How’s English Weird?
I’m thinking about what things are hard for my students to wrap their heads around. That’s different from things in English that are hard to learn because they require a lot of rote memorization (spelling, phrasal verbs, vocabulary). What’s WEIRD in English?
Vowels: English has lots of them, but we can’t even agree on how many! Hɑhɑ! Hæhæ! Hɒhɒ! Hɔhɔ!
Also, since English got these weird vowels after spelling had standardized, a lot of words LOOK like their European counterparts on paper. It should be /biologi/, Anglophones. What the hell is /baɪɒlədʒi/?
Consonants: Not as bad, except for TH and R, which cause a lot of people trouble.
Do-support: It’s “do I know” not *Know I? or *I know (question particle)? or *I know? and “I do not know” not *I not know or *I know not) Apparently there’s something like this in Celtic languages and nowhere else? Correct me if I’m wrong.
Very little morphology: Words do change in some ways to reflect their grammatical function, but not as much as in most other languages, especially most other European languages. Often, you can’t just look at a word and tell whether it’s a noun, adjective, or verb. It’s “Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo” not *Buffalo-(adjective)-(plural) Buffalo-(noun)-(nominative)-(plural) Buffalo-(verb)-(plural)-(third person)-(present simple) Buffalo-(adjective)-(plural) Buffalo-(noun)-(plural)-(accusative) For this reason, some people say English “has no grammar,” which is obviously untrue. The grammatical function and relationships of words are denoted by their place in the sentence, other grammatical words (like “have”), and emphasis.
Noun animacy and countability: English has no grammatical gender, but it does divide nouns based on whether they are people and whether you can count them. “If he would just fix his mother’s shoe, they’d have a party” not *If he just fixed the shoe of his mother, they’d have party.
Tenses: There are 12 of them (although people only actually use six or seven in casual speech) Yes, there really is a difference between “I did something” and “I have done something” and “I was doing something”
Future: There are four ways to talk about the future (I will do, I’m going to do, I’m doing, I do) and they all have different (although overlapping) usages.
We don’t say yes and no: It’s true! In most languages, it’s okay to answer questions with just “yes” or “no.” In many cases in English, that would sound rude, and instead you have to repeat the subject and the modal verb of the question. Q: Is this the president? A: It is. Q: Don’t you like pasta? A: I do.
Self-consciousness: The work of evil grammarians has driven double negatives out of formal English, hopelessly muddled adverbs, scrambled subject and object pronouns, attacked the verb to BE for some reason, and given us more tenses than we ever actually use. Now I have to teach this mess! It would be so much easier if my students could just write *Nothing was never understood before she was dead,“ like they want instead of “Nothing had ever been understood about her before she died.” Does any other language punish its native speakers like that? Probably, and I’d like to hear it!
Are there other weird aspects of English that I forgot about? Or are some of the things above not actually weird at all? Did I mess up the explanations? Correct me, please!
