Why did Americans simplify and streamline the English Language, but they didn't bother with all of the systems of measurement?
Actually, we're going the wrong way. The last highway sign I saw in metric was on I-95 northbound. They replaced it a couple of years ago (too old - the reflective material was worn out), and the new one only has miles on it.
There's a short highway in Arizona (I-19) that is only signed in kilometers (it runs to the Mexican border), and there are calls to replace them all with distances in miles.
In fact it's the only language I know that requires you to learn how to pronounce EACH word.
Most languages only require learning how each letter sounds, and maybe a few dozen di/trigraphs, the rest is regular. Not so in English.
马 is mǎ, meaning horse. It's a picture of a horse, with 3000 years of adaptation.
女 means woman / female. It's a picture of a woman.
Put them together and 妈 means "the female thing that sounds like mǎ", which is mā (a different tone), meaning mother.
(I'm very much a beginner, but my teacher claims ~70% of characters follow this pattern.)
马, for example, is the simplified form of 馬, which is traceable back through the millenia to a pretty recognizable picture of a horse back around 1300 BCE or so. (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E9%A6%AC#Etymology)
Same with 女, which originally was a drawing of a stick-figure woman with breasts. (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%A5%B3#Etymology)
You only need to learn separate spelling and pronunciation rules for each of the languages English has evolved or stolen from.
The tough spellings usually come from Germanic roots via Old English and Middle English, whereas the French-Norman spellings are less difficult.
Greek-Latin spellings are markedly less confusing when you learn the transliterations of the Greek alphabet. Of course Philadephia is pronounced with fricative 'f' sounds instead of plosive 'p' sounds, because the Greek letter for that sound is 'phi'. Because of that, I dislike it when people pronounce the feathered dinosaur archaeopterix as [ar-key-OP-tur-iks] rather than [ar-KAY-o-(p)TEAR-iks]. It isn't incorrect either way, because in English, correct is whatever other people will understand. (Suck it, French.)
This is why I get sick of people complaining about "monolingual" English-speakers. The language has been glued together from Dutch-Germanic, North-Germanic, French-Norman, Greek, Latin, and centuries of absorbing and assimilating immigrant populations from all over the world.
You really only need to learn rules derived from four dissimilar languages to spell and pronounce almost everything in English without having a word-specific association. The remaining ten percent of words are correct when spelled and pronounced as in the native language or as anglicized renormalizations, even using the rules specific to unrelated languages. That is why the plural of octopus can be either octopodes or octopuses. Octopi is colloquially correct, but it is then acceptable to deliver a short lecture on Latinized Greek words. Similarly, the acceptable plurals of cactus are cactuses, cacti, or (los) cactus (pronounced as in Spanish). As Spanish has an increasingly large influence on American English, I have found it useful to know that it only has five vowel sounds, and knowing how to pronounce burrito and enchilada correctly gives you all five.
Despite what your elementary school teachers may have said to you, you are only incorrect in English if other people cannot understand what you are trying to communicate. Nevertheless, failure to be incorrect does not imply correctness, which is why grammar nazis exist.
Don't you also need to learn the language from which every word is derived from?
Most doesn't equal all.
>Besides this, pattern recognition is strong & easy -- tons of cognates and near-cognates, and most of the homophones & homonyms are common enough words that you'll learn them quickly regardless.
It's very difficult compared to a language system where the pronunciation can be directly inferred from the letters.
Knowing the etymology helps, but is not necessary. When linguistic researchers create nonce words for their experiments--words with no etymology at all, like "gluff" or "splim"--they find that people still generally pronounce them in the same ways.
They also find that people impute meanings to the nonce based on structures found in the word. For instance, when given the nonce words "plorkish" and "erildophate", and told that they are synonyms, subjects may claim that the latter is more sophisticated or scientifically precise. Or perhaps they are told to match the word to the person who spoke it, and a significant fraction of subjects match the words to the pictures the same way.
You can do the test yourself. Print out photos of Bill Nye and Kanye West. Write out "plorkish" and "erildophate" on index cards. Tell people the words are synonyms, and ask them to match the word to the photo of the person who said it. If they don't swing at least 60% in favor of West=plorkish and Nye=erildophate, and pronounce the words the same way, I will eat a tiny portion of my least favorite hat.
I claim bonus points if they also use them in a sentence or identify the part of speech as adjectives. Perhaps ask your subjects to also guess the sentence their chosen person spoke when using the word.
People do actually get paid to test this. This might be a good Science Fair project, actually.
Well, often it's necessary to either memorize a pronunciation or know the etymology, because often people pronounce English incorrectly.
Polish is half Latin, 10% German, Italian, French and Russian, and now it becomes a lot like English too.
But it has consistent rules and after a word is used enough it becomes polonized: computer becomes komputer, and we don't ever have to wonder how to pronounce "c".
I spent 5 good minutes trying to find a way to transcribe in a way that an Anglosaxon would pronounce correctly, as Greek-Latin vowels have a unique sound while in English their sound depend on the letters before or after them and often are pronounced as diphtongs.
In Greek-Latin AE = E, always, and sounds like the "e" in "men".
Anyway, I'm no linguist.
I recall hearing or seeing the less-correct pronunciation near the relevant fossil or fossil reproduction at the Chicago Field Museum of Natural History, but I can't remember if it was actually printed on the display card or not. I did have to explain to my kids why the correct pronunciation of root-combining words is important for effective communication. The exaggerated roll of the eyeballs means you're teaching it effectively! (Or at least that's what I keep telling myself.)
If we were going to do something as big as change UoM, why not go with the engineering estimate of 1 ft is now the time light takes to travel 1 nanosecond in a vacuum (about 11.8 inches)? It is sure better than "the length of the path travelled by light in vacuum during a time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second". We could even base the new units of volume and weight off of the new cubic foot instead of 1/10 the unit of length. While we are at it, a national standard that all units of memory will be sold in base 2 would be a nice touch.
// apply sarcasm as needed
Throw in massive immigration and indigenous languages within and along its borders rather than overseas and American English simply adapted to more varied use.