Why English is confusing 1

[tsdragon]

I just ran across this little tidbit in some documentation. The programmer mentions somewhere that his native language is Ukranian.

...ColHeaderEndDragEvent occurs when the user has ended to drag a column header.

I suppose if English is not your native language it makes perfect sense: "the user has started to (or begun to)", so why not "the user had ended to"?

Tracy Dryden

Meddle not in the affairs of dragons,
For you are crunchy, and good with mustard.

 

[CajunCenturion]

I did understand Stella740pl. There are differences between EFL folks in the USA and EFL folks in the UK. It is those differences that prompted George Bernard Shaw to say:

"England and America are two countries separated by the same language."

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[Stella740pl]

I did understand Stella740pl.
I didn't have a doubt.

Do you mean you have attempted to answer my question or rather replace it by something completely different? I do know that differences exist between UK, USA, and other flavors of English (even though some UK folks prefer to call them American, Canadian, or Australian, not English). And there are dialects, too, and professional jargons, and slang. So let's not substitute the question and the answer.

Those differences not so drastic as to affect my question.

I just find a tiny bit of irony in the situation where a group of English speakers (did I make a mistake here?) discuss why English is so confusing when studied as a second language.

Not that some of the thoughts don't have their merits, and I can say a few things why I think my language can be confusing, too, but still.

Didn't mean it to be this long. Intended it as a light-hearted comment, but was drawn into a longer exchange. Well...

 

[tsdragon]

I wasn't only commenting about how confusing English is as a second language. Those examples just help to underscore how confusing it can be. English is confusing as a first language.

Tracy Dryden

Meddle not in the affairs of dragons,
For you are crunchy, and good with mustard.

 

[CajunCenturion]

I'm sorry Stella740pl. I was just trying make a little joke. English is a difficult language.

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[jrbarnett]

I didn't write this; I only wish I knew who did so I could properly attribute it.

The English Language

I take it you already know
Of tough and bough and cough and dough.
Others may stumble, but not you, On
Hiccough, thorough, laugh and through.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps?

Beware of heard; a dreadful word
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead: it's said like bed, not bead;
For goodness sake don't call it deed.
Watch out for meat and great and threat.
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt.)

A moth is not a moth in mother; nor both in bother, broth in brother;
And here is not a match for there,nor dear and fear for bear and pear.
And then there's dose and rose and lose
(just look them up) and goose and choose,
And cork and work, and card and ward,
And font and front, and work and sword,
And do and go, and thwart and cart.
Come, come ! I've hardly made a start.

A dreadful language ? Man alive!I mastered it when I was five!
I will teach you in my verse
Words like corps, corks, horse and worse.
For this phonetic labyrinth
Yields monkey, donkey, ninth and plinth,
Wounded, rounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dies and diet, lord and word;
Earth and hearth and clerk and herd;
Evil, devil, tomb, bomb, comb;
Doll, roll; dull, bull; some and home.
Finally - for I've had enough -
Through, though, thorough, plough, cough, tough,
While hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advise is give it up.

--
John

 

[jrbarnett]

Don't remember where this one wandered in from... maybe the same place we got this language from!

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 [really?] or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.

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? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese?

Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend, that you comb through annals of history but not a single annal? 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 preacher praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? If you wrote a letter, perhaps you bote your tongue?

Sometimes I think all the English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. 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 wise guy are opposites? How can overlook and oversee be opposites, while quite a lot and quite a few are alike? How can the weather be hot as hell one day and cold as hell another.

Have you noticed that we talk about certain things only when they are absent? Have you ever seen a horseful carriage or a strapful gown? Met a sung hero or experienced requited love? Have you ever run into someone who was combobulated, gruntled, ruly or peccable? And where are all those people who ARE spring chickens or who would ACTUALLY hurt a fly?

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 clock goes off by going on.

English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race (which, of course, isn't a race at all). That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible. And why, when I wind up my watch, I start it, but when I wind up this essay, I end it.

Last updated 05/25/96 / Steven Macdonald / steve - at - smacdonald - dot - com

(Note: the website and domain that I got this from are no longer in operation. If somebody knows of an up to date URL for this, I would be grateful to hear about it).

 

[CajunCenturion]

Great poem jrbarnett. I think its named, The English Lesson, but as far as I know, the author is unknown. Here are a few additional verses.


We'll begin with box, and the plural is boxes,
But the plural of ox should be oxen, not oxes.
Then one fowl is goose, but two are called geese,
Yet the plural of moose should never be meese.

You may find a lone mouse or a whole lot of mice,
But 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 pen?

The cow in the plural may be cows or kine,
But the plural of vow is vows, not vine.
And I speak of a foot, and you show me your feet,
But I give a boot... would a pair be beet?

If one is a tooth, and a whole set is teeth,
Why shouldn't the plural of booth be beeth?
If the singular is this, and the plural is these,
Why shouldn't the plural of kiss be kese?

Then one may be that, and three be those,
Yet the plural of hat would never be hose.
We speak of a brother, and also of brethren,
But though we say mother, we never say methren.

The masculine pronouns are he, his and him,
But imagine the feminine she, shis, and shim.
So our English, I think you will agree,
Is the trickiest language you ever did see.

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[CajunCenturion]

jrbarnett - Here is one site:
English is a Crazy Language

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[SF0751]

Check out this excerpt of Richard Lederer's essay "English is a Crazy Language".

Susan
"Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example." - Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894)

 

[ESquared]

The poem posted by jbarnett seems awfully reminiscent of the much longer poem written by Gerald Nolst Trenite, The Chaos. He lived from 1870 to 1946.

