John McWhorter explains the peculiarities of the English language — note, not why English is the bestest language of them all, but what’s so idiosyncratically bizarre about this language we native speakers all take for granted. I remember learning German, for instance, and wondering why they had all these annoying articles and declensions and confusing stuff that wasn’t like my language, instead of wondering why English had so many confusing oddities.
For instance, he explains how early on the collision between Germans and Celts produced a peculiar hybrid.
Crucially, their languages were quite unlike English. For one thing, the verb came first (came first the verb). But also, they had an odd construction with the verb do: they used it to form a question, to make a sentence negative, and even just as a kind of seasoning before any verb. Do you walk? I do not walk. I do walk. That looks familiar now because the Celts started doing it in their rendition of English. But before that, such sentences would have seemed bizarre to an English speaker – as they would today in just about any language other than our own and the surviving Celtic ones. Notice how even to dwell upon this queer usage of do is to realise something odd in oneself, like being made aware that there is always a tongue in your mouth.
At this date there is no documented language on earth beyond Celtic and English that uses do in just this way. Thus English’s weirdness began with its transformation in the mouths of people more at home with vastly different tongues. We’re still talking like them, and in ways we’d never think of. When saying ‘eeny, meeny, miny, moe’, have you ever felt like you were kind of counting? Well, you are – in Celtic numbers, chewed up over time but recognisably descended from the ones rural Britishers used when counting animals and playing games. ‘Hickory, dickory, dock’ – what in the world do those words mean? Well, here’s a clue: hovera, dovera, dick were eight, nine and ten in that same Celtic counting list.
And then we get the Norse and the French barging in and weirding the language even more. But it’s still refreshing to see an article that talks about the accidents and contingencies of language without trying to rank one as better than another.
However, we might be reluctant to identify just which languages are not ‘mighty’, especially since obscure languages spoken by small numbers of people are typically majestically complex. The common idea that English dominates the world because it is ‘flexible’ implies that there have been languages that failed to catch on beyond their tribe because they were mysteriously rigid. I am not aware of any such languages.
What English does have on other tongues is that it is deeply peculiar in the structural sense. And it became peculiar because of the slings and arrows – as well as caprices – of outrageous history.
By golly, McWhorter sounds a bit like an evolutionary biologist there.
The reason English “dominates” the world has nothing to do with the language itself: it’s because there were two large successive empires (British and American) whose language was the same, imposing that language as the language of most business dealings.
I think that the obvious disadvantage of English is the pronunciation/spelling axis. Try to explain the rules of through (and threw), enough, thorough, etc. And many others. If there was a language being chosen for utility, for ease of prouncing syllables and regularity of spelling and pronunciation, I think it would be Spanish. Maybe Italian.
Somewhat related, Mark Rylance: the way we do Shakespeare is like rapping in slow motion:
For the most part I agree, much of the time the plays are delivered appallingly slowly. To me, that makes them hard to follow, you keep losing the narrative thrust as you. wait. for. the. next. word. On the other hand (maybe), there is the issue of original vs. modern pronunciation. I (and, I presume, most others) would be hard-pressed to understand the pronunciation of Shakespeare’s time, albeit I have no idea what, if any, relationship that has to the speed of delivery.
Interesting article, though it makes one interesting error in this part:
Yes, there is: Scots. Odd that the writer goes to the obscure Frisian before Scots, which is still spoken by over a million people in Scotland. You could get into the debate of whether it’s a separate language from English or a dialect, but it’s really no further apart from English than say, Spanish is from Portugese. I do wonder if the reason many people don’t consider it a separate language is that in general English is so far away from most other languages, so we expect most other languages to be significantly different.
I thought English was virtually exclusively the assimilative language, that is, one that adopts words that seem convenient regardless of their language origin. Starting with a hybrid Norse/Germanic/Latin and still branching out further. How many think ninja is native English word for some Japanese martial artists cult?
Also amazed how people have invented portmanteaus [hmm] such as “spanglish”, “frenglish” for trying to reverse adopt english words spoken in a quasi-accent of the target. And the common Anglicization (pronunciation wise) of adopted words/names. Its a relief to know that most languages are similar, (ie “living”) and that rigorous French grammar/vocab rules rigidly enforced is a myth.
@garnetstar – aside from the British and American empires, there were also computers that helped with the “dominance” of English. For a long time even the most basic computer usage required at least some familiarity with English and in many contexts, this is still true – there are many specialised software packages that are only available in English, not to mention that programming languages are often English-based.
But I would add that English has some very convenient features, which make up for some of its oddities (in my opinion):
(a) Basically no grammatical genders: (I know, we still refer to a ship as “her”) unlike German. Romance and Slavonic languages
(b) No grammatical cases: Slavonic languages are difficult to learn because of these
(c) No diacritics: this is helpful for computers, that you can live with only a handful of characters (unless you really insist on the tréma in naïve)
“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.”
James Nicoll
#4
English is more widespread than most, and has perhaps been borrowing words from more languages than most, but loanwords are a common feature of organic languages. All such languages that have been in contact with another for a long time – by sharing a land border, for instance – will ‘cross contaminate’ each other.
rinn,
More accurately: not many cases. English has a very productive genitive case (the cat’s pajamas–the apostrophe is a historical anomaly), along with a subjective/objective distinction in the pronouns (I vs. me, etc.).
I suspect that if English used more diacritics computer keyboards would be designed to easily accommodate them.
As an aside, I always thought that Turkish would be a good computer language.
A comprehensive dictionary of English contains more than 300,000 words; a comparable book for, say, French, Russian, or Spanish has about 60,000 words.
Much of the reason for this involves the lack of an official “Academy” to regulate English, unlike the others I just named: we absorb everything from “tundra” (Mongolian) to “boondocks” (Tagalog) at the convenience of whoever’s speaking or writing. Anywhere else, such words typically have to run a gauntlet of stiff-necked scholars, whose edicts all writers and editors with any claim or hope of respectability must take seriously.
This endless merging has also made English one of the very rare languages without gender assigned to every noun. That feature was lost after the (French-speaking) Norman conquest of (Germanic-Nordic-Celtic) England: it so happened that what one group considered masculine objects, the other saw as feminine. Rather than having yet another war over saying “le/la” or “der/die”, both sides just settled for a grunt (“thuh”).
