
English is weirdly different from other languages - Vigier
https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-different-from-other-languages
======
kafkaesq
Overdrawn. Nearly every language has certain features (or annoyances) that
very few other languages have (except for closely related ones).

There's a "fat tail" of these weird-isms, basically, and English is just
another dot on that fat tail. Yes it's a creole (and creoles are kind of
weird), but it's not like it's unique that category either.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
> it's a creole

…is it? It's an example of heavy language contact in a few places, but
“creole” seems hyperbolic at best.

~~~
kbenson
Well, there's quite a bit of German and Latin together. Doesn't that qualify?

~~~
aap_
No, it's still Germanic. It just got a lot of loan words.

~~~
kafkaesq
A very high proportion of loan words, along with significant differences in
grammar, phonetics and orthography. That's why people think of it as more of
creole (or hybrid) language.

~~~
aap_
None of these are reasons one should consider it a creole language. It may
have been influenced by other languages, but that doesn't make it a creole.

~~~
kafkaesq
You can go find a linguist to debate this if you want. My basic points are
simply: (1) the author of the original article wasn't making much of a point,
and (2) in regard to what you were saying, where exactly English sits on the
spectrum of hybrid languages is a multi-faceted issue -- rather more complex
issue than simply the proportion of loan words.

------
bluGill
> There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English
> that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and
> the rest with only modest effort.

You mean like English as spoken in the American South, vs Australia, vs
England? They are each very different from the English I speak, I can mostly
understand each, but it takes effort and sometimes misunderstandings happen.

~~~
eridius
English in those different places is still English. There are different
accents and dialects, but they're generally considered the same language.

But you wouldn't say Spanish and Portuguese are the same language.

~~~
civilian
Q: What's the difference between a language and a dialect?

A: A language has an army!

Examples: The Chinese government usually just talks about "Chinese". Mandarin
is an English word to describe the Chinese language spoken in northern
China--- but the Chinese government as political reasons to try to pretend
that Cantonese is just a dialect.

Swedish, Danish and Norwegian are mutually intelligible, but each country has
a government department dedicated to vetting books published in the language,
and claim that what they speak are languages, not dialects.

I think the real answer is that taxonomy is difficult.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
Mutual intelligibility between Danish and the other two Scandinavian languages
has declined over the 20th century. Danish has undergone some striking
phonological developments (compare modern pronunciation to that of reference
works written before the war) that have made it extremely difficult for
Norwegians and, even more, Swedes to understand Danish without prior
experience with the language. Nina Grønnum's 2003 paper titled “Why are the
Danes so hard to understand?" looks at some of these quirks in detail.

It is interesting to attend international events and watch the Scandinavians
in their 60s or 70s speak among each other in their own languages with
seemingly no problem, since their generation was pushed to overcome any
hurdles to understanding the neighbours, while a group of younger
Scandinavians that includes Danes is likely to switch to English because it
just feels easier.

------
Veratyr
In case anyone is interested in the history of the English Language, Bill
Bryson's The Mother Tongue ([https://www.amazon.com/Mother-Tongue-English-How-
That/dp/038...](https://www.amazon.com/Mother-Tongue-English-How-
That/dp/0380715430)) is a pretty easy and informative read.

Actually had it set as required reading in high school English of all things.

~~~
ThinkingGuy
Another recommendation: the History of English Podcast, by Kevin Stroud.
[http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/](http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/)

~~~
Balgair
I'll add another one: 'The Story of English' from a Canadian bloke here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mj9jJiPwsp0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mj9jJiPwsp0)

------
matt_wulfeck
This really is why being a stickler for English is really pointless, and maybe
even counter-productive to the evolution of the language.

I also don't like it when people write "u" instead of "you", etc, but it's how
languages move. If you're going to cling to the past, you may as well write in
Ye Olde English -- because eventually that's what you'll sound like.

~~~
21
As a non-native, I find "u" closer to the actual pronunciation than "you".

~~~
jdmichal
The pronunciation is /ju/, so I would think that "you" is a closer rendition.
The only reason "u" works is because we happen to pronounce the name of that
letter exactly the same: /ju/. So it's being used as a non-traditional
digraph.

It's the same pattern as using "8" in examples like "g8 b8 m8 I r8 it 8/8".
Here "8" is serving as a non-traditional trigraph /eɪt/.

------
zingermc
I'm finding the writing style of this article very strange. Is the author
pulling some trick that other linguists would find amusing?

