ah, I was wondering because, in comparison to my native tongue (French), I’ve found English significantly more intuitive. I may be biased though, or French may just be another mongrel of a language 😅
My uneducated feeling so far is that most languages weren’t developed with particularly logical rules, and rules were added retroactively, and as such, most languages are ugly amalgamations, but English gets some of the worst rep because of its dominance on the internet.
That’s just every language once you get into it. English is a fairly standard north germanic language. There’s been a lot of mythology built around it over the years which often leads to misunderstandings, especially from monolinguals who simply have nothing to compare to.
The German language is ironically one of the weirder Germanic languages. When I say North Germanic languages I mostly mean what is now known as Scandinavian languages (and sometimes Dutch depending on who you ask).
I think they’ve been on the ball with spelling reforms as the language has evolved. The last one as recently as in 1996. English has no central authority for spelling, making such reforms much harder to implement. Conservatives are of course, like always, a problem. Being against any and all spelling reform. The main argument seem to be that it makes it harder for people to read really old texts in their original form. Which for some reason makes spelling and speach drifting apart worth it. I known Swedish conservative pseudo-intellectuals often praise the English for it’s lack of reform.
Maybe English should just get rid of the stupid “the first consonant is silent when two consonants form the beginning of a word” rule tbf.
It’s a skill issue to mispronounce loan words (like gnome, pterodactyl or psychology).
English is a hideous mongrel of a language.
I was already an adult when I learned that “salmon” is supposed to be pronounced as “sammon”.
Wait wait wait… How are baked and naked supposed to be pronounced?
I think, e is silent in baked and not in naked. But that’s kind of like Sean Bean
I’ve been pronouncing naked as baked for a while now. Thankfully it doesn’t come up in conversation as often.
Thanks for the painful laugh, Gugulethu
out of curiosity, do you speak another language than English?
I sure don’t!
ah, I was wondering because, in comparison to my native tongue (French), I’ve found English significantly more intuitive. I may be biased though, or French may just be another mongrel of a language 😅
My uneducated feeling so far is that most languages weren’t developed with particularly logical rules, and rules were added retroactively, and as such, most languages are ugly amalgamations, but English gets some of the worst rep because of its dominance on the internet.
That’s just every language once you get into it. English is a fairly standard north germanic language. There’s been a lot of mythology built around it over the years which often leads to misunderstandings, especially from monolinguals who simply have nothing to compare to.
Funny you mention Germanic languages, given how deterministic German itself is on pronunciation of letters.
The German language is ironically one of the weirder Germanic languages. When I say North Germanic languages I mostly mean what is now known as Scandinavian languages (and sometimes Dutch depending on who you ask).
Gotcha. I wish more languages were like German in their adherence to letter-phoneme pairing.
I think they’ve been on the ball with spelling reforms as the language has evolved. The last one as recently as in 1996. English has no central authority for spelling, making such reforms much harder to implement. Conservatives are of course, like always, a problem. Being against any and all spelling reform. The main argument seem to be that it makes it harder for people to read really old texts in their original form. Which for some reason makes spelling and speach drifting apart worth it. I known Swedish conservative pseudo-intellectuals often praise the English for it’s lack of reform.
Besides, they say ‘read really old texts’ as if this is easily achieved right now, which it is not
Snail, small, three, press, change. I could keep going.
I’ve never heard of that rule. There are a few combos that are basically always that way though: pt, gn, and kn come to mind.
And then there are the cases where two consonants combine to form another sound entirely: ph, ch, sh, th.
If you don’t pronounce the p in pterodactyl or psychiatrist then lose my number
If I start pronouncing them, can I get your number?
You just want to see the pretty bunnies, won’t you?
Who wouldn’t
Tortoise might be fine too
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English is a mix and match of a bunch of other languages