Infophile @3,
Ask a linguist what the difference is between a language and a dialect, and at best you’ll get the old quip about armies and navies. More likely they’ll just say there’s no good way to differentiate them. Generally speaking the question of whether two or more dialects are considered to be separate languages is decided by political/social/religious reasons. The languages spoken in the former Yugoslavia are a case in point–back before the country fell apart many of them were lumped under the umbrella of Serbo-Croatian, but these days Serbian, Croatian, Macedonian and Bosnian are generally considered separate languages. At the other extreme, the languages called Chinese and Arabic encompass dialects that differ wildly and are mutually unintelligible.
So anyway, is Scots a dialect? Yes, or more accurately it’s a group of closely related West Germanic dialects (much like the dialects spoken south of the Tweed and exported across the globe). Is it a language (and crucially, a language separate from English)? As far as I can tell, most speakers of Scots seem to think so, so that’s good enough for me.
I think the claims that English somehow has special advantages are overblown.
* The other languages I speak (with varying degrees of fluency) steal words from other languages as well. All the European languages I know have a fair number of words from neighboring languages. Russian has lots of French and German, German has a lot of French, Italian, and slavic words. And they all have adopted lots of English words recently, and that includes French. (The French and German language authorities have tried to create native versions, of English loan-words with little success.) The main reason they haven’t stolen more is that, in contexts where English has the words and the native language doesn’t, people tend to be speaking English anyway.
* Diacritics: the only reason diacritics are a problem is that most computer standards were developed by English-speaking groups, and English doesn’t have them. If the French had been the main source of computers, characters with French accents and such would have been part of the standard character set. Computers and applications primarily intended for non-English speaking groups have all their favorite characters on the keyboard and supported in programs and files by default. FWIW, there are character set standards that accommodate European characters: 8-bit ASCII and Unicode.
As for cases: latin was the international language for almost a millenium, despite having 5 1/2 cases, 5 declensions, and something like 60+ forms (WAG) for each verb. (But no articles.) So grammatical cases (and grammatical gender) are hardly an insurmountable obstacle for foreign language learners. When I started using German in my daily life, the cases were the least of my problems.
However, languages like Russian do have some difficulty with foreign words which can’t be easily stuffed into the usual declensions. There are indeclinable nouns in Russian, but at some point, if you have too many such words in a sentence, it gets a little hard to figure out what case you’re supposed to assume they have. German has no problem since most of the case information is carried by the articles, pronouns, and adjectives.
Chinese has fewer loan words mainly because the phonology doesn’t easily accommodate European words. Also, Chinese compounds are treated as consisting of several single-syllable words, so a string of Chinese syllables that sounds anything like an Indo-European word will sound like word salad to a Chinese speaker.
English pronunciation presents problems for non-native speakers: in particular, the two “th” sounds, the “r” and “l” sounds. English vowels are also hard to get right, especially since most of them are actually diphthongs.
Ultimately, the only reason English dominates is political: English-speaking countries have dominated the world for over a century.
More accurately: one of the very rare Indo-European languages without gender (the only other one I’m aware of being Farsi, though I’m sure there are a few others) (and even more accurately, English does have a vestigial gender system–as someone noted above, English speakers often refer to things like boats or cars or countries as “she”). Outside of Indo-European there are a lot of languages/language families that lack grammatical gender (e.g. Turkic, Japanese); there are also grammatical gender systems that aren’t sex-based (the most common being animate-inanimate).
English, despite its many peculiarities (worse of which is the completely nonsensical and unrully spelling) is really, really easy to learn compared to other Indoeuropean languages.
As mentioned – only two grammatical cases. German has four. Slavic languages have six (f.e. Slovak and IIRC Russian) to seven (Czech) cases and words have to be declined accordingly.
No genders – German has three, Czech has four. The difference is non-trivial, because the genders do not align across language barriers. I have real difficulty to use correct genders when I speak German, because corresponding Czech words have quite often different gender.
Further to this in Czech are multiple groups for each gender that describe the correct declining of individulal words – f.e “město, moře, kuře, stavení” (city, sea, chicken, building) are four type words for neutral gender. English has none of this nonsense – chicken is a chicken no matter what you say about it, whereas Czech “kuře” can morf into many shapes.
So I think that widespread use of English is a combination of multiple factors where its easiness to learn compared to other languages certainly plays its role.
@blf #2:
It’s not too difficult to understand OP if you’re familiar with the Brummie and Black Country accents (unsurprising, perhaps, given where Shakespeare was from and the fact that both Stratford-upon-Avon and London were in the same dialect area, the one which became the dominant modern English dialect). I’m not too familiar with the Birmingham accent myself, but I do find my ear adapts to OP deliveries quite quickly.
I dunno if its the general case but when I’ve been working on multi-lingual web sites the english version is invariably the most compact.
I should add this may be that the original pages english and all translations may suffer from that as a result but it does seem to be the case when french is translated into english – some classics are 60% the size of the french original!
What a Maroon… @ # 12 – Very interesting – thanks for the correction!
Charly @ # 13: English… is really, really easy to learn compared to other Indoeuropean languages.
Though hardly a linguist, I have to disagree. After their “reconquest” of Spain, Ferdinand of Castile and Isabella of Aragon went about a systematic program of unifying their disparate lands, including not just the Inquisition but merging the various dialects into one well-regulated language. This involved creating a national academy with sweeping powers, which produced – and made stick! – a clear, coherent, and phonetic spelling and grammar unlike anything this side of Esperanto.
English, compared with Spanish, is a labyrinth laid out by a quarrelsome committee of drunks ‘n’ stoners.
#13 Charly, Off topic, but could you do a little favor for me?
I have a pict of my great grandfather, and I’d like to know what his ribbon says. I thinks it’s something along the lines of ‘Order of St Vaclava’. but I’m not sure.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/53149321@N06/5249418972/in/dateposted-public/lightbox/
I’ve just realized that is a little small. If you can’t read it I can try to post a better one.
At least for the first 5 years or so.
You can quickly achieve a level of proficency that allows you to successfully communicate. Much easier than with French, German or Spanish. It gets hard once you get to the meat.
Pierce R. Butler
No, simply no.
The Real Academia was founded in 1713, that’s a whomping 200 years after the reign of the “reyes católicos”. And they didn’T much bother with language planning either, although the first Spanish grammar was indeed published in 1492.
@Michael Duczech
It says “Spolek Rytířů Sv. Václava” = The fellowship of the knights of St. Wenceslaus.