~~~
combatentropy
In at least some of his sentences, he tries to mix in words from different
origins. From the article:

"To be fair, mongrel vocabularies are hardly uncommon worldwide, but English’s
hybridity is high on the scale compared with most European languages. The
previous sentence, for example, is a riot of words from Old English, Old
Norse, French and Latin."

Also, this is not the first time I've heard someone on Hacker News say a
literary article was hard to read. Even when they aren't trying to prove a
point, people who swim in literature every day tend to sound like the
literature that they read. They also sound like their colleagues, as they read
a lot of their articles. They write differently than people who majored in one
of the sciences, who in turn write differently than business majors ---
naturally.

English majors delight in words and are at play when they write --- naturally.
They majored in it, didn't they? So their writing will have a wider variety of
words, they will inject subtle poetic traits even in prose (metaphor,
alliteration, etc.) and they will choose and arrange words based on how it
sounds. They remember that even when reading silently, you still hear all the
words in your head. So they will try to make it sing. Some do it subtly and
well. You don't notice anything but that it was a nice read. Other writers are
more heavy-handed and obnoxious about it.

I was an English minor and feel at home reading this kind of stuff. I miss it,
actually.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
> _Also, this is not the first time I 've heard someone on Hacker News say a
> literary article was hard to read._

Switching between computer code and natural language is a major context
switch.

EDIT: I mean, look at the dumb sentence I just wrote. "Switch [...] switch."
(sigh) Need to go back to the damn Vault config files.

------
oh_sigh
The author describes Hebrew as much easier to learn than Russian for a native
English speaker. Can anyone comment on this? Is Hebrew particularly
simple/rule-based with few exceptions, or is it just that Russian has a lot of
complex/one-off rules?

~~~
ender7
Russian is a famously difficult language to speak at a fluent level. You can
make yourself understood fairly easily, but the nuances of both the
pronunciation and grammar are quite hard to get 100% correct.

In particular, its system of declension for nouns and adjectives (and some
other noun-like things) tends to drive non-native speakers batty. Wikipedia
gives a good overview:

"Nouns, pronouns, adjectives, demonstratives, most numerals and other
particles are declined for two grammatical numbers (singular and plural),
three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) and six grammatical
cases (see below). This gives dozens of spelling combinations for most of the
words, which is needed for grammatical agreement within and (often) outside
the proposition. Also, there are several paradigms for each declension with
numerous irregular forms."

~~~
pandaman
Verbs are no joke too. Many students of Russian seem to be bewildered by
movement verbs in particular.

~~~
oh_sigh
Could you give an example?

~~~
kafkaesq
I'll leave it to the native speakers to provide some examples. But basically,
Russian (along with a few other Eastern Slavic languages) has an entire system
of verb organization (this business of "aspect") that has counterparts in only
a handful of other languages (outside that family). It's totally pervasive in
the language, and way more complex than, say, gendering for nouns or pronouns,
or even most verb tense distinctions.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> ...that has counterparts in only a handful of other languages (outside that
> family)

Obligatory aspect marking is extremely common all around the world. While
within the Indo-European family Russian might represent more hassles for the
learner than certain other languages, it is not particularly unusual in this
respect.

(Within the IE family, incidentally, combined aspect, deixis and path is
marked on motion verbs also in Ossetian. I am sure there are some other IE
languages that do it too.)

~~~
kafkaesq
_Obligatory aspect marking is extremely common all around the world._

Right, but usually (except in a few corner cases) this is done with separate
helping words (e.g. in English: "to cook up" v. "to cook") which are usually
pretty uniform and easy to pick up through osmosis. Such that it generally
isn't even taught in grammar courses (and even educated English speakers most
likely won't even be even consciously aware this is what they're doing).

Meanwhile in Russian it's a much bigger thing -- the markings are much more
complex, and every grammar book and every dictionary addresses the subject.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> Right, but usually (except in a few corner cases) this is done with separate
> helping words (e.g. in English: "to cook up" v. "to cook")

No, there are a large number of languages around the world that mark aspect
with affixes, apophony or root suppletism just like Russian. I can only assume
your knowledge is limited to a small handful of probably mainly IE languages.
I strongly recommend looking at an introduction to aspect whose examples are
drawn from a wide range of linguistic typologies such as the Oxford Handbook
of Tense and Aspect.

