Although I learned a smattering of a couple of other languages during my student days, I’m pretty nearly monolingual, and the language is English. I’m so used to it that I would almost say English “makes sense” to me.
But it doesn’t. Make sense that is. I’m just used to it.
And I’ve long been aware that it was one of the tougher languages to adjust to for the non-native speaker. Still, I kinda cracked up at this collection of examples of some of the things that make it so hard for non-natives to learn, assembled by linguist and author Aria Okrent in a piece for Aeon titled “Typos, Tips and Misprints” and subtitled: “Why is English spelling so weird and unpredictable? Don’t blame the mix of languages; look to quirks of timing and technology.”
Oh yeah, I was gonna give you list of what you might call words-that-should-rhyme-but-don’t, from the top of Okrent’s piece:
English spelling is ridiculous. Sew and new don’t rhyme. Kernel and colonel do. When you see an ough, you might need to read it out as “aw” (thought), “ow” (drought), “uff” (tough), “off” (cough), “oo” (through), or “oh” (though). The ea vowel is usually pronounced “ee” (weak, please, seal, beam) but can also be “eh” (bread, head, wealth, feather). Those two options cover most of it – except for a handful of cases, where it’s “ay”’ (break, steak, great). Oh wait, one more … there’s earth. No wait, there’s also heart.
The English spelling system, if you can even call it a system, is full of this kind of thing.
The full (and no, “full” doesn’t rhyme with “lull” or “mull” or “cull” or “hull,” but those last four don’t rhyme with “pull” and you get the idea by now). The funny/smart piece can be accessed via this link.
I have always had a sense that English, possibly because it is a blending of two laguages, French and Anglo Saxon, has a relatively simplified grammar. I suppose spelling is an issue, but that is what I think of as a dictionary problem. Spelling isn’t a problem language has, it’s a problem when we try to put language in a written form. At some point, we came to accept that there was a right way or wrong way to spell words. I like to think that happened when dictionaries were invented.
Plus some Celtic grammatical and lexicographic influence.
And of course there’s also a little Latin (less Greek).
Part of the problem is that American English (in all its dialects) has been diverging from British English (with all its own dialects) for several centuries.
If you go back to when these examples originated you can find rhymes where they are missing now. This can be true for even current Amurican and British English.
And I won’t go into changes in meaning.
The original meaning of the word ‘proof’ is ‘test’.
A mathematical proof is a test of the validity of a conjecture; the test of a pudding is in the eating; it’s the (apparent} exception that tests the rule.
Makes more sense this way.
My great-aunt taught first grade, and also taught adult literacy. She said the adults posed special challenges. A child will accept that “though” and “through” are not pronounced the same, but an adult will want to know why.
Now, I have to clean the kitchen. I can still smell the ghoti we had for dinner last night.
That was a very interesting article, and I can buy the premise that English spelling is nuts because of its history and development in relation to the printing press.
What I don’t quite understand is why English remained nuts. French used to have a lot of variation in spelling, too. During the Enlightenment, though, the Académie Française sat down and figured out a system. Now, although French orthography is confusing at first, at least the same letter combinations are usually pronounced the same way.
At some point, the English could have gotten together and said, you know what, let’s have “a” correspond to the vowel sound in “hot,” and “o” correspond to the vowel sound in “hope.” We could’ve avoided some of this mess. Too late now, though.
French was standardized when there was only one country speaking French as its official language. Standardization came easier for them.
English had already started to diverge into American and British English, and there was no way the newly independent colonies were going to surrender their linguistic liberty. Now, there are even more dialects of English, and those dialects are tied up with national sentiment to the point that standardization would be unthinkable.
Of course, the French spoken in Marseilles is not the same as Parisian French.
To RB: I suppose, but I still don’t see what stops the Brits in, say, 1750 from gathering some philologists at Oxbridge and making some decisions.
To Paul: Yes, there are difference accents and dialects, but my point is, French has a consistent system of spelling because the authorities in France decided it should. Pronunciation might differ somewhat, but orthography is consistent. “Eau” has the same vowel sound as in “beau,” “vous” rhymes with “sous,” no matter where you are.
To Brian: But that’s a great example of why French is easier. Those accent marks tell you how to pronounce the letter e. In English, if you don’t know, you just guess.
That’s kind of what happened, only it was booksellers who got together to pay Samuel Johnson to compile a dictionary.
The United States is larger in both area and population than France, and more heterogeneous, although you might find some interesting dialects among French of North African descent.
Having tried to learn french, I’m not certain it’s any easier. Yes, in English we prononces e in multiple ways. The French pronounce e differently from è or é or ê.
In my opinion, the languages are becoming uniform. I think what is having a huge effect on this is national media.
American English and English English are becoming what you hear on nightly national news broadcasts. Everybody is sounds like Norah O’Donnell or, I suppose someone like Piers Morgan. When listening to English broadcasters I am hardly ever baffled by what they are saying. For me, the problem comes when I watch British TV, where regional accents, or what might even be called, regional dialects are often heard. For example, I love the TV show “Broadchurch” but whole minutes go by when David Tennant might just as well be speaking Armenian.
Another thing. I watch a lot of programs on something called MHz from European countries where the dominant language is something else than English. In a lot of these shows, particularly the police procedurals, characters are often called to speak English. What amazes me is that very often their English is nearly perfect. It’s colloquial, and lightly accented at most. I watched one progam, “Beck” where the Swedish detective seems to speak perfectly fluent German with his German counterpart, but when a third person joins the discussion who is neither Swedish, nor German, they all converse in excellent English. As someone who sometimes finds it difficult to make out what people from Wisconsin are saying, I find this very intimidating.
A person who speaks two languages is bilingual.
A person who speaks three or more languages is multilingual.
A person who speaks only one language is an American.
I remember traveling in Europe where we ran into a party of four where one was American, one Swedish, one German and one French. Their conversations switched effortlessly among their four native languages.
There was a very funny episode on the TV classic: “I Love Lucy” where Lucy was telling Ricky that they both needed to take language lessons before their son, little Ricky, got old enough to pick up bad language habits from them. When Ricky was protesting, Lucy got out a children’s book that just so happened to have a lot of “ou” words in it: like bough, rough, through, etc., and Ricky got so exasperated when Lucy kept correcting him, he reluctantly agreed to take the class.
But, yes, the English language is a very difficult one to learn to use and speak by those from other countries trying to learn it. Heck, it’s not easy for some American citizens who are taught only English from birth to speak/write it correctly! I admire those in the profession of Education tremendously – so much of our future lies on their shoulders. Speak a kind word to a teacher today!
The question I ask myself in this context at least is, if English is such a difficult language, why do Europeans speak it so well? I think, for one thing, the spelling anomalies don’t matter that much because I think people learn English a lot from watching American TV. They sound American because they sound like Matthew Perry, basically.
In one show I watch, a Norwegian policeman was sent to Italy to interview subjects because he supposedly spoke Italian. After some fumbling attempts to speak the language with his Italian counterpart, the Italian guy said basically, “Let’s speak English instead.” and after that things were just fine.