@ Giliell #18
I think that every language gets hard once you get to the meat. That is why it is so damn difficult to learn another language after the age of six and why my attempts at learning spanish failed completely. And why I admire people who are able to learn foreign language to the level of being able to teach it.
My day-to-day experience includes communicating in three languages and I sometimes get the feeling that I get worse with time because it makes –
crambled eggs of my brain.
I would also like to add, that in my opinions one reason for the widespread of English is that some self-reinforcing loop has been started and continues on even stronger on the internet.
Btw: Follow our esteemed host’s link and look on the sidebar, and you’ll see (among others) a link to a separate article: Has the New Atheist Movement Done More Harm than Good?.
You won’t see much there that regulars here haven’t seen dozens of times before, but the lead author (several more chime in) at least spells “Myers” correctly.
Giliell… @ # 18 – You got me on the Real Academia, but I’d like to refer you to the history of Spanish as given by Ivan Illich – scroll down almost halfway, to “Empire Needs “Language” as Consort”, for the explicit political motivation of reshaping language as a mechanism of control.
(On re-reading which, I also have to concede that this project began despite the objections of Queen Isabella, rather than at her behest.)
Ed Rondthaler (then age 102) on the nonsense of English spelling:
http://youtu.be/XTjeoQ8gRmQ
Scots IS English. The south east of Scotland was part of the English kingdom of Northumbria, and spoke that heavy Germanic tongue. They didn’t get Normanised, but ended up, as soon as written records are available, speaking the same simplified language as their southern neighbours. Why, no one knows, especially as Scotland wasn’t heavily settled by Danes as were the fertile southron lands. But here’s William Dunbar about 1500-ish, Scotland being an independent kingdom then:
So Nixt to symmer winter bene,
Nixt eftir comfort cairis kene,
Nixt dirk mydnycht the myrthful morrow
Nixt efter joy ay cumis sorrow:
So is this warld and ay hes bene.
ENGLISH IS TOUGH STUFF
======================
Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.
Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it’s written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.
Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation’s OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.
Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.
We say hallowed, but allowed,
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.
Mark the differences, moreover,
Between mover, cover, clover;
Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,
Chalice, but police and lice;
Camel, constable, unstable,
Principle, disciple, label.
Petal, panel, and canal,
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,
Senator, spectator, mayor.
Tour, but our and succour, four.
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.
Sea, idea, Korea, area,
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.
Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean.
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.
Compare alien with Italian,
Dandelion and battalion.
Sally with ally, yea, ye,
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.
Say aver, but ever, fever,
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.
Heron, granary, canary.
Crevice and device and aerie.
Face, but preface, not efface.
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass.
Large, but target, gin, give, verging,
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.
Ear, but earn and wear and tear
Do not rhyme with here but ere.
Seven is right, but so is even,
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen,
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.
Pronunciation — think of Psyche!
Is a paling stout and spikey?
Won’t it make you lose your wits,
Writing groats and saying grits?
It’s a dark abyss or tunnel:
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,
Islington and Isle of Wight,
Housewife, verdict and indict.
Finally, which rhymes with enough —
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?
Hiccough has the sound of cup.
My advice is to give up!!!
I wonder how language will change over time going forward. I can see as the linked article and the discussion so far that english has acquired it’s present state through its ability to take up many aspects of the other languages it has come “up against” as close neighbors and invasion and political and economic dominance .
As things are now communication has been facilitated to a degree never before seen in human history and with that so has trade and all levels of interaction. There is also the very large and wide spread movement of people all over the world some of it is temporary but continuous in the form of global tourism and the other a very large permanent migration of peoples across borders and even continents the reasons for such movement very mixed. There is also the effects of mas-market entertainment.
where will language go from here what will be spoken ??
uncle frogy
When I had to learn English, I was completely confused by the pronunciation, especially of vowels.
Twenty years after and living in an English-speaking country, it still makes no sense whatsoever (ex: “eyes” and “ice” are written in a completely different way, but their sound difference is trivial).
But I really like that’s so easy to verb nouns. =D
Pierce R. Butler
Yep, the text makes a funny leap and glosses over the actual lack of immediate effects. Nobody denies Nebrija’s huge accomplishments, but the development of Spanish is more complex than that. POint in case, Spain is still a polylingual place.
Giliell… @ # 27: … Spain is still a polylingual place.
Agreed, especially when you consider the amazing persistence of Basque and the Catalan dialect.
Still, without that standardization, Spain’s sudden transition to an empire stretching from Italy to the Philippines and including most of both Americas might otherwise have produced a linguistic centrifuge. The K.I.S.S. [Keep It Simple, Spaniards!] principle first applied at the reunification of the 15th century not only played a part in successful imperialism, it also – my original point – made Spanish more easily learnable than just about any other European language.
The ideal language would be Welsh, which has (almost) perfect correspondence between spelling and pronunciation, a fairly vestigial gender system, a wonderfully simple grammar. If it weren’t for one crippling “defect” (quirk is probably better)- the initial consonant of a noun changes depending in a complex way on gender, case and consonance. It makes the language lovely to listen to, everyday prose sounds poetic, but it’s almost impossible for non- speakers to even look up a word in the dictionary.
That may be true, I couldn’t say. I have no clear idea what either sounds like, and probably couldn’t distinguish them anyways: I have a notorious “tin ear” when it comes to human speech, which is perhaps one reason my French is appalling, despite having lived in France for some years. I simply don’t hear / do not distinguish the different sounds. And my own “accent” is quite strange, and fools almost everyone.
Charly #19, thank you very much.
How English is weird.
How weird is English?
How weird English is.
How is English weird?
English is how weird?
I frequently hear complaints about the erratic spelling rules in English (I am an English teacher after all). Just to provide some context from a linguistics nerd… ahem.
Between 1400 and 1600, there was an enormous change in the English language that altered the pronunciation (phonemic representations) of words. This was known as “The Great Vowel Shift” (seriously my favorite linguistics term… we made many a silly joke). Basically tense, non-high vowels were heightened and tense, high vowels became dipthongs.
Some examples: Say these words aloud to yourself
please- pleasant
serene- serenity
sane- sanity
crime- criminal
sign- signal
Before the Great Vowel Shift, all of the vowels were pronounced the same! But After the VGS, the first words in each set changed the pronunciation: it heightened the vowels/changed them to dipthongs.
