Annoyances in the English Language

[lpetrich]

English is currently the biggest international language, and not surprisingly, the most-studied second language.

The most annoying things about the English language - Business Insider

1. English speakers say 'an hour and a half,' but not 'two hours and a half'
2. Prepositions can prove difficult, like how we get 'on' a bus, but 'in' a car
3. The level of formality can be unclear
4. Then you have phrasal verbs, which can be 'mind-bending'
5. 'Up' and 'down' can be combined with countless verbs, as one commenter illustrated beautifully
6. And some words sound nothing like they're spelled
7. Some English learners are thrown by regional accents and pronunciation
8. Sometimes, English speakers from different countries don't even know how other dialects work
9. English makes use out of words with very similar meanings, like skinny, thin, and slim
10. In English, it's easy to turn nouns into verbs, like 'blanket' and 'book'
11. And English's elaborate tense system can trip people up, too
12. English has more vowel sounds than many other languages
13. And some words are just plain hard to pronounce

 Phrasal verbs are verb-preposition combinations, and are related to other West Germanic  Separable verbs, notably in Dutch and German.

I've found Wikibooks:Language Learning Difficulty for English Speakers - Wikibooks, open books for an open world -- how does English rate in difficulty for speakers of other languages? I've yet to find any list like this one for speakers of any other language.

 

[repoman]

What would a highly stripped down (haha) version of English be like?

 

[Tharmas]

What would a highly stripped down (haha) version of English be like?

Like the semi pidgin my Thai barber speaks. She tends to use only one tense - the present - and sometimes drops the verb "to be," as in: "Yesterday I shop, and tomorrow I shop again, but today I working all day." However it's not difficult to carry on conversations with her. She understands standard English perfectly well.

In her defense, English is her third (or fourth) language.

 

[steve_bank]

I am around Spanish speakers and went through Spanish language CDs.

Native Spanish speakers have trouble with syntax and tense. They end up substuting English words for Spanish woerds using Spamish syntax.

Then there is the masculine ferminie categorization of words.

All languages have problems for non native speakers.

I took Chinese in college. I'd say what sets English apart and makes it difficult to learn for non natives is the way things are explicitly grammaticaly expressed. Spanish as spoken is loose on form and sentence structure. Pronouns are optional.

How are you? becomes how are? Como esta usted becomes como esta or just como in passing. In Chinese ni hau ma becomes ni hau? You good?

That is why native English speakers can sound like they are speaking bad English.

 

[James Brown]

Some words change emphasis depending on their suffix.

POL-itics

Po-LIT-ical

Poli-TIC-ian

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Multiple words when one would do.

Why is it altitude when you're dealing with the air but almost always elevation when you're dealing with the terrain? (We may use altitude when referring the air on the terrain, but not the terrain itself.)

 

[bilby]

Multiple words when one would do.

Why is it altitude when you're dealing with the air but almost always elevation when you're dealing with the terrain? (We may use altitude when referring the air on the terrain, but not the terrain itself.)

Altitude is above a defined datum (usually sea level); Elevation is above the local terrain minimum; Height is above the terrain directly below the point of measurement.

In the aviation industry, it is vitally important to understand the difference between barometric pressure due to altitude (QNH) above the standard sea-level datum, and due to height (QFE) above a specified location on the ground, such as an airfield. When cruising, you want all aircraft to agree on an altitude, regardless of the location of their origin or destination airfields, but when landing, the pilot is interested in how far above the runway he is, not how far above some arbitrary datum with no relevance to the local terrain.

English is full of situations where two (or more) synonymous words have allowed nuance to be established without a neologism - For example, the existence of the Saxon words [which became] 'sow', and 'cow' allowed the use of the French words [which became] 'pork' and 'beef' to refer specifically to the meat of the animal concerned, and the original word to refer only to the whole living animal - a useful distinction, but not one that is easy to make in languages that do not derive from the blending of several precursor languages. (This example also neatly demonstrates the relative social standing of the Saxon and French speakers in late medieval England - the Saxons raised the livestock, and the Normans ate it).

The great strength of English is that where a single concept needs to be split into smaller parts to convey nuance, there is often a pair or even trio of synonyms available, so over time, each can come to mean a different (but similar) thing. This enables English to convey complex technical detail without excessive verbosity. (Although we do not always take advantage of that fact).

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Words that are spelled the same and pronounced differently (bass v bass), words that are spelled the same and have different meanings (lie v lie), letters that are words (they are fucking letters!), words spelled differently but pronounced the same (to v too v two).

This is why I'd like to smack any teacher in the face when they ask a child to "sound out" a word. Yes, please... sound out the word 'hour'.

Language... it is what happens when you let liberal art majors create something important.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

Multiple words when one would do.

Why is it altitude when you're dealing with the air but almost always elevation when you're dealing with the terrain? (We may use altitude when referring the air on the terrain, but not the terrain itself.)

Altitude is above a defined datum (usually sea level); Elevation is above the local terrain minimum; Height is above the terrain directly below the point of measurement.

In the rare situation where it is used in reference to a local minimum I do agree it's a different word.

However, the most common usage I see for "elevation" is in reference to the height above sea level which is exactly the same thing that "altitude" is normally used to describe.

 

[bilby]

Multiple words when one would do.

Why is it altitude when you're dealing with the air but almost always elevation when you're dealing with the terrain? (We may use altitude when referring the air on the terrain, but not the terrain itself.)

Altitude is above a defined datum (usually sea level); Elevation is above the local terrain minimum; Height is above the terrain directly below the point of measurement.

In the rare situation where it is used in reference to a local minimum I do agree it's a different word.

