
An old I Love Lucy episode comes to mind, it’s got to be tough! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZV40f0cXF4
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English is weird tbh
What do you think of the Irish language? lol. Ouisce is ishkah is water, and that’s probably the only word that is spelled closest to how it’s pronounced. I’m just glad the bus lane is labeled “Lana bus”. I figured that one out just before stepping off the curb.
Hahaha, fair.
Though, according to Statutory Instrument 113/1993, the Irish and English markings can be used on their own, or in conjunction with each other:
http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/1993/en/si/0113.html
The problem is that Gaeilge (Gaelic) is the national language and it would simply cost twice the amount to paint Bus Lane underneath Lána Bus and the Irish government is cheap af just like most governments. And lazy.
Dude, I am so post office.
That one genuinely made me laugh out loud; thanks, haha.
It’s because “home” in this formation is an adverb, whereas school is a noun. You can be an adverb- I’m surprised, I’m exhuasted… - but you must be at a noun (or on, or in, or some other preposition).
You mean adjective, right? Adverb describes the verb, like talking “loudly” or “quietly”
They likely meant to say “adverbial phrase.”
This is the adverb form. If it were an adjective, it nearer to the noun and not sperated by the verb like in “He stole home plate.” “Home” is modifying the state of being or “am”.
with the addition that most languages - especially romance languages - have irregular verbs and constructions.
e.g. in french you say “I have 30 years” to say you are 30 years old. in English you say “I am 30” to say you are 30 years old. It makes no sense to say you are the number 30 or you have 30 years. But no one really thinks about it.
“I am 30” makes sense because it’s a shortened form of “I am 30 years old”.
Ironically students of foreign language often cling to these grammatical structures and are less confused by the same word in different contexts.
“I’m out of soap”
Well duh, you wouldn’t even fit inside one.
Do I fill in or fill out this form?
Neh, being home is also a state of mind
Well, tell them that home is more than just a location.