Anyways, written language is slower to change than spoken language and so VGS can account for a lot of spelling inconsistencies in English.
In short, damn the Great Vowel Shift!
For an example of popular use of Brummie English (Shakespeare-like), listen to progressives’ own John Oliver. Now, he tones it down a lot for USan ears, but he is a Brummie that USans hear regularly.
# 33 ayarb003
I have read a few articles that suggest English spelling is bizarre enough that it means that children can take 2 or 3 years longer to learn to read fluently than children learning in another language such as Finnish or Spanish. And if you can pronounce the word, you can spell it. Given that Russian, despite its grammatical complexity, is almost completely phonetic, I’d expect the same would apply in that language. One article suggests it takes up to 10 years to learn to spell English more or less correctly. http://englishspellingproblems.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/the-costs-englishspelling-literacy-is.html.
People seem to have been advocating spelling reform or a new alphabet for years. George Bernard Shaw, who apparently wrote all his plays in Pittman Shorthand hated English spelling so much that he left most or all of his estate for the purpose of creating a new phonetic alphabet. There were a few tense times with GBS’s other heirs but apparently there was a compromise and a new phonetic alphabet was created. Nobody uses it. And one can see why. A purely phonetic alphabet, given the varieties of English dialects does not sound like a really good idea. Think of someone from Louisiana writing to a Scot from Glasgow!
I recently ran into a slightly different approach by a Russian/British/American … linguist who seems to think that current English spelling is outmoded or ridiculous and more related to ideograms than most Indo-European languages ( my interpretation not his words) and has proposed a rather different way to write English, abandoning the current Roman alphabet completely. I doubt if he will succeed but I think I like the idea.
I can definitely see how it would greatly reduce the need to memorize thousands of word spellings. And as I understand it, the method is not strickly speaking phonetic so the Louisiana — Glasgow problem does not come up.
His website is at http://unspell.blogspot.ca/p/home.html.
One way to conceptualize “dialect” is in terms of differences across space. If you think instead of differences across time, you see another equally valid reason why a “purely phonetic alphabet” “does not sound like a really good idea”: hundreds of years of written texts become incomprehensible to all but the most dogged readers. Something like this (but less extreme) actually happened late in the Netherlands not too many decades ago, as I recall.
Sure, if by “flexible” you mean “chases down other languages, beats them up, and steals their words.”
sheesh, I’ll be the cliche absurdist, reiterating an ultimate satirist about the “eccentricity” of the english language: A: fish.
amusing composition of selected phonemes from several words to try to assemble an example of english being a hodgepodge.
#35 jrkrideau
Thanks for linking that article! I thought the information about how many sounds there are in English versus graphemes as compared to other languages sums up the problem quite succinctly. I have to admit that I didn’t realize that English had 205 graphemes for its measly 40 sounds. No wonder it takes so long to learn to read.
I wanted to add Korean to the list of languages that is much easier to learn to read than English. Hangul (The South Korean script) is extremely phonetic, simplistic, and probably contributes to their high literacy rates. I can attest to the ease of learning Hangul when I lived in South Korea last year. I could read road signs and menus (granted I had absolutely NO idea what I was reading, but I could sound out the words) after maybe a week of studying.
I wonder what kind of alphabet would serve English best. I think the lower grapheme to sound ratio, the better. I wonder if it would also need to denote syllabic stress… I will definitely check out blog you recommended. Thanks for sharing!
#35 jrkrideau
I decided to click through a few links on the unspell website and my first reaction was to this seriously awesome table of graphemes. http://unspell.blogspot.ca/p/resources.html
All of the consonants are laid out so logically! From left to right the sounds move from the front of your mouth to the back and top to bottom it looks like mostly voiced/unvoiced phonemes. All of the voiced phonemes have a little accent mark so you know which ones they are. It’s very similar to an IPA chart that I have but I think this one is more uniform.
I’d like to see some studies done using this with English language learners, particularly those past the critical period (because these are my students).
jacksprocket #29: Unfortunately in Welsh, the genders of most nouns seem rather arbitrary. For example, cal (penis), is feminine.
I’m not a linguist, but the article makes a lot of sense to me because of my experiences as a substitute teacher.
I’ve worked with Somali immigrant high school students who were learning to write in English. It was very common for them to leave out modifying words like ‘a’, ‘the’, and ‘to’. Sentences like ‘I go friend house.’, were typical. Most of them spoke 2 or 3 languages, but the peculiarities of English baffled them.
Addendum to #42
When they get frustrated, I reassure them that they are not stupid, especially since they speak more languages than I do. I explain that English can be more difficult to learn than other languages.
We are Plethora, Protectors of the Orb of Tranquility ~+~ Seated on the Throne of Fantasia wrote:
Ed Rondthaler (then age 102) on the nonsense of English spelling:
As nice as the idea of having perfectly phonetic spelling would be, it just isn’t really practical.
First problem: Whose phonetics would make up that spelling? American english isn’t like Canadian, British, Australian or New Zealand english, and even within these larger categories there are several sub-dialects with several unique pronunciations. So, either you’d have people spelling with their own dialect, which would be incomprehensible to other dialects, or you’d have some people spelling non-phonetically to satisfy some other english-speaking group’s demand for phonetic spelling.
Secondly, there is the inevitable linguistic drift. Some of the non-phonetic spelled words in english used to be phonetic. I do not speak english the exact same way my parents do, or my grandparents did, even if our regional dialects would be considered otherwise identical. This means constantly revising spelling, effectively isolating new readers/writers from writings of the past (and if you think Shakespeare is hard to read today, just wait).
How about English’s robust number of irregular verbs or the arbitrary confusion about which verbs are transitive, intransitive or either? (My students all hate that one can “read a book” but not “listen a song.”)
And then there are all our phrasal verbs (bring up, keep at, figure out, etc) which are sometimes treated as concrete units and sometimes treated as variations on a root verb. Or the way infinitives work in general, the hairy fucking mess that is how verbs interact with infinitives and gerunds, and the rules for when to use one or the other.
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ck (#44)
There are a few spelling rules that could be made more phonetically consistent regardless of dialect. For instance, the inconsistent bloat of “gh” in things like “tight” and “though” or the gratuitous use of “ph” where it sounds like “f”. We already have a tendency to excise those in informal writing. Basically, we could legitimize existing simplifications.
