What's strange about *your* language?

[Buzz Killington_v1legacy]

oh, also we have seven causes. take that, inferior germans with your four not even talking to you english guys with a single one..

English still retains three cases--subjective, objective, and genitive/possessive--but we only bother to mark them on the personal pronouns (he/him/his, she/her/hers, etc.). Everything else is handled with word order and prepositions, with a vestigial genitive case marker ('s) for nouns. English has gotten pretty far away from its inflectional roots and become much more of an isolating/analytic language.

Also, for everyone who's mentioned the silent letters in English: part of the problem there is that English orthography (the writing system, in other words) got more or less frozen in place while the pronunciation of the language was still changing. Take a word like knight, for instance, with its silent k and gh--those consonants used to be pronounced in Middle English. (It sounded something like "kuhneekht".)

 

[Uber Evil]

Russian, the language in which you can write a sentence full of swears and it won't be swearing.

Is that strange enough for you?

Seriously? What is that sentence? I want to know!

 

[Knight Captain Kerr]

The Irish language has so many exceptions for the verbs, there's no real point in having the rules there in the first place.

It's also impossible to have a normal conversation without mentioning God. 'Dia duit' means 'hello'. But a literal tranlation is 'God be with you'. Not only that, but if someone says 'Dia duit' you can't reply with 'dia duit'. You have to reply with 'Dia is Muire duit(God and Mary be with you)'. And if somone says 'Dia is Muire duit', you have to reply 'Dia is Muire is Pardraig duit(God,Mary,Patrick). And if somone says 'Dia is Muire is Pardraig duit' you have to reply, 'Dia is Muire is Pardraig is Niamh duit(God,Mary,Patrick,Niamh)' . And if someone says 'Dia is Muire is Pardraig is Niamh duit', you have to reply 'Dia is Muire is Padraig is Niamh is Peadar duit(God,Mary,Patrick,Niamh,Peter)' Thankfully, there's nothing after that .

In fairness that is the same for a lot of languages as I am fairly sure Goodbye is God by ye or God be with you or something along those lines.

OT: Irish isn't actually too bad for learning stuff like verbs in my opinion until you go past the basics. Once you start to do the genitive cases, plurals, proper syntax, past and present participles then it goes out the fucking window. Although to be honest I think a lot of these problems come from bad teaching at the foundation of the language in primary school and certain patterns not being made clear and assumed to be known in primary school level.

I had poor Irish teachng in primary so now i'm doing ordinary for the leaving.
Craic is the Irish word for fun and enjoyment well it is more than just that but its meaning is hard to translate into english. Anyway I often say to somebody "Any craic?" and if I ever move to a different country I would be worried a lot of people would think i'm a big druggie.

 

[Gavmando]

Australians invented tripthongs because we're lazy.
A tripthong is where you elongate the vowel sound to make it longer for no reason. It's because we speak from the back of our mouth's. Unlike the American accent where they speak from the front of the mouth. Which is why people find the accent annoying as it has a very penetrating sound. It's not their fault, it's just how they speak. That's why it's hard for an American actor to do a good Australian accent. They have to learn a whole new way to speak.

The reason it's lazy is because when you speak from the back of the mouth, you dont use your lips as much. You just move your throat around. Essentially, everybody else speaks, we make a noise and try to shape it as it comes out.

 

[DanDanikov]

Some people say English is a really difficult language to learn, others that it's really easy. I suspect this is because English is quite possible the hardest to learn from a rules perspective, which is how many languages are taught academically. Most languages are easier to pick up practically; English merely encourages more people to take the practical approach due to its inherent supposed complexity. That's my theory, anyway.

 

[fulano]

Well for English I can say that one of the fascinating things about English is how it evolved over time from us taking bits and pieces from other languages and assimilating them into our own (English actually contains words taken straight from other languages too, including Arabic and various European languages), in short, English is quite literally a 'bastard language'.

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 as well as the fact that English is one of the least consistant languages around (there are numerous exceptions to grammatical and puncuation related rules in English as well as several words that sound the same but can have completely different meanings).

Sure, it might not be exotic like Cantonese Chinese but you'd be suprised by the amount of intricacy and history behind English.

by speak you mean pronounce, right? Because english is quite easy if you speak a language like spanish, portiguese, italian, french, or other more complex ones (those that have more rules).

If I tried to speak Spanish the way I speak English I'd be called a dumbass.

Examples...

English: I want to cross the street.

Direct Spanish Translation: Yo Querer Cruzar (el/la) calle == WTF?

