If English wasn't as easy to learn as it is, it would have been destroyed though.
The absolute selling point of English is the fact that since it has no proper rules it's the "glue" of European languages, it's the bash of human linguistics.
Ugly, crude, nearly impossible to master if you're not using it daily and all it really does is pin together superior languages that actually have formal rules, but could never be as flexible as "common".
Yes, it enjoyed tremendous success due to the british empire, and continues to dominate thanks to the hollywood propaganda machine - and it owes about 90% of it's success to that. But it's important to note that last 10% is important too, and that is because English is an easy language to learn and it is able to evolve rapidly.
Who's being glib now? Most people learn English because it's means making more money - in technology, finance, tourism, ...
Anyone who thinks English has "no proper rules" clearly has never had the joy of learning English as a second language.
(Or maybe they have a really warped notion of what "formal rules" mean when it comes to languages. There are no natural human languages in the world that are dictated by formal rules. All formal rules are after-the-fact descriptions devised to explain the language that is already there.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophony#Ablaut-motivated_comp... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication#English
Tic Tac Toe is the one that I remember most easily...
> Examples include: bric-a-brac, chit-chat, clip-clop, ding-dong, flimflam, flip-flop, hip-hop, jibber-jabber, kitty-cat, knick-knack, mishmash, ping-pong, pitter-patter, riffraff, sing-song, slipslop, splish-splash, tick-tock, ticky-tacky, tip-top, whiff-whaff, wibble-wobble, wishy-washy, zig-zag.
Saying any of those in the wrong order sounds wrong to a native ear.
It even shows up in Live, Laugh, Love.
And then there's adjective order... https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/...
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If people want a language with "proper rules"... head over to conlangs. https://youtu.be/x_x_PQ85_0k https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil is my favorite (I've got a copy of the grammar guide that is on my shelf of random things next to Random Numbers by the RAND corporation).
That's part of why it's so difficult to fully master, and there are rules (sentence structure) for clarity, but there's no actually solid rules for pronunciation (it differs depending on word) or even what words are really proper words (there are central dictionaries that largely agree, but there are also "Hinglish", patois and the other creole dialects).
English steals aggressively from other languages, since that's its history. Other languages might borrow some words but there's multiple branches of these inside english. You can use English with only latin-root words, or English with only Germanic-root words and both are as valid english as each other.
Easy to learn; awful to master.
That's true for any human language. E.g. in Russian, adjectives use the gender, case and plurality of a noun, until they suddenly don't.
> English steals aggressively from other languages, since that's its history.
That's not unique to English. E.g. Japanese has even borrowed numerals, and some of its pronouns are borrowings. Russian has borrowed verb forms.
Having a lot of Latin borrowings is quite common in most European languages. Even in Romance languages, there are a lot of Latin borrowings (e.g. minuto is Latin borrowing, miúdo is a native Portuguese word).
> You can use English with only latin-root words, or English with only Germanic-root words and both are as valid english as each other.
That's similar to how e.g. Romanian has Latin-based and Slavic-based vocabulary. This is not that unique.
> but there are also "Hinglish", patois and the other creole dialects
Many languages have or had patois and creoles based on them.
I really dislike this argument. It treats English as a mythical, exceptional language even though it really is not.
English was not particularly hard or easy compared to other European languages. It did not have a particularly hard or easy structure, and orthography took centuries to normalise in continental languages as well. It had the quirk of combining Germanic grammar with Romance vocabulary, but that’s relevant for linguists, not most speakers.
What happened is that it was simplified and adapted over the course of centuries.
French was not displaced by English because of some magical language qualities. The French were displaced by the British somewhat, but mostly by the Americans and language followed.
I always found French to be very much the opposite in spoken form, due to the 'consonnes finales muettes' and liaison and élision, along with the large amount of homonyms and general colloquialism used in everyday speech. Yet in written form, it is nearly as straightforward as English, as you get back those damn letters that aren't being spoken.
It is not that different from English in that respect. I found both to be quite difficult compared to e.g. German, which is very regular, or Spanish (which is annoying grammar-wise but straightforward to pronounce).
Spoken English is full of elisions and silent letters, and also full of locale-dependent colloquialisms that take some time getting used to. I remember struggling for a while living in New York and London despite having a decent level in “standard” English. I still occasionally struggle with my mates from Ireland and Yorkshire. After living more than a decade in English-speaking countries I accepted that I will never be able to pronounce correctly a word I never heard before.