Nobody has yet touched on the worst thing about English for new speakers — it’s not just the weird grammar, the inconsistent spelling, and so on, it’s that English is heavily infused with bizarre colloquialisms and informalities that sometimes make no sense at all. I know they exist in all languages, but English speakers seem perversely determined to say things in the most oblique way possible.
“Jeez, he really dropped the ball on that one.”
“Hey, don’t put him down like that!”
“He made a real hash of things, though.”
“Sure, but he was put up to it by his friends.”
“I guess, but it’s not like he can’t make up his own mind.”
“Let it go. He got his dressing down. You shouldn’t hold on to it so long.”
#24
“My advice is to give up!!!”
That last line would scan better as
“My advice is, just give up!!!”
Interesting thread, this.
@Pierce R. Butler #28
I am in no position to evaluate such things objectively, but from my personal perspective this is not true. For me personally Spanish was insurmountably difficult. But it migth be due to relatively high age and its scarcity in my surroundings (english is literally everywhere).
@Chigau #32
This might be weird, but it is one of the things that makes to my mind English much easier than German. The order of the words in a sentence is not so important and often does not play some crucial role for the meaning of the sentence. In German the verb is in some cases put on to the very end of the sentence so when I read, I have to read sentences multiple times in order to understand them at all.
@jrkrideau #35 (and #44 ck, the Irate Lump)
I do not see a problem here. What is the difference to someone from rural South Bavaria writing to someone from Berlin? German dialects can (and do) differ very strongly in their pronounciation, but there is a standard language “Hochdeutsch” to which the grammar and spelling etc. applies and which everybody learns in school. And everybody understands it, reads it and writes it (althought nobody is able to speak it “precisely”) and foreigners learning the language have one standardised way of spelling and pronounciation which nearly guarantees that they will understand (when people make an effort not to speak a dialect) and will be understood.
To my ear American English does not sound that much different from Canadian, Australian or Brittish (but I concede Scotts is a nightmare) and I understand better many English dialects thatn German dialects.
Every language has quirks, heavy dialects etc. Despite that, many languages have standardized phonetic spellings. So I personally see no problem there.
@Igneous Rick #41
Genders in other languages are also arbitrary. When talking about genitals, in Czech clitoris is masculine and foreskin is feminine.
@A. Noyd #45
This is of course a problem, but I do not think that f.e. Czech sixteen classes of regular verbs whose conjugation additonally to the class (and as in English on time and timing) depends on gender and plural are much easier to learn for a foreigner.
It would really be interesting to see languages ordered with regard to their difficulty, but unfortunately I think it is impossible to do this with any usable degree of objectivity. So as with every other thing whose evaluation is heavily subjective, debate can eventually go on infinitively without reaching any conclusion.
I know for sure that Czechs take some strange pride in the complexity of their native language as if it were something commendable despite the fact that even most Czechs are unable to write and speak it correctly :).
Pierce R. Butler
Noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
Please. Catalán is NOT a dialect, neither by linguistic nor political definitions. It is a fully functional romance language, historically and presently. The linguistic unification of Spain took mostly place during and after the Reconquista because there was a linguistic vaccuum that was filled by the language of the biggest power. The other languages in Spain are all in the North, such as Catalán, Euskera and Gallego. I could go on for a while on the historical development of the Spanish language both on the Penisula as well as in AL, but that’s for another time.
As for “therefore Spanish is easy to learn” is a bit short, because spelling = pronounciation is about the one thing that is easy in Spanish. You got the whole gender clusterfuck as well as the subjunctive and a few tenses others don’t have. For English native speakers there’s the whole conjugation stuff to learn, the gerund isn’t as you know it and once you got one standard right there’s a few more standards to learn ’cause it’s also pluricentric…
Charly @47
Well, you can easily find features in other languages that are far more difficult to learn but if we’re talking about what makes English difficult to learn, all those things mentioned by A. Noyd—irregular verbs, transitive/intransitive, phrasal verbs, etc.—are all really difficult (and are usually overlooked by native speakers of English who jump to something like spelling as the big stumbling block). A language like Cantonese, which has its own difficulties, has almost none of those that are listed for English in A. Noyd’s comment. (I say “almost” because there are a few—very few—irregular forms.)
ayarb003 @ 39
I was going to mention Hangul also which is largely phonetic (some consonants are pronounced differently in different places but the rules are pretty regular) and it was, uniquely among writing systems in common use, designed—and it was very thoughtfully designed—as a featural alphabet. As The Economist explains “The shape of its consonants is derived from that of the mouth, lips and tongue in forming their sounds, so that a ㄱ is the shape of the tongue as it forms a [hard] ‘g’ sound…” It’s difficult not to be dazzled by its elegance, simplicity, and sheer brilliance.
Charly (#47)
I wasn’t saying English is harder than other languages for its irregular verbs. But it’s definitely a critical area of difficulty for anyone learning English, even native speakers or learners used to the concept of irregular verbs. Basically the lower the level of predictability any element of a given language has, the longer it takes to become proficient in its use.
You know, whether a language is easy to learn or not also depends on what languages you already know.
Learning the difference between Spanish perfecto compuesto and indefinido is much easier if you are already competent in French or English than when you just know German. And knowing German and French with its conjugation and gender is helping more than English. And anyway there’s a large shared vocabulary etc.
And no matter how logical or consistent a language might be, if its phonetic inventory, grammatical structure and writing system is completely different from anything you know, you will have a lot more difficulties than somebody who is already competent in similar languages.
#45, 46, 49. Yes, I’m told phrasal verbs are hard to get to grips with: a non-native speaker may set out to learn English, think all the verbs will be set out in the dictionary and that they are all set up to understand a native speaker – then feel they’ve been set up!
Giliell@51,
OTOH, currently struggling with Italian, I find my schoolboy French frequently interfering. Groping for a word in Italian, the French word pops into my head – or the Italian does, and I’m not sure it isn’t French!
@Giliell #51
Definitively. There are big differences within languages, and even bigger differences between languages, but the differences between language families are huge. Learning Russian and Slovak was for me relatively easy (although I forgot Russian by now by now due to lack of use) because they are slavic languages. Many words are similar, many rules are similar, so often all one needs is to learn the overall differences and adjust Czech words accordingly. Of course this leads to some false friends and to some nonsensical creations, but it works often enough for basic communication when you search for a word (especially with classic “hand windmill” pantomime). But when speaking foreign language one must always be prepared for a little faux pas no matter what.