For example, Gerald's poem ends:

Finally, which rhymes with enough–
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give it up!!!

Do you think Gerald copied the other author, or the other way around?

-------------------------------------
• Every joy is beyond all others. The fruit we are eating is always the best fruit of all.
• It is waking that understands sleep and not sleep that understands waking. There is an ignorance of evil that comes from being young: there is a darker ignorance that comes from doing it, as men by sleeping lose the k

 

[Stella740pl]

CajunCenturion,

I was just trying make a little joke.
Never mind. So was I.

It seemed to me that you were correcting my grammar (in "native English speakers"). Was there an actual error? If so, what it was?


English is a difficult language.
Do you know of an easy one?
Maybe I should start learning it next.

In general, this thread transformed, instead of discussing difficulties of English, into having a little fun with the language. Which is great, even though I've read most of this before, and more than once.

 

[CajunCenturion]

No error that I'm aware of Stella740pl. I guess that if you replace "native English" with "original English" then my joke may make more sense. I don't know what "original English" is.

Again I'm sorry.

The poems and essays provided are having fun with language, but they do illustrate a number of difficulties with English.

What is an easy language to learn? That largely depends on your first language and how similar the target language is to your first langauge. By similar, I mean things like sentence structure, grammatical constructs, and the like.

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[tsdragon]

This is all coming from what I remember from high school and college, but I always thought that German was a pretty easy language to learn. Aside from the difficulties with the genders of nouns, which English has largely done away with, it wasn't that difficult. I don't recall that many irregular verbs (why is "to be" irregular in so many languages?), and the spelling and pronunciation rules were solid. We couldn't believe it when the teacher told us that "ie" is always pronounced long "e" and "ei" is always pronounced long "i" and there are no exceptions. Sentence structure is different from English, but fairly consistent.


Tracy Dryden

Meddle not in the affairs of dragons,
For you are crunchy, and good with mustard.

 

[AngelB]

If you can get your mouth round some of the pronunciation then Welsh is a pretty easy language to learn. Nouns are genderless and the language is phonetic so you just say what you see. It helps to have a lungful of cattarh too

Gez



Sorry, did I say something wrong? Pardon me for breathing which I never do anyway so I don't know why I bother to say it Oh God I'm so depressed - Marvin, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

 

[Stella740pl]

What is an easy language to learn? That largely depends on your first language and how similar the target language is to your first langauge. By similar, I mean things like sentence structure, grammatical constructs, and the like.
Exactly.
That's why I didn't participate in the original conversation - it just didn't make sense to me to discuss how confusing English is. I mean, confusing from what standpoint? What's your first language is and also what level you have already achieved at learning English make all the difference.

But then, what did you compare English with when said it is difficult?

...German was a pretty easy language to learn. Aside from the difficulties with the genders of nouns, ... and the spelling and pronunciation rules were solid.
That's coming from an English speaker; same language group, right?
Yes, German pronunciation seems easier to me than English, and I am not afraid of genders of nouns, as we have them in Russian, too, but otherwise I don't think it would be much easier for me than English. Though, who knows.

If you can get your mouth round some of the pronunciation then Welsh is a pretty easy language to learn.
Pronunciation? I cannot get my English pronunciation straight, and probably never will. You got to start very early in your childhood to avoid accent problems. Though, again, who knows, what's difficult for you might be easy for me, and the other way around.

the parts of speach that make it hard
Parts of speach? What languages without parts of speach did they speak?

 

[Dimandja]

How about this for a tough language to learn.

In one of the African languages I speak (actually my native language),

"love" is "lolango".
"I love you" is "dimi kolangaka".
"I dont'love you" is "dimi hakolange".

Verbs get transformed in mid-flight, so to speak.

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[jrbarnett]

Thanks for your information CajunCenturion and ESquared.

John

 

[Stella740pl]

Dimandja,

It's hard to tell how easy/hard it is by a single example. Is there a system to the changes? Are there too many exceptions and "irregular" verbs?

I guess, if those mid-flight transformations are systematic across the language, so as you can draw a chart of a reasonable size, what changes to what and when, it shouldn't be too hard then. Same suffixes/prefixes, or what's it, every time, the base stays there.

It's a programmer in me speaking, not a Russian-speaking person. ;-)

 

[Dimandja]

You're right, there is a system. Although one that is vastly different from English systems. For example, "ko" (you) and "ha" (not) will often be used to transfrom a verb. To add to the above example, "I love" is "dimi nangaka", while the verb "to love" is "nanga".

The closest I can think of is how nouns are modified in Russian, in the presence of a possessive. But I think there is a firm rule about that.

Actually, the most difficult part of this language is speaking it. There is virtually no stress on syllables. For example, "Dimandja" should be pronounced without stress anywhere -- flat. Many English speaking friends who have tried to correctly pronounce my name say that by the third syllable their lungs are ready to collapse. They can't imagine uttering a whole unstressed sentence, and surviving the ordeal. For many words in this language, instead of stress, syllables are drawn out in a sing-song manner.

Also, the language has an aboundance of words that are spelled the same; yet, when put in context, even the same word will acquire a different pronunciation.

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[Stella740pl]

From what I've seen so far, I found Hebrew to be almost mathematically systematic a language, in the way verbs transform. Very different from English, but shouldn't be too hard for a technically minded person.

Pronunciation of a few letters (not letter combinations) can be different sometimes, but if you know grammatical constructs, you often know how to pronounce it. Sometimes you got to know the word to know how to read it.

It's the alphabet that was most confusing to me.