What's strange about *your* language?

[mellemhund]

What's weird about english? Too many contextual uses of words. Eat lead. I'll lead. Try interpreting the meaning of "They read." on it's own without any context.

Haha - i get this with kindle text-to-speech all the time!

In my native tongue - danish - we have a habit of not pronouncing words the same way we write them. Like making a 'g' silent if it comes before an 'e' in the last syllable. But if you ever read a book on danish grammar, it wouldn't tell you.

 

[Dyme]

I will help the English people out and point out what is actually strange about your language.

I read Game Of Thrones, and read the word gaoler.
I thought "What? Goal? Does this have anything to do with goals?"

Turns out you pronounce it jailer. Which makes sooo much more sense.
The strangest part about English is how you pronounce and write your shit.

Let's pretend you are learning English and you know how to pronounce "owl" and you know how to pronounce "cowl".
You find the word "bowl".
What do you think? How would you pronounce it?


And something not directly related:
You use "an" instead of "a" before words that start with a vowel.
However you say "an x-ray" and "an FBI agent". I did this intuitively correct, but just today found out why you do that. Because you pronounce it "Eff Bee Eye" and that starts with a vowel. I laughed a lot when I found that out today.

 

[blankedboy]

Norfuk and Pitkern (same language) are the only non-English languages I can speak. It's essentially a derived syntax of English that's about 1/8th Tahitian. So it pretty much reads as really bad English.

"A brij i' a ting dat dem salan use to get from wan said taedha."

Have a look around the Norfuk/Pitkern Wikipedia to see what I mean. http://pih.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mien_Paij

 

[rokkolpo]

In Dutch. Many things, but we have a word that almost none but ourselves can pronounce.

Scheveningen.
(It's a city)

http://translate.google.nl/#en|nl|scheveningen

 

[Sammaul]

Well my native tongue is Aramaic which has some similarities with Hebrew to give a sense of the kind of phonetics involved.
What I find ''weird'' about it is that the rules for our verbs have really weird layers.
For instance, saying '' I can't'' translates to (phonetic) ''Laybie'' if you are male and ''Laplie'' if you are female.
As in many languages nouns are ''male or female'' but in aramaic the verbs have to be the right ''gender'' as well, not only when talking about yourself but in every verb used in a sentence.
Always gets me stern looks from my father when I talk Aramaic (born and raised in the Netherlands).
Because when I say ''The moon shines'', what my dad hears is ''The moon, he shines''

 

[uzo]

I will help the English people out and point out what is actually strange about your language.

I read Game Of Thrones, and read the word gaoler.
I thought "What? Goal? Does this have anything to do with goals?"

Turns out you pronounce it jailer. Which makes sooo much more sense.
The strangest part about English is how you pronounce and write your shit.

Let's pretend you are learning English and you know how to pronounce "owl" and you know how to pronounce "cowl".
You find the word "bowl".
What do you think? How would you pronounce it?

You spelt it wrong - the word is 'gaol'. The strange thing is in your first sentence you spelt it correctly, but then mixed it up in the next sentence.

As a side note, are you dyslexic? I remember hearing something somewhere that English is the language with the largest number of dyslexics - and scientists are starting to think it's the peculiar structure of English spelling that causes it. Dyslexics are a constant percentage in all demographics - so why else would we see more in English, yet it is almost unheard of in, for example, Japanese?

 

[Crumpster]

Rødgrød med fløde.

'nuff said. Good luck pronouncing it!

Actually I'll say more...

Some of the major characteristics of Danish pronunciation is that the Danish r has to be fetched from deep below the tonsils and, as somebody would say, it requires special muscles. The reduction of unstressed vowels and the glottal stop are also characteristic features.

The glottal stop may be difficult for non-Danish speakers to imitate and does not in fact exist in the pronunciation of the language in many regions of Denmark. However, it is important to pronounce the glottal stop because otherwise words may be misunderstood. For example le´ver (with a glottal stop) means liver, whereas lever (without a glottal stop) means to live. The glottal stop is produced by a sudden contraction of the expiration muscles. If the vowel of the syllable in question is long, the glottal stop occurs at the end of the vowel. If the vowel is short the glottal stop is pronounced before the following consonant. In a syllable with a short vowel and a voiceless consonant there is no glottal stop.

We also have a lot of unvoiced consonants, especially b, d and g. Mainly if they're not at the start of the word.

Danish, if you were wondering ^^

 

[Queen Michael]

The Swedish word for "chocolate bar", chokladkaka, is by an amazing coincidence also our word for "doing the twist on a sinking ship in springtime while you're wondering if that spot you've got on your back is something malignant." It's weird.

 

[Dyme]

I will help the English people out and point out what is actually strange about your language.

I read Game Of Thrones, and read the word gaoler.
I thought "What? Goal? Does this have anything to do with goals?"

Turns out you pronounce it jailer. Which makes sooo much more sense.
The strangest part about English is how you pronounce and write your shit.

Let's pretend you are learning English and you know how to pronounce "owl" and you know how to pronounce "cowl".
You find the word "bowl".
What do you think? How would you pronounce it?

You spelt it wrong - the word is 'gaol'. The strange thing is in your first sentence you spelt it correctly, but then mixed it up in the next sentence.

As a side note, are you dyslexic? I remember hearing something somewhere that English is the language with the largest number of dyslexics - and scientists are starting to think it's the peculiar structure of English spelling that causes it. Dyslexics are a constant percentage in all demographics - so why else would we see more in English, yet it is almost unheard of in, for example, Japanese?