German is completely different. Not only different words, but different consonants, different rules – basically different everything. But there are some overlaps between English and German, so my guess would be that it is easier for a German to learn English and vice versa than for a Czech to learn either of those.
And once I learned German and English I found out accidentally, that I am able to understand to some degree (and in some cases usable degree) written Dutch so I guess that if I had the reasons and motivations, I might learn it and I expect it would be easier now than it would be before I knew German.
But when I hear Dutch, I am not even able to parse words in a sentence, the sound is too unfamiliar.
Life would be so much easier without this whole “different languages” mess.
The old counting was till used until very recently
Jake Thackray, “Old” Molly Metcalfe
https://youtu.be/TiXINuf5nbI
Nick Gotts
Oh definitely, interference can be positive and negative. By now I still understand French really well, but whenever I speak it’S Spanish that comes out of my mouth… Yet it’s Spanish and not English.
Charly
False friends are always a problem. They’re even worse when you think that actually you’re speaking the language. There’s volumes of missunderstandings between different speakers of Spanish.
My favourite ones are from Cuba:
“Nos han robado el coche” said the tourists to the policeman, trying to tell him that their car had been stolen. “Don’t worry”, said the policeman. “What colour are the horses?” Because coche=horse carriage in Cuba.
Even worse was what happened to the colleague of a friend of mine when he was teaching in Mexico. He told the students they were going to take the bus: “Vamos a coger una guagua”. His students understood: “We’re going to fuck a baby.”
Evolution?! I thought English was more like something from the Dungeon Dimensions…
Giliell (#51)
I’m sure it also depends on how you’re exposed to the underlying logic. I find Japanese verb conjugation extremely logical and consistent while my friend struggles with even the simplest forms. But then, my introduction to Japanese verbs was a book that laid out the whole system of stems and their respective suffixes. Her introduction came from classes which stressed a severely limited number of polite forms that are all based on a single stem.
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Nick Gotts (#52)
Clever. And true, too. Dictionaries don’t tend to handle phrasal verbs very well or consistently, and figuring them out is not helped by way we pretend all the spaces between words in written English imply an equal level of separability.
# 40 ayarab003
my first reaction was to this seriously awesome table of graphemes. http://unspell.blogspot.ca/p/resources.html All of the consonants are laid out so logically!
Did I mention that Dmitri Orlov, the creator, is a trained linguist?
Unspell uses a simple set of just 13 symbols which, with 4 equally simple modifications that group symbols into sets (vowel vs. consonant, voiced consonant vs. unvoiced, etc.) represent all of the 40 speech sounds of the English language that signal changes in meaning.
At a guess, he rationalized the IPA layout for the English language and then ‘invented’ the symbols. He points out that among other carefully planned advantages of the symbols you do not get perceptual reversal problems such as b & d or p & q.
Unfortunately I don’t know if anyone is doing any studies on the Unspell system. Orlov is a writer, blogger and whatever who seems to live on a boat in the Caribbean or thereabouts. Recruiting academics to do some research might not be easy for him to organize.
I would really like to see a study though. Intuitively it looks a lot easier to teach/learn and there seems to be just about enough materials (Again see the website http://unspell.blogspot.ca/p/home.html) to allow someone to do it.
It probably would not be all that difficult to produce supplementary materials. There is an Unspell font available. I am not sure how long it would take to be a competent typist in Unspell but I managed to teach myself how to use a Dvorak keyboard in a weekend so probably not all that long, perhaps two or three weeks of distributed practice?
The real difficulty would be in convincing any educational organization to risk the implementation. Implementing Unspell strikes me as something like Turkish switching from Arabic to Roman orthography. A private school, a School of Education with its own primary school, perhaps, or a group of home schoolers?
Come to think of it, Orlov has recently added the Old and New Testaments (King James Version) to the list of translations, joining “The Wind in the Willows” and “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”. Possibly a play for the US home schooling crowd?
I don’t know if you have heard of John Mighton (http://jumpmath.org/jump/en/john_mighton) but he has managed to introduce a new way of teaching mathematics (Jump Mathematics) into what appears to be a fairly large number of schools in Canada, the UK and the USA. He has managed to get some actual evaluations done as well.
However his teaching system integrates well with normal math classes from what I read, and is nowhere as drastic a change as Unspell would be. Mighton is not advocating replacing the existing system of mathematical notation. His system can be infiltrated into a classroom. Mighton also is a bit of a heavy-hitter locally and nationally so I suspect he gets a hearing in some cases where most people would not.
A.Noyd
There are some very analytical learners, but most people are simply not. So you finding that totes logical and your friend not may be due to that. Seriously, as a teacher it is one of the hardest tasks to present the content in the way that will satisfy both the analytical learner and the more synthetic learner. Me, I could never grasp Latin simply because it was dead. No matter how “logical” it is, I need a hands on approach. I know others who simply aced it because you didn’t have to do all this communication stuff living languages require you to do…
I see that “beats up other languages and steals their words” quote a lot from english-speakers. I think they mean to imply that English is especially vibrant in some ruthless way.
The problem with this is that having lots of loanwords is a sign that a language had a WEAK cultural and social standing at the time they were absorbed, relative to some other language.
Which is of course exactly what we see with English — all those French/Norman and latinate loan words come from a time when the ruling class spoke French, and English was spoken by the lower orders. Similarly, loan words tend to appear in areas where someone else is leading — hence a lot of English psychology and philosophy vocabulary is German, a lot of German IT vocabulary is English, a lot of Western cooking vocabulary is French, and so on.
It’s not a case of speakers confidently deciding that they will go and “steal” this handy word from unsuspecting foreigners. It’s foreigners inventing some thing or idea before you do, and so you don’t have a native word for it. Or else trying to appear fancier by using vocabulary from a more prestigious language than one’s own.
If you look at languages that have a very high percentage of loan words in their vocabulary, they’re either small minority languages, or languages that spent a very long time under the cultural shadow of a more influential culture (for example Sinitic vocabulary in languages across asia).
English is also not special in terms of the percentage of loan words in its vocabulary, except in comparison to its immediate neighbours. There are plenty of languages with 80-90% loan words.
Ah, McWorther! “The Power of Babel” is still one of the best books I’ve ever read about languages, it was a very fun way to discover the crazy variation present in human languages.
Also, very interesting thread.