~~~
kafkaesq
Your background knowledge is impressive, but this is way off topic.

Recall I was simply attempting to explain why Russian verbs are sometimes
confusing to foreign speakers. My quantification of the distinctiveness of the
Russian system may not have been quite correct -- but it was completely
ancillary to the broader point I was making.

~~~
kafkaesq
_Your background knowledge is impressive,_

This sounds a bit obnoxious, actually. I should have said something like "Your
clarification is very helpful, and your points are perfectly valid."

------
kaffeemitsahne
So here we have someone with English as their mother tongue speaking about how
weird English is. I'd bet native speakers of just about any other language
could write a similar article about theirs, too.

~~~
Mithaldu
As a german: No. German is a little oddly rigid due to being more tied to
legislation and has a few weird corners like "ei". However in the big picture
and on the scale of fucked-up-ness it's not even in the same order of
magnitude as english.

You have a german username so i guess you're german too. Try to point out
what's as weird in german as having to wonder in english how to even write a
word just from the sounds.

~~~
kaffeemitsahne
Good guess, but I'm Dutch :) Let's see what weirdness I can come up with.

A thing that's often noted about German and Dutch is how you can string words
together without spaces
(kindercarnavalsoptochtvoorbereidingswerkzaamhedenplan).

In Dutch we have the "g" or "sch" sound that almost noone else can pronounce.
As you can see, "g" and "ch" are sometimes pronounced the same.

In Dutch it's quite a problem for some people to determine if the perfect
tense of a verb should end with "d" or "t".

A common mistake (do mistakes count?) is to use the possessive "hun" (their)
in places where you should say "hen" or "ze" (they).

Some articles online remark on the large number of consonants that can be
grouped together in a single word (e.g. "angstschreeuw").

There are no clear rules on whether nouns should be preceded by "de" or "het"
(the or it), for example you say "het huis" (it house) but "de fiets" (the
bike). Confusing these is a hallmark of beginner speech.

Whether a word goes with "de" or "het" also determines how you should spell
adjectives ("deze fiets" but "dit huis").

Another article (1) noted that the two parts of a separable verb can be very
far apart in a sentence:

“I _want to go_ to the park tomorrow” becomes “Ik _wil_ morgen naar het park
_gaan_“

Although I'm not quite sure how strange this is.

(1) [https://novemberfive.co/blog/learning-
dutch/](https://novemberfive.co/blog/learning-dutch/)

~~~
talideon
> A thing that's often noted about German and Dutch is how you can string
> words together without spaces
> (kindercarnavalsoptochtvoorbereidingswerkzaamhedenplan).

You can do that in English, it's just that we choose not to and introduce
spaces between the unbound morphemes. Imagine:

    
    
        kinder carnavals optocht voorbereidings werkzaamheden plan
    

If Dutch were written more like English, that's what that word would look
like.

The dutch 'g' isn't really all that strange. What's strange is how prevalent
the sound is in the language.

English has phonological abominations like 'strengths', so can't really
complain about complex consonant clusters. :-)

'de' and 'het' is just a historical thing: gender is just as difficult in
other languages that have it, and it just happens that in the Romance
languages, the sound changes have mostly conspired to leave pretty decent
markers as to the grammatical genders in a lot of cases.