Correct Spanish translation: Yo (<--optional) Quiero (<--conjugated form of 'querer') cruzar (first person of 'cruzar' therefore it stays the same) la calle (yes, guys, the street is a girl).

What makes English beautiful to me is that as a "bastard language" it works just fine b/c it is highly compressed; verbs are a breeze and things don't have a "sex," and that saves you a bunch of dealing with suffixes; the grammar is fairly straight forward compared to a bunch of other languages; and more importantly: a bunch of people speak it, which makes it even easier to learn.

 

[Iron Mal]

No, it's still widely spoken, and is the second most prevalent of the Sino-languages (70 million speakers, last time I checked) and still the most common Chinese language spoken outside China/Taiwan (Mandarin's slowly catching up thanks to migration patterns).

I did not know that and thank you for correcting me (learn something new every day).

Still, regarding the rest, you make a fair point, especially regarding the difficulty in learning new languages at all. The difficulty encountered is merely a different sort. With Cantonese it's primarily to do with phonology, while English, its grammatical exceptions and contractions as you mention (as well as numerous other features).

I've tried learning quite a few languages in the past (including French, Spanish, Latin, Japanese and even a small bit of Klingon for a few giggles) and haven't had a whole lot of success with any of them.

As a result I'm very familiar with how difficult it can be to try and learn how to speak and write in other languages, so I wholeheartedly agree with your elaboration on my point there, even for languages that some off-handedly consider to be 'easy' it can be a very daunting task just to learn basic phrases like 'hello' and 'where is the bathroom, please?' (and in the case of Klingon it'll give you a murderous sore throat).

However, as a departure from my question, these would be reasons why the languages are fascinating rather than necessarily strange. Because, as a spoken language, everything you say in English can be easily written down (with the possible exception of some onomatopoeic exclamations/expressions) whereas so much of spoken Cantonese literally cannot be written down. Granted, this may be due to the vagaries of written Chinese, being non-alphabetised or having syllable symbols (e.g. kana for Japanese), but it's still an aspect that one may identify as lunatic(!)

This does make me wonder then how Cantonese has been carried and kept alive through the various generations when it for the most part must be transered and taught from person to person through the way of word of mouth (a method that in most cases would logically result in radical changes and adaptations being made to the language to match the technology and social climate of today).

Even with the standardisation and regulation that having a smaller number of words (most of which can be, and often are, written down) brings it's also interesting to note that there are many people out there who believe that the 'dumbing down' of the English language is happening as we speak and that any changes to the way English is utilised as a language will be a threat to the future of civilised communication (despite the fact that it's changes like the ones they fear that have given us the version of English we recognise today).

 

[Wolfhound3060]

Another strange thing about English is the size of it's vocabulary. The Oxford English Dictionary has about 615,000 entries and about 200,000 words are in common use. That's more than German (184,000) or French (100,000). English is one of the only languages that has, or needs, a Thesaurus.

And yet we have so many words that have multiple meaning and are spelled the same. To quote one of my favorite English textbooks, "Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled."

 

[Ghengis John]

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.

Thank you for that info! I'll probably have to read a few danish names from history differently now.

 

[The Thinker]

your mother's parents would be your maternal grandparents, and your father's parents would be your paternal grandparents. Nobody uses this much though, and I'm not sure why.

It's mostly too unimportant.

This may not exactly be strange, but Afrikaans actually has two words for family. "Familie": Your entire group that shares a common ancestor and "Gesin": i.e. Mom, dad and siblings. I'm actually surprised that English doesn't also have two words for it.

"Extended" and "nuclear" family.

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"?

I wonder about this too.

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.

What.

I made it up, in its entirety.
Wibble!

The.

Russian, the language in which you can write a sentence full of swears and it won't be swearing.

Is that strange enough for you?

Fluffernutters.

OT: It's kind of weird how, in English, we have the letter "c", which makes the sound of either a "k" or an "s", the letter "q", which could easily be replaced by "kw", and the letter "x", which could be replaced by "ks". So, really, three useless letters. Meanwhile, we have three sounds (the "sh", "th", and "ch" sounds) unrelated to the two letters each that makeup their symbols. I'm saying that these bothersome logical flaws could easily be fixed, simplifying the English language.

P.S. I am aware, Queen Michael, that you were joking. Well... I'm 95% sure you were.
P.P.S. The word "weird" is weird. It breaks the "I before E" rule.

 

[the_dancy_vagrant]

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.

English: fighting consistency from day 1.