However, the most common usage I see for "elevation" is in reference to the height above sea level which is exactly the same thing that "altitude" is normally used to describe.

Yes, it's possible for the constant datum of altitude to coincide with the local datum for elevation.

Yes, it's common for this to occcur.

Yes, this leads to casual speakers confusing the two or believing that they are mere synonyms.

No, they are not synonymous, and there's a good reason to have two different words.

In summary - You are wrong. The intelligent thing to do at this point would be to acknowledge your error and move on. The wise thing would be to move on, with or without acknowledging your error. The Internet thing would be to insist that you are right, regardless of the facts.

I am not a psychic, but I know which one I would bet on if I were forced to choose.

 

[ideologyhunter]

Queue.

 

[Bomb#20]

The NATO pronunciation poem

...
Have you ever yet endeavoured
To pronounce revered and severed,
Demon, lemon, ghoul, foul, soul,
Peter, petrol and patrol?
Billet does not end like ballet;
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
...

"After trying them, a Frenchman said he'd prefer six months at hard labor to reading six lines aloud."

 

[Loren Pechtel]

In the rare situation where it is used in reference to a local minimum I do agree it's a different word.

However, the most common usage I see for "elevation" is in reference to the height above sea level which is exactly the same thing that "altitude" is normally used to describe.

Yes, it's possible for the constant datum of altitude to coincide with the local datum for elevation.

Yes, it's common for this to occcur.

Yes, this leads to casual speakers confusing the two or believing that they are mere synonyms.

No, they are not synonymous, and there's a good reason to have two different words.

In summary - You are wrong. The intelligent thing to do at this point would be to acknowledge your error and move on. The wise thing would be to move on, with or without acknowledging your error. The Internet thing would be to insist that you are right, regardless of the facts.

I am not a psychic, but I know which one I would bet on if I were forced to choose.

I'm saying that in common usage elevation = altitude.

 

[bilby]

Queue.

It's a great word - it illustrates it's own meaning. A 'Q', followed by four silent vowels patiently waiting their turn.

- - - Updated - - -

In the rare situation where it is used in reference to a local minimum I do agree it's a different word.

However, the most common usage I see for "elevation" is in reference to the height above sea level which is exactly the same thing that "altitude" is normally used to describe.

Yes, it's possible for the constant datum of altitude to coincide with the local datum for elevation.

Yes, it's common for this to occcur.

Yes, this leads to casual speakers confusing the two or believing that they are mere synonyms.

No, they are not synonymous, and there's a good reason to have two different words.

In summary - You are wrong. The intelligent thing to do at this point would be to acknowledge your error and move on. The wise thing would be to move on, with or without acknowledging your error. The Internet thing would be to insist that you are right, regardless of the facts.

I am not a psychic, but I know which one I would bet on if I were forced to choose.

I'm saying that in common usage elevation = altitude.

OK, maybe I am a psychic.

 

[lpetrich]

English spelling may be charitably described as semi-logographic, where logographic is Chinese-like spelling, with a single symbol for each word or word part. Those examples show that English has a mixture of spelling conventions, a mixture that arose from getting its numerous borrowed words, especially its Norman French ones.

For Chinese, one has to learn a *lot* of characters, and the same is true of Korean and Japanese speakers, who use a lot of Chinese characters in their languages. But that is unnecessary for logographic spelling, and one can do such spelling with an alphabet -- all one has to do is make combinations of letters.

Another familiar example of logographic writing is numbers. 123 = CXXIII = one hundred twenty-three. But short numbers are often written out, something that makes "2 Broke Girls" rather odd to me -- I expected "Two Broke Girls".

 

[lpetrich]

Prepositions as verb prefixes is an ancestral Indo-European feature, and it is preserved in several of the descendant languages. One can find this feature in Greek, Latin and its Romance descendants, the Germanic languages, and in the Baltic and Slavic languages. As I'd mentioned earlier, preposition prefixes came loose in the West Germanic languages, becoming permanently loose in one of them as the English phrasal verbs.


English has numerous verb tenses, or more precisely, tense-aspect combinations. It has two simple tenses, the simple present and the simple past, and numerous compound ones, though the compound ones are all formed regularly.

Indicative mode:

[TABLE="class: grid"]
[TR]
[TD](Simple aspect)
[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD](Progressive aspect)
[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Present: I see
[/TD]
[TD]Perfect: I have seen
[/TD]
[TD]Present: I am seeing
[/TD]
[TD]Prefect: I have been seeing
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Past: I saw
[/TD]
[TD]Pluperfect: I had seen
[/TD]
[TD]Past: I was seeing
[/TD]
[TD]Pluperfect: I had been seeing
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]Future: I will see
[/TD]
[TD]Future Perfect: I will have seen
[/TD]
[TD]Future: I will be seeing
[/TD]
[TD]Future Perfect: I will have been seeing
[/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD](Conditional mode)
[/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[TD][/TD]
[/TR]
[TR]
[TD]I would see
[/TD]
[TD]I would have seen
[/TD]
[TD]I would be seeing
[/TD]
[TD]I would have been seeing
[/TD]
[/TR]
[/TABLE]
Other modal auxiliaries, like "must", "may", "might", "should", and "ought to", work like "would". English also has an additional compound tense, formed with "used to", as well as an additional future tense, formed with "to be going to".

The simple past and the past/passive participle are the irregular parts in most English irregular verbs. These parts are formed in either of two ways, both shared with other Germanic languages. The strong ones have vowel shifts and often -n on the participle, while the weak ones are formed with -ed. The strong ones go back to ancestral Indo-European, while the weak ones' formation is a Germanic innovation.