Your 'separable verb' example isn't: Dutch is a V2 language, meaning that
there has to be a finite verb in the second slot in a sentence. 'wil' in this
case is a finite (auxiliary) verb, where as 'gaan' is an infinitive, and thus
goes at the end of the word. This whole thing is a consequence of the Germanic
languages once having been verb final, but later the finite verb moved up to
where it presently is in most of the Germanic languages. English is now a
notable example of a Germanic language (mostly) without this, but you still
get remnants of V2 word order here and there. The term 'separable verb' is
more apt for the likes of 'aankomen'. English has these too, it's just that
the separable bit is typically written afterwards as separate word rather than
prefixed as in most other Germanic languages.

~~~
jdmichal
I would say that English has broadened the V2 transformation into a fully SVO
language. While German is still SOV with an exception for V2. My reasoning
being that this interpretation results in a smaller rule set than calling it
V2 with exceptions for SOV. (But it's not like I would take a hard line on it
_has_ to be interpreted as SOV.)

------
faragon
English has many great things:

\- Easy to learn so you can speak like Tarzan and being understood. Pronouns,
articles, and verbs, for a basic grammar, is quite easy.

\- Articles have no gender (e.g. "the moon" has an article that is not
masculine nor feminine, which is a pain for learning Latin and German
languages).

\- Is the most universal language in the world.

And some drawbacks, too:

\- To master English is very difficult, like mastering most advanced
languages.

\- Pronunciation vs writing is not 1:1 (e.g. Spanish and German are easier in
that regard)

------
TazeTSchnitzel
> There is no other language, for example, that is close enough to English
> that we can get about half of what people are saying without training and
> the rest with only modest effort.

…uh, French? English has such a huge amount of French vocabulary that it does
not take a huge amount of effort for an English speaker like me to, say, read
a Wikipedia page in French, despite my limited knowledge of the language.
Pronunciation is a different matter, however, that's true.

> it’s us who are odd: almost all European languages belong to one family –
> Indo-European – and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t
> assign genders that way.

Might be weird from an Indo-European perspective. But consider this: firstly,
it's not like other IE languages' grammatical gender isn't being simplified.
Maybe it hasn't been eliminated yet, but English is not a complete oddball
here.

Second, lacking grammatical gender is hardly unusual once you go outside Indo-
European!

> There is exactly one language on Earth whose present tense requires a
> special ending only in the third‑person singular.

English has a small and not very expressive set of verb inflections, okay.
It's not alone there. Yes, maybe other languages don't have inflections
limited in that specific way, but that kind of specificity is far from
unusual.

> English started out as, essentially, a kind of German.

Well… _Germanic_ doesn't really mean German. Old English does look somewhat
familiar to a German speaker, though.

> In linguistics circles it’s risky to call one language ‘easier’ than another
> one, for there is no single metric by which we can determine objective
> rankings. But even if there is no bright line between day and night, we’d
> never pretend there’s no difference between life at 10am and life at 10pm.

Languages are not “easier” or “harder” in isolation. What matters is how
similar a language is to those already know. The author does nothing to refute
this and comes up with the bizarre concept that “English is ‘easier’ than
other Germanic languages”… how so? I could make a convincing argument that
English is significantly harder than other Germanic languages, for instance.

> normal languages don’t dangle prepositions in this way

What's the author's idea of “normal” here? Latin?

> the has no specifically masculine form to match man […] strangeness

Arabic has no masculine form of “the”. Is it weird?

> English got hit by a firehose spray of words from yet more languages

As opposed to other languages, which never import possibly duplicative
vocabulary en masse? Japanese has a lot of Chinese vocabulary alongside native
words, for an easy example. And this is hardly unique to Japan.

> The very idea of etymology being a polyglot smorgasbord, each word a
> fascinating story of migration and exchange, seems everyday to us. But the
> roots of a great many languages are much duller.

But the roots of a great many _other_ languages are similarly interesting!

\----

This tells you various interesting (and correct!) facts about English's
history which a student of historical linguistics could tell you, and maybe
that's good, it could get more people interested in the subject! It utterly
fails at proving its thesis though. English is a bit of an outlier, but it's
not a unique one. Of course, you could argue that no other language has the
same combination of weirdnesses, but that's because they're different
languages!

~~~
eridius
> _English has such a huge amount of French vocabulary that it does not take a
> huge amount of effort for an English speaker like me to, say, read a
> Wikipedia page in French, despite my limited knowledge of the language._

I just tested this out. I visited
[https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random)
and tried to understand the page I got. I ended up on
[https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conte_licencieux](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conte_licencieux)
and I really have no idea what that page is about. There's a bunch of random
words I can understand, but it's not even close to enough to figure out what's
going on.

> > _normal languages don’t dangle prepositions in this way_

> _What 's the author's idea of “normal” here? Latin?_

The article made that quite clear. On the subject of dangling prepositions, it
said there were only 2 other languages besides English that allowed them (an
indigenous language in Mexico and one in Siberia).

