
English is not normal - nkurz
https://aeon.co/essays/why-is-english-so-weirdly-different-from-other-languages
======
Mithaldu
As a german the commentary here strikes me as sadly defensive.

I'm in contact with and kinda familiar with a lot of languages, and out of the
ones i know English is the weirdest one, if only by its most basic property:

English text does not remotely map to english pronounciation.

This may sound weird to native english speakers, but it's the truth. To give a
more concrete example: With many languages in movies, it is easy for me to
listen to them, i.e. in a movie, even when whispered, and accurately
transcribe them into script; even when i don't actually speak them. English
movies consistently keep me getting subtitles because i can't make out what's
being said even at normal volume.

His mention of the existence of a "spelling bee" as a sign of how weird
english is was spot-on.

~~~
switch007
As a native English speaker, I struggle with many modern movies. I find the
speech very muttered and scripts full of quick, short retorts. English /can/
be perfectly clear. There must be other explanations.

~~~
nommm-nommm
I know quite a few non hard of hearing native English speakers who watch
movies with the closed captioning on for that reason as well.

Movies are unique in that sense, not sure what it is about them.

~~~
cooper12
Yeah this perplexes me too because my hearing is otherwise decent but I almost
always need subtitles. I've looked into it a bit and some people are surmising
that it has to do with poor audio engineering for home release. Films audio is
recorded to be played back in a spacious theater with surround sound, good
acoustics, and speakers with high range. Then you have people's home audio
setups: noisy listening environments with people right next to the audio
source, poor acoustics and stereo sound, and poor speakers from laptops,
smartphones, or those built in to flatscreen tv's. The sound mixing also
relies on these factors as well as the theater experience so explosions are
super loud and quiet moments are eerily silent. (Not to mention that dialogue
takes a backseat in many modern films) The audio might be poorly remixed, if
at all for home release and the poor playback equipment exacerbates the issue.
It's similar to developers saying "works on my machine", where in this case
the machine is properly calibrated, thousands of dollars, and top-of-the-line.

~~~
nitrogen
This is what the Dynamic Range Compression setting is for on Dolby Digital
decoders. Do the new Blu-Ray formats have a similar option? If you aren't in a
quiet home theater with no neighbors to bother, you want DRC on maximum
compression.

------
beefhash
> What’s the difference? It’s that -ful and -ly are Germanic endings, while
> -ity came in with French. French and Latin endings pull the accent closer –
> TEM-pest, tem-PEST-uous – while Germanic ones leave the accent alone.

As someone learning English as a second language, I must say that I'm really
grateful to have read that passage. This spares me a lot of learning accents
by rote.

------
oska
I found this article mediocre and its conceit, that English is “weirdly
different”, not well justified.

But what I have discovered recently, on the same subject, is a podcast called
_The History of English_ [1]. It's very, very detailed. So far there have been
69 episodes made, each about 45 minutes long, and the creator has only just
got up to the Norman Invasion. I've listened to the first 22 episodes and in
the last two episodes it's only just started discussing Old Germanic. So maybe
more detailed than most people want but it's very good and quite easy to
listen to.

[1]
[http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/](http://historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/)

------
pandaman
Regarding spelling bees being unique to English. While it's probably true,
spelling competitions exist in other languages but in a form of dictation. Do
a search for "national dictation contest" to see it happening in multiple
countries and, I imagine, searching in different languages will reveal more. I
figure the reason why spelling single words is not practiced in other
languages is that many languages inflect words in irregular ways so being able
to correctly spell a default form of a word is not a very impressive skill.
But I would be very surprised if a form of spelling bee does not exists in
China.

------
raverbashing
English is the PHP of languages

It has its weirdnesses, but in the end it's easier to learn than other
languages (and thankfully, unlike PHP, natural languages don't have issues
with maintainability or addition of new features)

~~~
wodenokoto
It's in no way easier to learn. It's just more ubiquitous.

~~~
eva1984
Hardest part is what the author has mentioned: vocabulary. Those french words
drive me crazy when I tried to memorize them for the sake of GRE. Very little
pattern, and the pronunciation is also different, some of them I don't even
know how to start, e.g. cliché.

~~~
raverbashing
GRE?

