Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Fanfic Related Why English Is So Difficult

I just got this in an email from my folks. And I couldn't resist sharing it with all of you.

We'll begin with a box, and the plural is boxes;
but the plural of ox became oxen not oxes.
One fowl is a goose, but two are called geese,
yet the plural of moose should never be meese.
You may find a lone mouse or a nest full of mice;
yet the plural of house is houses, not hice.
If the plural of man is always called men,
why shouldn't the plural of pan be called pen?
If I spoke of my foot and show you my feet,
and I give you a boot, would a pair be called beet?
If one is a tooth and a whole set are teeth,
why shouldn't the plural of booth be called beeth?
Then one may be that, and three would be those,
yet hat in the plural would never be hose,
and the plural of cat is cats, not cose.
We speak of a brother and also of brethren,
but though we say mother we never say methren.
Then the masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
but imagine the feminine, she, shis and shim.


Anonymous


Some reasons to be grateful if you grew up speaking English;
1) The bandage was wound around the wound.
2) The farm was used to produce produce.
3) The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.
4) We must polish the Polish furniture.
5) He could lead if he would get the lead out.
6) The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
7) There is no time like the present, he said it was time to present the present.
8) At the Army base, a bass was painted on the head of a bass drum.
9) When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.
10) I did not object to the object.
11) The insurance was invalid for the invalid.
12) There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.
13) They were too close to the door to close it.
14) The buck does funny things when the does are present.
15) A seamstress and a sewer fell down into a sewer line.
16) To help with planting, the farmer taught his sow to sow.
17) The wind was too strong to wind the sail.
18) After a number of Novocain injections, my jaw got number.
19) Upon seeing the tear in the painting I shed a tear.
20) I had to subject the subject to a series of tests.
21) How can I intimate this to my most intimate friend?
22) I spent last evening evening out a pile of dirt.


Let's face it - English is a crazy language.


There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine In pineapple.
English muffins weren't invented in England.
We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.
And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham?
Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend?
If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?
If teachers taught, why didn't preachers praught?
If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat?
In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital?
Ship by truck and send cargo by ship?
Have noses that run and feet that smell?
How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wiseguy are opposites?
You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which an alarm goes off by going on.
If Dad is Pop, how come! Mom isn't Mop?
GO FIGURE! That's American English.


unlike Sanskrit english made its own rules of pronounciation & Grammar in a different way based on the words derivated from:
example CH is pronounced as ka wen the word is derived from greek: example
character = karakter
CH is pronounced as sha wen the word is from french
example champagne,chateau
similarly with singulars & plurals


ML

Oh ML that was delightful! Thanks for sharing. I had to read that poem out loud as if I were reading a Dr. Seuss book. I read it to my husband and laughed all the way through as I read it.

-- DJ

Thanks a lot for sharing that, ML!

Barb

Yes, English is a wonderful language. What other language can you say "They're putting their stuff over there.", and make perfect sense.
This
reminds me of when my oldest daughter was just learning to talk. She started calling her grandfather (my father) Pop Pop. My mom said that she just wanted Skye to call her anything but changed her mind for some reason when she became Mop Mop for a few days.

Frank

LOL. This reminds me of Eddie Izzard's routine when he discusses how the English came up with the spelling for "through."

Oh, wow. Well, it reminds me of the word "ghoti". Never heard of it? It's an alternative spelling of "fish". Consider. "f" can be spelled "gh", as in "trough". The short "i" can be spelled "o", as in "women". "sh" can be spelled "ti" as in - oh, I don't remember which word it was right now. Not "motion", because there the "sh" sound is spelled "tio", but there is an English word where "sh" is spelled "ti", believe me.

Such fun, ML!
Ann

I think it's nation that they often use for the ti.

Consider pronouncing the following words

trough
through
dough
bough
tough
rough
cough

some are pronounced the same way, but there are 4 different pronunciations for the same four letters.

here's a great sentence for you:

Indeed, he protected her in word and in deed.

Actually, there are six pronunciations for the -ough phonogram . I think you captured five of them in your list.

/o/ - dough
/oo/ - through
/uff/ - rough
/off/ - cough
/aw/ - bought
/ow/ - bough

I never thought about it myself until I made my kids memorize them for spelling. (Kind of makes you feel sorry for my kids, doesn't it?)

I don't believe the "ghoti" thing actually works though, except as a joke, because you will never see 'gh' making an /f/ sound at the beginning of a word in English. You might see it - like in 'ghastly' - but the 'h' will be silent and the sound will be /g/.

Plenty of them, generally Latin in origin. (Again, I consult my phonogram cards...) In addition to the many -tion words, there's patient, confidential, dietitian, penitentiary, differentiate, and cautious - and any other words using those same endings. Anytime 'ti' is used at the beginning of any syllable after the first one, it will make a /sh/ sound. You won't see it at the end of words though - like in ghoti - because with a very few exceptions, English words don't end in 'i'.

Oh, and 'ci', 'si', and 'ch' can all make the /sh/ sound as well, just to keep life interesting.

Caroline, who is taking off her geeky homeschooler hat now

Meredith Knight had a quote a few years back as her exit message on IRC -- to the best of my memory, it went:

English doesn't borrow words from other languages. It follows other languages into dark alleys, beats them up, and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.