> _Arabic has no masculine form of “the”. Is it weird?_

The context of that sentence is the changes that Norse made to Old English.
Prior to the Norse influence, the implication is that English had gendered
articles. And more generally, Indo-European languages (of which Arabic is not
one) have gendered nouns and articles, except for English.

It looks to me like you're cherry-picking sentences and trying to refute them,
but by taking them out of context you're actually just turning them into straw
men.

~~~
jdmichal
> The article made that quite clear. On the subject of dangling prepositions,
> it said there were only 2 other languages besides English that allowed them
> (an indigenous language in Mexico and one in Siberia).

Which is not the complete story, at all. English "dangling" prepositions are a
direct lineage from Germanic separable verbs, which also still exist in at
least German and Dutch.

 _Ich fahre jetzt ab._ \-- The "ab" is a preposition, just kind of hanging out
at the end of the sentence. It is, in fact, part of the verb, where
"ab·fahren" means "to leave". The example given, "Which town do you come
from?", could be analyzed as exactly analogous, where the verb is actually "to
come from".

~~~
eridius
> _where the verb is actually "to come from"._

I'm not sure what you mean by this, because "to come from" isn't a verb, and
you can't simply declare that it is.

Also FWIW, upon re-reading the article, it says Danish actually also has this
(more specifically, it said Old Norse allowed for this, "which Danish
retains"). So I guess it's 4 languages, not 3. Not that that really makes any
difference here, since the whole point is that dangling prepositions are
rather exceptional and nearly all languages don't allow them.

~~~
jdmichal
> I'm not sure what you mean by this, because "to come from" isn't a verb, and
> you can't simply declare that it is.

"ab·fahren" is analyzed as a verb in German, even though it is clearly a verb
with a detachable prepositional particle which modifies that verb.

Let's look at some English examples:

stand up, stand out, stand in, stand down, stand by, stand back, stand for

These all have drastically different meanings from both each other and from
the verb "stand". I don't see any reason why they shouldn't be analyzed as
individual verbs, same as the German ones. Do you have an actual reasoning
behind not analyzing them in that way?

And this isn't just some strange idea that I, random internet person, am
spouting either:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separable_verb#Analogy_to_Engl...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separable_verb#Analogy_to_English)

~~~
eridius
For all of your examples except "stand for", you have a verb and an adverbial
particle. "stand for" (and "come from") is a verb and a preposition. So all of
your examples except for "stand for" are already something different. For
example, with "come from", "where did you come from?" is the same as "from
where did you come?", but there's no equivalent with e.g. "stand up". And
conversely, you can "screw things up", but you can't "come <object> from".

Anyway, simply put, they aren't verbs. They're "phrasal verbs". Or more
specifically, most of them are particle phrasal verbs, and two (stand for and
come from) are prepositional phrasal verbs. And you can't just pretend they're
the same thing as normal verbs.

The Wikipedia page also says particle phrasal verbs (e.g. "stand in") are in
the same general category as the separable verbs of other Germanic languages,
the implication here being that prepositional phrasal verbs aren't. And in the
link you provided, it explicitly says adverbial particles can be separated
from the verb. So the point here is that ab·fahren is analogous to particle
phrasal verbs in English, and _not_ to prepositional phrasal verbs. So it's
like "stand up", but it's not like "come from".

~~~
jdmichal
It occurs to me that maybe this more abstract approach I've been taking isn't
working. So let me try again, with a concrete example. I'll use "stand for",
which you seemed to have taken specific umbrage with. You state that you
believe "stand for" is a verbal phrase ("stand") with a prepositional phrase
("for something"). Let's use a concrete sentence:

A rainbow flag stands for LGBT pride.

So, if I'm understanding you correctly, this is how you would analyze this
sentence:

(A rainbow flag)subject (stands)verb (for LGBT pride)prepositional

I agree that, with this interpretation, the question form should be:

For what does a rainbow flag stand?

However, I don't agree with that interpretation. Here, the verb is simply
"stand", with the prepositional phrase being the beneficiary of the standing.
Well, a flag can't stand. And even if it could, I don't see how it could stand
in benefit of LGBT pride, considering that it has no intrinsic motive.

I propose the sentence be analyzed as follows:

(A rainbow flag)subject (stands for)verb (LGBT pride)object

In this analysis, "stands for" is a discrete lexical entry, a transitive verb
that just happens to be written as two words. A flag can't "stand", but it can
"stand for". And since it's now a transitive verb with a direct object, it's
perfectly acceptable to ask:

What does a rainbow flag (stand for)?

Because that is how you ask for the direct object of a verb. It's exactly the
same construction as:

What does a lion (eat)?

And all this is directly in line with German prefixed verbs -- both separable
and inseparable -- where the prefixed verbs are analyzed as distinct verbs
from their unprefixed forms. And I doubt you would argue against "understand"
being a different verb than "stand", which is an example of an English
inseparable verb. So why the strong stance against the same type of analysis
for English separated verbs?