As I was learning English at 16 by way of a one-year full immersion in Australia, I found the grammar and vocabulary very easy to learn. (It certainly helped that by then I already knew Italian, French, German and some Latin.) The big exception was phrasal verbs. My schoolmates found it very funny that I would rather say “surrender”, “invent”, “prepare” or “separate” then “give up”, “make up”, “set up”, or “break up”. Thanks to my other languages I hardly had to learn the former, but the latter were utterly mysterious to me. What does “set” even mean?! Should I average over all the phrasal verbs in which it occurs? Some people think that phrasal verbs are easy because they all consist of the same few words (set, make, give + a few prepositions) but that is precisely why they’re difficult: extreme meaning overload. And no reliable way to analyze them by reducing their meaning to their components. (German is slightly better in this respect with its phrasal verbs, but not much.)
Also, the phonetics were driving me crazy. I had no idea what people were saying around me, until they spelled it out or write it down for me — then I was like, “ah, *that’s* what you’re saying”. The problem is, for a couple of years previously I had learned a little English from Italian-speaking teachers — or on my own — and the way I pronounced English words in my head resembled all too often an Italian phonetic reading of the English spelling. So for instance I had no trouble distinguishing “principal” and “principle”, because I pronounced them differently to myself. But when somebody introduced themselves as “Ahththah”, I assumed it was some exotic Arabic name, and I was utterly confused to find out later on that his name was the supposedly familiar “Arthur” (which, to me, should have sounded something like the Italian “Arturo” with the final “o” dropped).
So I got an Oxford dictionary which had International Phonetic Alphabet renditions of all words, and started to plot letter combinations against sounds on huge tables, trying to find the logic in it all — or at least, the trends, the subtrends and the more fashionable exceptions. That soon devolved into a hunt for the weirdest possible spellings, so it became a fun game: I was scoring the dictionary, trying to fill up as many sound/spelling combinations as possible… Eventually, I learned a lot that way.
Oh, goody, a language thread!
I’ve a friend in France who taught English for some time and she agreed that phrasal verbs were one of the things her students had the hardest time with. I pointed her at Tom Waits’s song “Hold On” that begins:
Good luck trying to get learners to translate that. Also, it seems to me that excessive use of phrasal verbs was was how they got Basic English down to c. 800 words; e.g., by replacing “tolerate” with “put up with”. Which is close to cheating in my book.
Jeff W @50: Thanks, I didn’t know the Korean writing system is so awesome!
I once set out to invent the *perfect* writing system, by which I meant (I think) one in which the shape of the syllables best evoked their sounds. It could serve *any* language (that I knew…). It was a vertical, Mongolian looking syllabic system, with round-soft lines for round-soft sounds, harsh-jagged lines for harsh sounds, etc. I’m not sure exactly what logic I was following, if any (I was a teenager after all), but the table combining consonants and vowels certainly looks a lot like the one for Tolkien’s Tengwar :-) In particular, the place and manner of articulation were playing a role.
[Ups: I meant McWhorter, not McWorther. Kind of embarassing, after blathering on about my heroic feats re English spelling…]
English is really a palimpsest of different linguistic influences:
1. Underneath it all, its core is that of a Western Germanic language, related to Frisian, with some borrowings from Latin (mostly ecclesiastical terms)
2. Then the Vikings invaded which brought in a bunch of changes: the inflected endings of a lot of words were changed because they conflicted (like the plural ending -en becoming -s), a bunch of new vocabulary introduced (generally speaking, if an English word starts with sk-, it’s a Norse borrowing; you also get “doublets” where you basically have original English and Norse versions of the same word like “skirt” and “shirt”)
3. Then the Normans invaded which introduced a bunch of (Norman) French words, mostly to do with law and governance
4. During the Renaissance, you got an influx of words from Greek and Latin, as well as by-now Standard French (which gives English another set of doublets like chef/ chief, warden/ guardian, etc.)
5. The Age of Exploration and the British Empire borrowed a load of words from non-European languages, e.g., anorak (Inuit), punch (as in the drink: Hindi), etc.
While all this was going on, you had the Great Vowel Shift which was mutating all the long vowels in the language. Some linguists have said that printing arrived in England at just about the worst time because it caused the spelling to start freezing right about the time that it was drifting most badly out of sync with pronunciation– if William Caxton hadn’t turned up for another generation or two, we might have ended up with something a bit more logical!
There is an interesting video here of how the pronunciation of English has drifted since Shakespeare’s time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s
To me, that sounds like a West Country English accent.
Giliell (#61)
My friend has a preference for analytic learning, going by how she studies. But now she’s kind of blinkered by the way she was taught—which isn’t any flaw with her because that’s an intended consequence of that teaching style.
Beginning Japanese classes don’t tend to go for either an analytic or properly synthetic approach because they put a lot of emphasis on students not coming off rude by accident, which is easy to do in Japanese unless you corral beginners into using an extremely limited number of forms.
If I hadn’t done a good amount of self study prior to taking the first class I actually stuck with and had the good luck to find that one book, which gave me a glimpse of the foundations of comprehensive verb use very early on, I might have had the same troubles as her.
A while ago, I saw an introduction to Inuktitut, a language of Canada’s far north. Fascinating!
Words are assembled from a root and, sometimes very many, suffixes. This sometimes gives quite long words.
Learning Inuktitut would be an interesting experience.
Are there other languages that work that way?
@looncall:
The general term for that sort of thing is agglutination, and as WikiP shows, many languages (and entire language families) are agglutinative.
looncall (#69)
What Owlmirror says. Also, languages with the degree of agglutination you find in Inuktitut are usually classified as polysynthetic languages.
looncall @69: I think that characteristic is called agglutination, and it appears in the Turkic, Mongolic, Uralic (Hungarian, Finnic, etc), Basque, Lakota languages, among many others.
Ivo @ 65
You’re welcome! I think a lot of people don’t but the Koreans are justly proud of their writing system. King Sejong who, (almost definitely) along with a group of scholars, invented it in the 1440s, is revered in South Korea today—he is one of only a very few kings in Korean history with “the Great” after his name. The day that the writing system was introduced is in modern times a national holiday—Hangul Day—in both North and South Korea (but different dates for each). I hope it is not too disappointing that your quest for the “perfect” writing system had been largely achieved over a half a millennium ago.