PJ

Learning to spell was for me, as a dyslexic, a nightmare. I still don't do it well. But the way I'd do it was to spell phonetically. But then, realizing that many words aren't spelled phonetically, I'd add random silent letters.

Thus, a word like 'nothing' could find itself spelled 'knothing' - when I added that silent 'k' .

It used to drive my teachers absolutely up the wall .

ML

ML said
I get a good chuckle out of some of your spellings too, even though not as much as I used to.

Caroline,
I think the ghoti thing was made up to show the seeming randomness of English spelling. I used to use it in my lectures about the difficulties learning disabled kids had with learning spelling rules. it was't meant to fit into all the rules.

gerry

Yeah, well some people pronounce bough like dough. I'd forgot it was pronounced like cow.

You nailed it, ML. Of course, it's difficult to be to hard on a language where 'fat chance' and 'slim chance' mean essentially the same thing.

Funny the issue of dyslexia should be mentioned in conjunction with learning to spell. I'm almost postive I have a dyslexic student currently and am at my wits end as to how to handle it. She can always repeat words once I say them so it's not a lack of language aptitude, but asking her to read off a page with words of more than 2 letters turns into a nightmare.

What I find hardest about any language is when brand names turn into the common name. So some Americans eat "Kraft dinner" which apparently is macaroni noodles and cheese along with a "Coke"--which usually isn't even made by the CocaCola Co. It's so confusing!

Isn't there somewhere you can send her for an assessment? When I taught at a university, I would refer students like her to Disability Services, where they would be sent for a learning disabilities assessment and then offered help and support - for example, some students would get special software or reading aids, and departments would be informed of the disability and asked to make allowances or provide certain types of handouts (eg large-print or in particular colours).

If you're not sure what's provided where you teach, ask a colleague (or the department administrator, who is generally the one who knows everything )


Wendy

I went through that whole thing, and didn't see one of my favorite English language mix-up things:

We drive on a parkway, but park on a driveway.

And I agree, the whole thing was totally funny! I found myself having to go back a few times in the numbered part, to re-pronounce certain words in my head, now that I knew which context I was supposed to be using.

I've seen this other places, I'm sure. Like on a T-shirt. English betrays its roots in every turn. It started out as a pidgin - a trade language that was an amalgam of the languages being spoken in an area. It steals wholeheartedly the words, the concepts, the grammar it needs to express concepts from the cultures it's dealing with, and makes the concepts its own as well.

Inuit may have many words for the varying aspects of snow, but I guarantee if an English speaker needs them, we'll cheerfully put them in our user dictionary.

AND, to make matters even more bizarre, a competent English speaker can usually read through the English work of non-native speakers and not only get the gist of the the message, but may even have trouble figuring out how to make it 'proper' English! (I have a Greek speaker I'm BRing for on a different forum. I know what she's trying to express, but for the life of me, I can't always figure out how to make it a 'normal' English phrase. And I dare you to find another language that would allow the term 'BRing' to fly!)

Thanks for sharing! I'm going to show my hubbie. I was laughing so hard my nose hurts now

I totally agree, however it is actually true that the Inuit language (50,000 dialects) that exist do not have an abnormally large amount of words for snow. Some people say there is no one language but a series of groups overlapping.

I think there was an argument somewhere that one of the first papers stated that the Inuit had four words for snow that each meaning "falling snow", "snow on the ground", "snow drift" and "drifting snow" or blowing snow"...I can't remember which of the last two it is. Another researcher expanded the list but some say it is because they did not understand the structure of the language.

I think there are about four or five words.

English is just crazy, however I can't seem to grasp any other language. I guess I just don't have constant exposure to it/them.

That is just so sweet!



Isn't that just crazy?

My parents live (well my mum is back for a bit) in Northern Manitoba on a reserve and they say the people there are really isolated from the outside world. No surprise, but what did surprise me was there are people who don't know Cree and rely on English, but they only know a handful of words. They of course of deeper problems. Most can't understand how to string together a sentence or understand the meaning of a word. I can't imagine not having the ability to speak at the level of a five year old in the only language I know. Some can do partial Cree and English, but to an outsider make no sense at all. Two or three of the older people try to learn, but they get very frustrated with the 'silly white man words'.

I totally agree! Craziness I tell you, CRAZINESS!

If the plural of "mouse" is "mice", why isn't the plural of "blouse" "blice"?

Nan

I'm pretty sure we had that in our English book (one of the Green Line series).

And there are several sets of letters which sound the same:
two - too
brake - break

And other letters which aren't pronounced for some stupid reason, as in: lis(t)en, (k)now,...

And then there are the letters not written but pronounced:
(y)uniform, n(y)ew (okay, it shoud be a yod...)

And the vowels - none of them are pronounced the way they are written, and the same combination can be pronounced in so many different ways... This is certainly different in French, Italian, Spanish and German - at least as far as I can tell.

I don't agree here. English certainly doesn't steal much in the way of grammar - it doesn't have much of it in the first place. At least not if you compare it to German or Latin.

Oh, and then there are those (whole!) words which can be pronounced in several different ways - like the word 'foyer'. I know of three different pronounciations - and I'm not even native!

Oh, and last but not least:

There was this little girl with a lock on her forehead.
If she was good, she was really, really good, but if she was bad, she was horrid.

I mean, 'forehead' can be pronounced as in fore-head, but also as a rhyme to 'horrid'. How strange is that?