I present to you a (nonsense) sentence string that will give anyone learning English a hard time:

'I had a rough cough. I barely made it through. Say, is that a bough of oak over there? Those sell for pretty good dough.'

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

English is the most bastardised language alive. No neuter pronouns and the weirdest pronunciation imaginable.

 

[ChickenZombie]

The weird thing about english is that almost nobody speaks english well.

Here is also a great example of how I feel about the way we speak.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOVhHxTkitU&list=FL9BDwYL5ZWqUObS8FtJkDZg&index=5

 

[chiMmy]

Hungarian has no direct relations to other languages, and I don't know how it could sound to a foreign ear, but when I was in Germany, everybody asked: "what's that weird language that you're speaking?"

Introducing myself and then saying that I was born in Zalaegerszeg, was always rather embarrassing. Usual reaction was: "say't again?"

Actually I believe it's close related to finnish if I recall correctly.

Swedish isn't all that hard to learn so you can make yourself understood, but the grammar is way harder then english.

 

[Logodaedalus]

The thing that realy pisses me off about the Dutch language is the Dutch Language Institute (a.k.a. Het Nederlands Taal Institute). This organisation officialy decides how every single word in the Dutch language is spelled, with one problem; they don't make a bunch of sensable rules and aply them to all the weird and wonderful words the Dutch have come up with. They instead just write each word how they think looks right and then make a clusterfuck of rules that somehow fit the words they wrote.

Ruwrak already gave one example of this with his 'Zonnebloem' and 'Zonnenbloem' but I'll flesh it out. What he is talking about is composite words, words made by throwing two words together, like sun flower. In Dutch you throw a 'EN' in between the two word to join them together except under following circumstances in which it's just an 'E';

> if the first word has no plural
> if the first word can be made a plural by adding both 'en' to the end or just an 's'
> if there is only one of the first word, meaning that is would be zonnEbloem, because there's only on sun (by the way, there's also only one queen, Elizabeth II doesn't count
for some reason).
> if the first word is an animal and the second a flower
> if it is one of the designated exceptions (i.e. "we couldn't figure rules out for these so we'll just call them exceptions that prove the rules")

And that's just one very specific case of were the rules are messed for normal words, you should see what happen when this kind of logic gets used on borrowed words, seriously fucking up Dutch is bad enough, leave other languages alone.

And worst of all, this shit changes every 2-3 years! I had to do our Dutch spelling exam just 3 months after everything was changed and a whole bunch of exceptions were added and others removed and even our own teacher didn't have a clue what was right and wrong. In the end about 15 of the 120 in our year managed to pass the exam. Being a non-native speaker myself actualy helped here because I didn't even try to make sense out of it all and just accepted it a weird and idiotic.

/endrant

 

[similar.squirrel]

Along with Finnish, it's the only language in the Finno-Ugric linguistic group. Apparently.
Still, they tell me that this will make me very welcome in Finland, which is good because I intend to live there after I graduate.

 

[IamQ]

Well, while Swedish is strange grammatically, the real kicker are some of the words.

Such as "Gift" which both means "Poison" and "Married".

Or "Tomt" which is pronounced differently in both ways, but it's really sublte. Either it means "Empty" or "house property".

One I really like is the sentence "Far, får får får?" Which translates to "Father, does sheep get sheep?". Confuses foreigners every time.

 

[Radelaide]

Australian is a fairly odd dialect to speak. We insult those we love, we hate and thing we nothing. G'day is suitable for ANY situation, "Fuck off!" has many meanings, etc.

I fuckin' love my country.

 

[Deadyawn]

You know I'm really quite surprised by how many people here have learned english as a second language, especially seeing as how I thought this was a predominately american community. Don't get me wrong, I'm australian myself but It's a little strange. English is one hell of a weird langauge. Context and conventions are extremely complex in many cases and they have a tendancy to break their own rules. I can't imagine attempting to learn english after having grown up with a different language but I have heard it's very difficult.
I actually learned a bit of hebrew for a while and it's really strange. Don't quote me on this because I'm probably wrong but originally hebrew was an ancient language that died out for some time. When it was ressurected it had to be modernized and one of the issues with the written part was that certain letters could represent different vowel sounds and sometimes consonants. They were remembered in context but to help eliminate confusion a series of symbols were made to denote which particular sound certain letters should make. Honestly I'm surprised they managed to bring hebrew back at all.

 

[Mandalore_15]

In Scottish Gaelic, there are five words for the word "the" (the definite article), and no words for the word "a" (indefinite article)!