~~~
eridius
You keep trying to say "what if we pretend that preopositional phrasal verbs
are just regular verbs, then we can declare that they're the same as Germanic
separable verbs". But the whole point is _they 're not the same thing_. That's
not how they're categorized.

~~~
jdmichal
How do you think they were categorized and named in the first place? They were
named by someone studying the language, examining how it works, and making a
decision. Well, I'm studying the language, examining how this construct works,
and making a decision.

Did you know that there are some people that classify German as an SOV
language? It actually makes a lot of sense in analysis; it drastically
simplifies the otherwise complex rules around German verb placement. However,
it takes the ability to step aside for a moment. To look at the _common_ case
(V2) and call it an exception.

Well, reformulating "stand for" as a transitive verb _also_ simplifies the
rules. It does even more; it takes a very common construction ("dangling
preposition") and not only explains it, but makes it perfectly grammatical.

There's been a huge movement in linguistics away from what has been called
"prescriptivism" towards "descriptivism". That is, that the _users_ of a
language are the ones who determine what is correct, and the best a linguist
can do is take those constructs and describe them. Your approach to my
comments so far has been extremely prescriptivist; that this construct has
these words and therefore should be formed that way. And you do this in light
of the fact that these types of constructions are extremely common and
perfectly well understood.

So I ask you, is grammar meant to be a _description_ of the way a language
works, or is it meant to be a _prescription_ of the way a language is supposed
to work? Because all you've given me is the latter, while I'm attempting to
show you the former. And if you believe the latter, then I already know that
we will not come to terms because we are at philosophical odds with each
other.

~~~
eridius
> _Your approach to my comments so far has been extremely prescriptivist_

Not at all correct. We're not talking about the correct way to form sentences.
If I was saying "it's incorrect to have a dangling preposition" then I would
be prescriptivist. But I'm not. What I am doing is telling you that you cannot
simply reclassify one element of grammar as something else in order to pretend
that there's no difference. Because there _absolutely is_ a difference between
prepositional phrasal verbs and particle phrasal verbs, both in how they're
defined and how they're used. "stand up" and "stand for" are _grammatically
different_ , and pretending they're the same is simply wrong.

I don't understand why you keep ignoring this, since I've said it several
times. And your attempt to paint this as prescriptivism vs descriptivism is a
straw man.

~~~
jdmichal
That's not what a strawman is. I never said that such a view was _wrong_ ; I
said that it was a philosophical point over which we would not be able to
agree. Note that I was not directing the argument to something I could knock
down; I was trying to identify a potentially terminal issue and "agree to
disagree".

I was also communicating my view of what was happening. And I'm glad I did,
because you are correct and it was a mistaken view. You never implied
"dangling prepositions" as a problem; that was something I had in my head
which you hadn't said.

In the end, I think we are stuck in a hole that Wikipedia actually summarizes
quite nicely, so I'll just quote it here. The topic is the use of the
terminology "phrasal verb", emphasis is all original:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrasal_verb#Some_notes_on_ter...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrasal_verb#Some_notes_on_terminology)

"The value of this choice and its alternatives (including _separable verb_ for
Germanic languages) is debatable. In origin the concept is based on
translation linguistics; as many single-word English and Latinate words are
translatable by a phrasal verb complex in English, therefore the logic is that
the phrasal verb complex must be a complete semantic unit in itself. One
should consider in this regard that the actual term _phrasal verb_ suggests
that such constructions should form phrases. In most cases however, they
clearly do _not_ form phrases. Hence the very term _phrasal verb_ is
misleading and a source of confusion, which has motivated some to reject the
term outright."

I think I'm sitting squarely in the latter camp described above. My analysis
is that these are not phrasal at all, and so I think that's where this debate
is actually sitting. (And conveniently, that quote also directly indicates
Germanic separable verbs as alternative terminology.)

So, to summarize, I think this is one of those fine times (that seems to
happen so often on the Internet) where we saw some sort of disagreement, but
were really agreeing on everything but terminology.