~~~
wodenokoto
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_Record_Examinations](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graduate_Record_Examinations)

It's one of those tests American takes to get into university.

------
pazimzadeh
Having learned English as my third language (after French and Farsi) I found
it more streamlined, full of shortcuts and easier to pick up than any other
language. Not sure if that counts as weird.

~~~
keerthiko
I think that's more a function of easy exposure and constant bombardment by
English medium content that makes it less strenuous on your brain's language
center to make the necessary connections to retain it effectively.

I felt the same way about Japanese because I consumed a lot of anime and other
Japanese media as hobbies I enjoyed. However, it is objectively a harder-to-
learn language than Korean, which I had markedly less success with. And I
don't think I have some kind of untraditional language processing algorithm in
my brain.

~~~
wodenokoto
Objectively harder than korean? I've always been told Korean is more difficult
than Japanese in terms of grammar. Obviously it has a simpler writing system,
but I'm not sure that counts as the language, fundamentally. More as a gateway
to the language.

------
jugad
Almost any largely spoken old language will have unique quirks of its own...
stating some unique and weird points of english don't suddenly make it extra
unique.

------
adimitrov
While this article has surprisingly little of it, there's still some bæd
linguistix here. Among others, comparing the utterly conservative Icelandic,
spoken on a remote island by (today!) merely 300,000 people, with the language
of England, which was invaded from every which way every couple of centuries
until the 1400s. That's just ridiculous. To take a _much_ more adequate
example: To most Germans, the Nibelungenlied in its original rendition is just
about as understandable as Beowulf is to modern English speakers.

English _is_ in dire need of a spelling reform (the Celts have you one-upped
here, Scottish and Irish have had very successful reforms,) but I don't think
it is "weirder" than many other languages of peoples that have had widespread
linguistic contact to other societies. French, German, Spanish, all have their
oddities, on a similar scale of magnitude as English.

------
gpvos
Hmm, I heard several times that English has almost a double-size vocabulary[0]
since it imported almost all of French on top of Anglo-Saxon, but this guy
says it was only about 10,000 words, and there was a bit of Latin too. Now
which is it?

Note that most other European languages also imported roughly the same
scientific vocabulary from Latin and Greek.

[0] compared to other somewhat comparable languages such as German and French,
and assuming you can find suitable criteria for determining what a word is;
e.g., discounting compound words such as the Dutch
_roltrommelhuisvuilophaalwagen._

------
asgard1024
I think you could find the similar problems with many languages (for example,
my native Czech has a unique sound that's quite difficult to learn, and all
the different declensions and conjugations will make your head spin).

But I also take the issue with: "Spelling is a matter of writing, of course,
whereas language is fundamentally about speaking." I think with English it's
not the case, English is like modern Latin, more people write/read in English
than those who speak it.

------
hasenj
All languages are not normal in that same sense.

Study any language and you will be struck with "weird" all the time.

~~~
rustynails
I learnt French, German and Italian in school. Those languages may have
complexities (eg. In German, Gender for a table is male, a fly is female).
However, if you heard a word, you could spell it and vice versa.

English has many inconsistencies: Spelling vs pronunciation, completely
different words for tenses (eg. Go/went), inconsistent pluralisation rules
(look up fish vs fishes as one example), "me and" vs "and I" rules, etc.

I've heard many people say that English is one of the hardest European
languages to learn. Supposedly, Japanese and Chinese are a different league
altogether.

~~~
Mithaldu
Japanese and Chinese are in different leagues because they come from a
completely different language root than european languages and require one to
_think_ differently.

For example instead of common sound based words in writing, they use kanji,
which effectively are either small, simple and time-corrupted little pictures,
or combinations of less complex pictures.

For example 新 consists of 7 "prime" pictures, of which three are easily
recognizable, and as such can be remembered as "axe | standing-up, tree" =>
"new". (
[http://jisho.org/search/%E6%96%B0%20%23kanji](http://jisho.org/search/%E6%96%B0%20%23kanji)
)

This is easly memorized but cannot re-use latin-based language patterns and
requires creation of entirely new language circuitry in the brain.

~~~
ekianjo
Kanji writing is learnt by heart and repetition by japanese folks, certainly
not the way you describe. I live in Japan.

