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tumblr post by seokoilua: it’s so wild to me that some people just speak english all the time… like they can’t switch it off to speak in a #real language when they need to
tumblr post by seokoilua: it’s so wild to me that some people just speak english all the time… like they can’t switch it off to speak in a #real language when they need to
english is very practical and relatively easy
trilingual here. No language is “dumb”.
I hate the number of exceptions to rules there are and situations like read/read/red, lead/lead/led, threw/through/throw. I guess there’s homonyms in many languages (thinking of Chinese especially where tonality is everything).
I know a lot of the exceptions to pronunciation rules are just a result of English having so many different root influences. I’m comparing it to my (admittedly rudimentary) knowledge of Spanish where things are just pronounced how they’re spelled. I’m thinking back to my college Spanish courses where I asked my professor what kind of pronunciation exceptions there are and he said there weren’t really any. Then again, I suppose just like English, the exceptions come from words that are borrowed from other languages and he wasn’t looking at my question holistically. There’s a silent P in the word pterodáctilo borrowed from Greek in both languages, after all.
Curious as someone with more skill than me what you feel makes English practical, if you don’t mind sharing!
this is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_gender
a cat is a cat in english.
i’m not saying that everybody should speak English in a Babylonian world. It’s just that it’s practical to have it as one of your languages.
Thanks for sharing. It is a bit of a hassle trying to remember the gender of certain words (thinking of mano being feminine, or día being masculine) but I found that less weird than a lot of English’s grammar exceptions.
For basic, daily conversation, there are more irregular cases than cases that obey the rules.
Past tense verbs for example.
You add “ed” right?
Except for go/went sleep/slept come/came see/saw eat/ate…
Then for some topics, there ARE no rules. It’s just “remember how every verb works.” For instance, how to combine two verbs.
For “like”, you can attach either the infinitive or the gerund.
But some only take the infinitive.
And some only take the gerund.
English is a mess.
Strictly, ‘like to eat’ and ‘like eating’ don’t mean the same either. ‘I (personally) like to eat’ and ‘I like eating (in general)’. Maybe you’re a chef and you enjoy watching others eating? Admittedly, that makes more sense when talking about eg. swimming or cycling, when you may enjoy the sport but not doing the activity.
Nice observations on other ways that English is a mess, though - I’d not appreciated those before. You can make them worse by negating them - all those sentences need ‘do’ support, with different forms of ‘to do’ to agree with the rest of the sentence.
Oh, absolutely. They have different meanings. But in a purely syntactic sense, which is the first step before learning nuance of meanings, just learning what structures are VALID requires a huge amount of memorization. It’s rightfully very annoying to students.
Yep, matter of fact let’s make pig Latin the global language, as it is not dumb at all, not even a bit.
says that it’s a “language game” and not a language
Who said this?