~~~
eridius
It's a straw man because it wasn't actually my argument at all. You declared
my argument to be something it wasn't, then said you disagree with the straw
argument (which is another way to say you think it's wrong).

That said, the rest of your comment is quite reasonable and I'm content to let
this be. I'm not entirely convinced that the only thing we disagree on is
terminology, but it's certainly possible, and I don't think we need to waste
any more air in figuring that out.

~~~
jdmichal
> It's a straw man because it wasn't actually my argument at all.

And I admitted as much.

I'm allowed to disagree with a certain philosophy or approach, while at the
same time not discrediting it as an alternative approach nor as a basis for
argument. And if I'm not attempting to discredit an argument, but rather
saying that I simply don't think we will agree on an issue, then I'm not
setting up a strawman.

------
rumcajz
When I started learning Chinese I was like: Huh, this is basically English
with a different vocabulary.

May it be that languages with a lot on non-native speakers (I assume Han was
imposed on most of it speakers over the course of history, but I may be wrong)
degrade to some kind of gramatically "neutral" pidgin?

~~~
jdmichal
In that case it's because they are both relatively analytic languages.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytic_language)

~~~
rumcajz
That's the obvious part of it. One would except laguage spoken by non-native
speakers to lose most of the complexity in inflection. But what about, for
instance, how the same word can be used as distinct lexical categories. The
extreme case of the phenomenon is to use proper name as a verb: Houdini
yourself out of a situation. In Chinese I've seen a text describing how
killers of king Wu were going to "wu" his minister.

------
crazygringo
The history described in this article is fascinating, but it does nothing to
prove the article's thesis that English is uniquely "not normal".

All it does is describe how it's different, principally, from continental
languages in the German and Latin families. Which, you know, you might expect
when it comes from a big island off the coast.

Only English has spelling bees? In Chinese you have to memorize thousands of
characters -- much, much more work. English has no genders and less present-
tense conjugations? Again, Chinese has no genders and _no_ conjugations.
English uses a weird word "do"? Chinese has a weird word "le".

I'm only using Chinese as an example because I took a few semesters of it in
college... but the idea that English is somehow an "weird" outlier in the
world of languages doesn't seem to have a shred of supporting evidence from
this particular article.

~~~
pc2g4d
This article struck me as ignorant enough that I gave up before it got to the
history, which may have been interesting. Every language has things unique
about it, otherwise it wouldn't be considered a different language. Picking a
couple from English (some of which are really arbitrary, others not even true)
proves nothing.

Yes, English has some unique features. But rather than every English speaker
going around thinking their language is some massive exception, I'd like
people to understand that English has been subject to essentially the same
forces as every other language, and makes plenty of sense given the history of
Britain. But I think many of us anglophones want to hold on to a sense of
uniqueness rather than acknowledge our commonality with the rest of humanity.

~~~
edko
Indeed. If there was a language that had nothing unique in it, then it would
be unique for the mere fact of not having anything unique in it.

------
awinter-py
yeah, spelling is way harder than learning ten thousand pictograms in CJK
languages

~~~
vorg
I disagree. I think learning 10,000 pictograms is much harder than learning
English spelling. Even just learning the 2000 needed for reading Japanese or
3000 to 4000 needed for Chinese is harder. Of course most Han pictograms are
composed of a few hundred "letters" (e.g. 能 is made up of a 厶, a 月, and two
匕s) but the correspondence between a "spelt" pictogram to the spoken word or
meaning in Chinese or Japanese is far more variable than between the spelling
of an English word and its pronunciation.

------
bitwize
Well, no shit. What we today call English is a creole that emerged out of
trade pidgins used by Angles, Saxons, and Normans to communicate. It doesn't
look like other languages for the same reason Garnet looks like neither Ruby
nor Sapphire.