It had been said over the centuries that the letters in Hangul were designed to show articulatory and phonemic principles but that was considered somewhat speculative, until, nearly 500 years after Hangul was created, a 65-page edition of the original document that, in 1446, publicly introduced the writing system—but, unlike all known earlier editions, had examples and explanations of the principles underlying the letters—was found in 1940 in an old house in Andong, Gyeongsangbuk-do, ending the speculation. The wealthy art dealer, who had founded the private art museum in which that edition is now housed, reportedly paid ₩10,000 for it (plus ₩1000, the asking price, to the antique book dealer who was trying to buy it), at a time when ₩1000 could buy a mansion, thereby saving the book from an uncertain fate at the hands of the occupying Japanese. (A reproduction edition, made available for sale this year on Hangul Day, has proved unexpectedly popular at ₩250,000 [$222 USD] per copy.)
And thank you for your comments (in #63) regarding phrasal verbs. I think most native English speakers never give any thought to how difficult they are—or actually think they’re easy—but I’ve often thought learning the differences between look after, look back on, look down on, look for, look forward to, look into, look on, look out, look over, look up, and look up to must be a bit of a nightmare for non-native speakers. And set had long been considered the most polysemous in the OED with over 400 meanings of the word but, apparently, by 2011, the OED lexicographer had figured out all 645 meanings of the verb run, taking nine months (plus additional time for preparatory research), to do so.
A while back, there was an attempt to rank languages by “weirdness”. English is pretty weird, but German is weirder. The weirdest is Mixtec, and the least weird language is Hindi.
http://idibon.com/the-weirdest-languages
What does “weirdness” mean? Well, as the author explains:
A. Noyd (#59)
THIS!
I’m in the process of writing some Japanese instructional stuff and the polite first nonsense is something I tackle. It’s just, really not a good idea.
For anyone that’s curious, an excerpt of what I have:
Interesting assertion. I am no kind of linguist, but I have a minor talent in this area. At various times, I have been “significantly proficient” (defined by myself as being able to read a newspaper and carry on conversation on common topics) in the following languages: English, French, German, Dutch, Japanese, Russian, I am a native speaker of American English, but have lived overseas as well.
The thing that makes English difficult (weird is a matter of opinion) is not its grammar; it is its spelling. English spelling (and punctuation) is just the most god-awful, atrocious mish-mash of accumulated garbage to ever infect a writing system (pictographic systems, like Japanese and Chinese, are their own, special hell, but that’s an altogether different category of problem). I have no experience with some language categories, like Thai, Pharsi and Taglog, so I have no idea what they’re like, but I consider English to be grammatically benign compared to Greek or Russian (no language should have case, gender *and* declension; that’s just sadistic).
Somewhat surprisingly, Japanese possesses the most rational grammatical structure I have ever encountered. It is deeply alien to a speaker of English, but not complicated in a structural sense. What makes Japanese difficult (ignoring the written form of the language) is its deep entanglement with the backing culture. The consequence of this can perhaps be best understood, by someone who has never studied the language, as being that no statement in Japanese means what it says (when naively translated). To be fair, this is somewhat of an exaggeration, and also to some extent true of any language; Japanese simply raises it to a higher degree. It is also explicitly the reason that I abhor watching Japanese video with an English soundtrack; the translation loses so much in the cultural shift that it becomes a different story.
@A. Noyd: Hai, so desu!
The Defense Language Institute categorizes languages into four degrees of difficulty. A couple of caveats: those rankings are old (I believe from the ’70s), as far as I know they’ve never divulged their methodology, and of course they apply mainly to the target population; i.e., intelligent but mostly monolingual English-speaking high school graduates).
That said, I think the rankings say something about the relationship between English and other languages. One thing that sticks out is that, in general, Romance languages are easier to learn for English speakers than Germanic languages, despite the fact that English is genetically* more closely related to other Germanic languages. One reason for this has been touched on already–English had a massive influx of vocabulary from French and Latin. But I think there’s something else going on as well–syntactically (in the linguistic sense, meaning how sentences are put together) English is a lot closer to Romance languages, and especially French, than to other Germanic languages. Yes, we put the adjective on the wrong side of the noun, and tend to lump together a bunch of nouns just like good Germanic speakers, but other than that our word order is remarkably similar to French. To see this, take a random French sentence and translate it word-to-word into English. It may sound a bit odd, but it will likely be comprehensible in a way that the results from random sentences in German wouldn’t. For many learning a second language for the first time, the natural tendency is to try to translate word-for-word from L1 to L2; that’s not the worst strategy when going from English to French or vice versa, but it won’t get you very far in going from English to Turkish. (This could be evidence for a Sprachbund, but the good folks at Linguist List aren’t so convinced.)
*Linguistic metaphor–don’t take it literally.
@Giliell,
Algún día tenemos que charlar sobre la lingüística y los idiomas de España. Te invito a un vaso de vino (o la bebida que quieras).
By the way, in his article McWhorter seems to have completely forgotten about the existence of Scotland. Not only does he ignore Scots, he also erases Scottish Gaelic from the environment:
Now this is a strange claim. I translated that word-for-word into German (Tust du gehn? Ich tu nicht gehn. Ich tu gehn.), and the result is pretty unremarkable, if not exactly high-status usage. (It’s just unlikely to be used with walking. Try less common verbs.)
For that matter, that same low-status German has a construction that fills exactly the same grammatical niche as the -ing form: I am swimming – ich bin am Schwimmen (literally, “I am at the swim”).
As for phrasal verbs, I do not remember any serious problems in that area – perhaps I was just usually able to infer the meaning from the context? Or I have forgotten, always possible. My biggest problem was the massive amount of references to culture I did not share, from Mother Goose to movies to literature to … After that, English speakers seem to have a hobby of inventing specialized vocabulary and using flowery descriptions … and Americans have a rather excessive love of abbreviations. Which, in the end, all amount to some variant of vocabulary.
The first English-language novel I read was Stranger in a Strange Land, which is chock-full of references to contemporary US culture, most of which took me a decade to understand, in some cases even to realize that they represented actual culture (not quite the same as actual historic facts), not just a caricature of same (such as the story about the vote to make pi equal to three). I don’t know why I ever read the Xanth books, which are even worse in that respect – I’m extremely bad with puns.
What a Maroon @79:
Don’t be too hard on McWhorter. It’s a moribund language, and that’s largely down to Lowland Scots. Just like the erasure of Pictish was mostly due to Gaelic.