Yea, I know that I spelt it wrong. It was just the closest word I knew in terms of looks. And I wouldn't ever have dreamt (or dreamed?) of pronouncing gaoler jailer. I would have pronounced it like goaler.
I am not dyslexic, but I really can see why there would be more dyslexics in English. In German ~every word is pronounced the same way it is written.

 

[Queen Michael]

In swedish, we don't have a "the" word. Instead, when mentioning a definitve article we ad an "et" or "en" to the end of it. Example:

Fish = Fisk
The fish = Fisken

Coffee = Kaffe
The coffee = Kaffet

Also, we have different words for different grandparents, depending on wether it's the parents of your father or your mother... why don't you have that english people? Seriously, get on this, your way is confusing.

Aahahha agreed. So your mother and your fathers father is grandpa?.... Im sensing incest here!

Kära svenskar, vi har problem! Hur lyckades den här utlänningen lista ut de mörka hemligheter som vi döljer?
(To all of you who don't speak Swedish: Please don't translate this.)

 

[Byr0m]

I'm English but that'll have been done to death by now so my language is now Klingon...
*dealwithit.jpg*
It's a language of fearsome warriors but completely and utterly spoken by people who could never claim that title

 

[GrungyMunchy]

Not only that but English is widely reputed to be amongst one of the hardest languages to learn to speak due to the wide amount of idiotmatic language we posess

Wait, are you serious? English uses nowhere near as many different words as the majority of latin languages. A verb in English has 4 or 5 different variations to aknowledge time and person, in my language it has 67. Seriously, English is one of the easiest languages I've ever encountered.

 

[Nickolai77]

No offense OP, but you've made your language sound well and truly cluster-fucked

I'm English, and personally i find it weird and strange how other European languages like French and German assign genders to nouns. Seriously, how can desks, chairs, radiators etc be masculine and feminine? What's the point? Why not just settle on one word that means "the"?

Also, question to native Germans- does it really matter if you use the wrong gender to describe something? If i wanted the Hähnchen off the menu say, how important is it i get the gender right?

Also, from what i've heard English is fairly easy to speak at a basic level because you don't need to master complex rules like gender for instance, and you don't really need to know the difference between where/were and there/their/they're to be understood. Mastering English however is supposed to be hard.

 

[Auninteligentname]

In Norway..., well, firstly, we have two written languages, which almost everyone is required to learn. Then we can continue that we have three more letters than the english language: æ, ø and å. And lastly, is wish to point out that there is different dialects/accents all over the country, and we still have to learn the same two languages. Which gives us the problem that in one pat of the country, half of the written words sounds different than how they say it, while in the other half it sounds correct, and then the other language comes in and inverses this. And in the end, everyone is confused.

 

[Thaa'ir]

Hm...I guess I can touch on something about English.

English is unique among all of the Germanic languages for how simply...not Germanic it is. It has far more words of Old French or Latin origin than of Germanic origin, either inherited directly from Old English/Anglo-Saxon or borrowed from Old Norse. It does not use the verb-second word order characteristic of other Germanic languages. It has no grammatical gender whatsoever.

Yet despite how much non-Germanic influence it contains, it retains the two dental fricatives (our "th" sounds) which have vanished from every other Germanic language except Icelandic, and which are very rare to find in general...how strange.

And since we've talked about English so much, I shall point to my favorite language: Arabic. Be careful how long you hold out your vowels or consonants, or it can change the meaning of what you want to say or render it gibberish.

I once tried to ask a buddy where the bathroom was in Standard Arabic, but ended up asking "Where is the pigeon" instead. >.<

 

[Ruwrak]

The grammar of the dutch.

We have rules for certain conjugations.
Then we have exceptions
And exceptions to the exceptions.
Also exceptions to those, but only if section 2.14 of the green booklet apply.

... seriously. It's messed up.

In english it's easy.
Sunflower -> SunflowerS
here it is 'ZonnEbloem' or 'ZonnENbloem'

Its.... no difference at all. EVERYONE knows what I mean by it, but nooo the spelling has to be with an N or no N. It's not even consistent. One time a word like that does get an N and the other time it does not. And they change it about every year or so... wtf?

 

[CrimsonBlaze]

In Spanish, the hardest thing to learn is accents.

There are many words that are spelled the same and having the accent changes the word and meaning completely.

 

[Vonnis]

Not so sure I would call it *my* language, but I've always been baffled by Dutch expressions. They seem to make absolutely no goddamn logical sense. Like when you want to tell somebody they're being paranoid, you say (translated literally):"Stop looking for nails on low water." Seriously, what the fuck does that mean? Or "all silliness on a stick".

I can't remember many more off the top of my head, but it's happened to me quite a few times that I would have to turn to a Dutch friend to decipher what seemed to be complete gibberish, but was actually a commonly known Dutch expression.

Ha, well phrases like that rarely make sense, regardless of the language. That said, "Stop looking for nails on low water" doesn't mean anything to me (I'm dutch myself).
Expressions aside, the only peculiarity I can think of is dutch swearing. I've never heard any other language that uses as many references to disease as we do, nor have I ever heard someone string as many curse words together in any other language.
Moving on to local variants: I think it's rather odd that as long as I speak my dialect (Maastrichts), I can have a conversation with someone speaking Danish and we'll understand each other 90% of the time. For the record, Maastricht is all the way in the south of the netherlands, so it's not like we're right next to Denmark, and everyone who lives in between won't understand either (except Frisians I imagine).