Missing liaisons is not problematic when you speak French. It marks you as a non-native but it does not make you harder to understand. They can be often omitted by natives as well, depending on the accent.
This happens not infrequently to native English speakers. It's especially prominent for people who read a lot when they're young and develop a large vocabulary that doesn't get socialized until much later. My English teacher, of all people, was notorious for this.
Real life examples from native speakers: Emphasizing the wrong syllable in "forage", "respite", and "parameter". Pronouncing "draught" like "fraught". Softening "chasm" and "chaos". And an extra syllable (long e sound) in "homogeneous".
> Emphasizing the wrong syllable
As a native French speaker, I will never be able to emphasise the right syllable in any language, ever :D
Stress is just not really a thing in French, and it is quite difficult to get it intuitively later in life.
I'm still learning, English is huge and it can be a delight to discover.
What interests me is the prominence of words in foreign languages that have an extremely obscure equivalent in English. Like, why do they devote common vocabulary to it and what does it mean that they do?
I have been conversational in languages almost no one learns from parts of the world no one cares about. They are full of words like this and I still use those words in English because that was the first word I learned for the concept. But when I’ve taken the time to see if an equivalent English word exists, it always does. Ironically, it is safer to assume that my ignorance of the English language (my native language) is more likely than the lack of a word in English for a thing.
You can say that again.
That's exactly what I'm alluding in my other comments thread but referring to Chinese language and writing system complexity rather than English for the C++ and Rust, but on second thought Rust probably be the Chinese equivalent.
> But when I’ve taken the time to see if an equivalent English word exists, it always does.
It's the same happen with C++ that has been ripping up Dlang features for quite sometimes now including its new module system [1].
[1] Converting a large mathematical software package written in C++ to C++20 modules (42 comments):
Also from that time was many culinary words. The word for the meat in English is the word for the animal in French (the word for the animal in English is likely germanic in origin). That was in part because the when the French speaking nobility wanted boef (French for cow), they didn't want a cow (German Kuh) - they wanted the meat of a cow. So English got beef. Pork? French asked for porc, but didn't want a swine.
See Rob Word's "Is English really a Germanic language?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCE4C9GvqI0
(my separation of the words, which may be slightly off:
While of the words come from, in any written or spoken the falls. All the small words we and the of our is // dictionary French sentence number dramatically joining use core grammar Germanic )
Spoken Chinese has at least five tones (1,2,3,4,5 Number five stands for neutral) but to native speakers there is much nuance.
I won't explain the reason of its popularity. Someone braver than I may do it. Grammar is very simple, by the way
Spoken mandarin has 5 tones but the original ancient Chinese is similar to Cantonese and it has 7 tones. The modern Chinese writing characters is considered simplified because in Taiwan they use the original and more complex Chinese characters.
Fun facts King Sejong of Korea actually get rid of the cumbersome Chinese characters for writing Korean languages and introduced new Korean characters Hangul in 15th CE [2[. It's reported Korean literacy rate skyrocketed in a very short time because it's much easier and suited the Korean language better. Another fun facts, Korean characters can be learnt overnight but you need to memorize and understand several thousands of Chinese characters just to read and understand the newspaper headlines in Chinese. I have a Chinese friend who has Chinese mother tongue and is a well accomplished senior engineer but he cannot even read Chinese newspapers since he did not has a formal education in Chinese writing system.
As Einstein famously remark you should make it simple but not simpler.
[1] Why is the Rust compiler so slow? (425 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44390488
[2] Hangul:
Is spoken Mandarin really "hard in an unnecessary way"? I think it's quite straightforward, except for the tones. The tones are difficult for anyone who isn't a native speaker of a tonal language. But they are trivial to learn as a child, and easy to learn for native speakers of say Thai (a mostly unrelated language that also happens to use tones). Uneducated people in all walks of life speak both Mandarin and their local dialect well.
Written Chinese really is objectively difficult, and it's a believable argument that before Mao it was intentionally gatekept that way to have a caste of intellectual "elites".
That's the the majority of the world's population.
"Hard in an unnecessary way" implies that it's objectively difficult and complex, not just different from what certain outsiders are used to.
It is true that in 1400s Korea being able to read was a sign of status, and the literati argued against making it easier to preserve their station. The same applied to postwar Japan according to J. Marshall Unger.