~~~
Mithaldu
Well, i'm not saying that is how it is read in practice, because obviously
that would be much too slow to be practical. Nevertheless the structure and
meaning is there, and for beginners it helps a lot to memorize complex kanji
as combinations of radicals instead of a giant blob of context-free lines,
until subconscious pattern recognition has a big enough body of data to work
and start matching with.

Obviously there is also a difference in how japanese children and foreigners
learn the language, since children in japan are, since birth, surrounded by
kanji and very often see them in context with their meaning, while for
foreigners they're completely new and some kind of mental context needs to be
established in the first place.

------
amai
German is far ahead in weirdness compared to english. It is the 10th most
weird language in the world. English is only on place 33. See

[http://idibon.com/the-weirdest-languages/](http://idibon.com/the-weirdest-
languages/)

------
acqq
"In Old English, however, ‘Ving-Thor was mad when he woke up’ would have been
Wraþmod wæs Ving-Þórr/he áwæcnede. We can just about wrap our heads around
this as ‘English’"

That particular example doesn't appear to be so hard:

Wrath-mad was Ving-Thor, he awokend.

~~~
gpvos
I'd say wrath-mood and awakened, but yes.

------
anon4
I would love it if I could say groundwrought, endsay and saywhat. It would be
very good if we could make a pressed together work and come up with a word
list of other ways to say words of French root.

------
ericschmidt
What a conceptually interesting article. There are a few cool framing devices
in here.

I like how is using English to describe how English is weird. That's like
using a spray can to illegally graffiti the phrase "vandalism is dumb" on a
building.

The author is "going meta" to English, while using English. Respect to that
strange and thoughtful recursive writing technique

Gosh this comment is weird

------
irakli
Fun read, but alas factually inaccurate. Article says: "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."

1\. There're quite a few languages in Europe that do not belong to Indo-
European: Basque, Estonian, Finnish, Georgian, Hungarian, Turkish...

2\. It is not true that English is the only Indo-European language the nouns
of which don't have gender. Armenian for instance, does not and there are
probably others.

~~~
robotresearcher
You ignored the word 'almost'.

~~~
thaumasiotes
You didn't read the quote.

> almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European

This is where we see "almost". Basque, for example, is a European language,
but famously does not belong to the Indo-European language family.

> and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that
> way

No qualifier here. Armenian is an Indo-European language with no grammatical
gender (making it even less gendered than English), which the quote states,
boldly and without qualification, to be impossible.

You could make the argument that he ignored the word "European", because to
you Armenian is an Asian language and not a European one -- but saying
"English is the only language _within an oddly-shaped geographic region_ to
have some special feature" is a very strange way to assign significance.
Saying "English is the only descendant of Proto-Indo-European to have mostly
lost its grammatical gender" gets the idea of "what might be interesting"
right -- it makes more sense to compare English to sister languages than to
compare it to unrelated languages that happen to lie within the same weird
gerrymander outline you drew on a map -- but it isn't true.

~~~
Mithaldu
"them" in that case is the group of languages belonging to the family "Indo-
European". He was selecting a group of language from the european ones and
then making a statement about that group.

~~~
thaumasiotes
You're agreeing with me. Where "them" is the family of Indo-European
languages, the claim "of all of them, English is the only one that doesn't
assign genders that way" is false, and is not qualified with the word
"almost".

Where "them" is the special-pleading-based group of Indo-European languages
currently spoken within "Europe", the claim is less false than otherwise (but
still not great), and it's _still not qualified with the word "almost"_.

~~~
Mithaldu
Yeah, i misunderstood you a little. Nevertheless your initial complaint is
mistaken.

Honestly, this is a nice example of attribution of responsibility in message
comprehension. As a professor he constructs elaborate structures to convey
meaning and puts the responsibility to understand on the reader. As an
internet commentor you put the responsibility to express himself clearly on
him.

You considered it ridiculous that he may have meant "European" languages, but
he clearly constructed the group out of those.

------
ekianjo
Obviously whoever wrote this is far from being a luingist or even familiar
with several languages. So many of his statements are completely false.

~~~
crishoj
According to the byline, "John McWhorter is a professor of linguistics and
American studies at Columbia University."

~~~
ekianjo
Well then i would avoid learning anything from him.

