English is not normal
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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.
Movies are unique in that sense, not sure what it is about them.
I bet it would be helpful for children learning to read, too, with the constant matching of text with corresponding dialog or narration.
It's a funny metric for engineering sloppiness as well. For example, many programs (especially sports) make poor choices with respect to placement of the CC lines; most major sports networks end up covering the scoreboard insert with CC, for example.
One bizarre botch going on now is that our local CBS affiliate (KPIX) is sending captioning from the wrong program in the 10PM hour more often than not -- clearly a news program. Sometimes, it will be back to the correct show upon return from a commercial break, then fail back again later. It's happened the last 2 weeks in a row during Elementary, for sure. Anybody else seen this?
English spelling reform is difficult to do at this point because there's no one place that can claim to be authoritative; it isn't possible to spell words phonemically in a way that's simultaneously valid for American and British English.
All that said, Japanese spelling is infinitely worse than English spelling.
cough (off), through (oo), though (oh), tough (uff), ought (aw), thorough (uh), plough (ow), hiccough (up).
moon (oo), room (oo or uh), rhubarb (oo).
I think you're overestimating weirdness of 日本語. For native Russian speaker, Japanese is slightly weirder than English. The only rule: be prepared that every rule could be broken.
For me, it's the recent movies synchronized to German where I need the subtitles, and the old ones (like, 50 years old) being easy to understand. Often it's that in the modern ones the music is playing over the voice, the female voice often attempts to sound "cooler" to the point of the actor doing the sync almost sounding like speaking with the closed mouth and therefore being hard to understand. At the same time, the male voices sound a little clearer to me but also significantly worse than in the old movies. In the old movies, the actors tended to be clear like in the theater.
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.
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.
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)
It's one of those tests American takes to get into university.
EDIT: Actually I'm not so sure. Swedish has genders and most of time it's not based on anything. I'd call it a tie.
Do they decline depending on the case?
So, probably harder than English
In English you have to learn spelling and pronunciation separately. Which is lot more work than Swedish genders. The structure of the language is simpler. But there is more exceptions to every rule.
So tie before Hollywood effect.
The worse mismatch between pronunciation and writing I know is Gaeilge (Irish)
I just checked and it would have held true for 13/16 words in the above sentence. From spoken English into writing it is also true. It took me years to accept that the word "know" has k-letter in the beginning.
That is significantly worse than Swedish, if you guess the "en" gender, you are correct more than 50% of the time. And the language stays pretty much understandable with wrong genders. That might not be true with English.
My native Finnish is more structurally complex than either of those. But I think it has fewer exceptions. Terribly hard to tell when it's bit too fluent.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Study any language and you will be struck with "weird" all the time.
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.
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 )
This is easly memorized but cannot re-use latin-based language patterns and requires creation of entirely new language circuitry in the brain.
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.
1) You face "weird" everywhere
2) You come to realize some absurdities in your own native language
For example, in Japanese, one of the super weird things is counting. You can't just say "five apples". You have to use a counter phrase, which is a concept that I've never seen in any other language (they say Korean and Chinese have the same concept). Essentially a counter is a word you must use. In the apples example, the closest thing to English would be "five pieces of apples". If you were counting books, you would use a totally different "counter".
On the other hand, learning Japanese has made me realize how absurdly complicated Arabic grammar can be. Every verb/adjective/noun has to be modified to signify gender, singularity-vs-plurality, first-vs-second-vs-third-person, etc. Every verb tense has about 8 to 12 different conjugations, depending on the (implicit) pronoun.
Japanese on the other hand, is deceptively simple (and has more ambiguity) in that regard. The concepts of singular and plural forms pretty much don't exist. There's no definite or indefinite article. The subject is often not mentioned. It's as if you refer to all people in third person.
The past tense of a verb does not change to signify anything about the subject(s).
On the other hand, it can change for a completely different reason: to indicate politeness level.
That particular example doesn't appear to be so hard:
Wrath-mad was Ving-Thor, he awokend.
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
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.
> 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.
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".
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.
As it is, it reads like a teenager talking about their uniqueness because only they like eating peanut butter and ice cream while listening to Leonard Cohen.
On the other hand, just like trying to explain programming to someone who only knows how to use MS Word, trying to explain linguistics to someone without formal training is bound to end in misunderstandings and inaccuracy.
That's very strongly dependent on your native dialect. I know people who have to put on the subtitles to understand the movie Trainspotting, and (I think) that's not even full-blown Scots.