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Why English is so Hard to Learn
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Stealth
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Joined: 13 Mar 2005
PostPosted: Sun Jul 08, 2012 11:35 am 
Post subject: Why English is so Hard to Learn
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You guys probably already saw this, but I loved it. I found it a lot funnier to say it out loud.

--------------

The Bandage was wound around the wound.

The farm was used to produce produce.

The dump was so full that it had to refuse more refuse.

We must polish the Polish furniture.

He could lead if he would get the lead out.

The soldier decided to desert his dessert in the desert.

Since there is no time like the present, he thought it was time to present the present.

A bass was painted on the head of the a bass drum.

When shot at, the dove dove into the bushes.

I did not object to the object.

The insurance was invalid for the invalid.

There was a row among the oarsmen about how to row.

They were too close to the door to close it.
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Eugene
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Joined: 30 Jun 2011
PostPosted: Sun Jul 08, 2012 12:49 pm 
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This, motherfucking this. 2 years of ESL, and constant ridicule in English class because of this.
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Hirmuinen
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Joined: 16 Mar 2005
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 08, 2012 2:19 pm 
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I don't know it felt mostly logical to me.
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Erwin Rommel
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Joined: 02 Aug 2005
PostPosted: Sun Jul 08, 2012 3:15 pm 
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Actually, a lot of the noun-verb pairs are quite consistent and logical.

They might be spelled the same, but they are distinguished by stress. Stress on the last syllable makes it a verb, usually.

Still funny, though.
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Eugene
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Joined: 30 Jun 2011
PostPosted: Sun Jul 08, 2012 3:47 pm 
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The problem is going from a language where every word has its own meaning, for example the words bat (animal) and bat (object) are very different for me and going to a language where bat and bat are two different things but share a word, was not logical to me at all.
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Stealth
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Joined: 13 Mar 2005
PostPosted: Sun Jul 08, 2012 7:00 pm 
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Certainly a Bat existed in animal form first. So when did they decide a baseball bat it's name when it came into existance?

I think English is a lazy language tbh.
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Erwin Rommel
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PostPosted: Sun Jul 08, 2012 10:08 pm 
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Eugene wrote:
The problem is going from a language where every word has its own meaning, for example the words bat (animal) and bat (object) are very different for me and going to a language where bat and bat are two different things but share a word, was not logical to me at all.


You also forgot abotu the verb "to bat" as in "I batted my eyelashes."

To answer Stealth's question, all three of these have completely different etymologies.
Source: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=bat

It's not like someone sat down and decided to make all of these the same. It's more a consequence of importing stuff from multiple languages.

Also, I strongly doubt there is a language where this sort of thing doesn't happen. For instance, what is the meaning of the word "есть" in Russian?

Quote:
I think English is a lazy language tbh.


English is a strange language in that the grammar is Germanic, but the vocabulary is largly Italic (i.e. descended from Latin - often through French).

What really annoys me, however, is when people get hung up on spelling. Spelling really has nothing to do with linguistics.
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Wang Chung
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Joined: 13 Mar 2005
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 09, 2012 9:16 am 
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Great topic. I love meta discussions about language. I'm a native English speaker and I took four years of French from 8th to 11th grade. I only wanted to speak French, and I really hated having to read, write, and understand formal grammar in French. Grammar was probably the hardest part of French for me, and looking back, it's because I have no formal understanding of grammar in English. If it's not intuitive to me, I don't care about it, but 95% of grammar seems to make perfect sense to me.

The English language has its caveats, some dreadful stuff, but it's really not all that bad and when you consider spoken and written English together it really has a nice balance between the different characteristics of language. There is actually no "official" ruling body for the English language, which is unlike Spanish. What Erwinator said is indeed the case: the Anglo-Saxon folks who created English were germanic people, so it makes sense that the structure of the language is germanic. But those French bastards blended in some of their language, which is why we have tons of Greek and Latin vocabulary (scientific and legal - two very important things), though these words come in "through" French. Nothing in English has come about because someone sat down and said "this means this" - it's pretty organic, and dictionaries should really be seen as historical records, not "official standards."

Obviously English became the working language of the world due to England's conquests (and has remained due to America's conquest), but could this have happened with any language? Are there some characteristics that a language must have in order for it to see acceptance?

As Erwin mentioned, words that are written the same but pronounced differently due to stressing syllables differently can usually be identified by the type of stress. I could see how a non-native speaker has difficulty with this. Yet one nice thing about English is that slight stress differences are used rather sparingly, unlike this.
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Erwin Rommel
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PostPosted: Mon Jul 09, 2012 7:27 pm 
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I had seen the Chinese poem before, but forgot about it. Thanks for reminding me. Razz

It's probably good that English has no ruling body, since they would probably propagate nonsense like "Never end a sentence with a syllable" or " 'they' is not a singular pronoun."
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Stealth
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Joined: 13 Mar 2005
PostPosted: Mon Jul 09, 2012 7:50 pm 
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Side note: It bugs me when you're having a conversation and you've established the subject and use the word "they." And someone asks, "Who's 'they'?"

Example: In reference to talking about a school fight earlier that day..

"They said I'll be suspended for several days."

"Who's 'they?'"

Does it matter? Lol
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tru.pairadocs
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Joined: 12 Oct 2011
Location: Michigan
PostPosted: Mon Jul 09, 2012 9:55 pm 
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I have read this before but was glad to read it again



(See what i did there? Wink )
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massive
Captain Ass Kicking Asshole


Joined: 13 Mar 2005
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 10, 2012 7:04 pm 
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tru.pairadocs wrote:
I have read this before but was glad to read it again



(See what i did there? Wink )


Clever, clever girl
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Erwin Rommel
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PostPosted: Tue Jul 10, 2012 7:48 pm 
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tru.pairadocs wrote:
I have read this before but was glad to read it again



(See what i did there? Wink )


I refer you to my previous comment Razz

Quote:
What really annoys me, however, is when people get hung up on spelling. Spelling really has nothing to do with linguistics.

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Stealth
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Joined: 13 Mar 2005
PostPosted: Wed Jul 11, 2012 9:32 am 
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Linguistics is the study of languages.

Spelling is a subset of Linguistics; Therefore, it's important.
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Erwin Rommel
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PostPosted: Wed Jul 11, 2012 12:18 pm 
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Saying "nothing to do with linguistics" was perhaps a bit stronger than I intended. However, I really would suggest that a language is independent of how it is written.

The most basic example are languages that has several completely different writing systems that can be used independently. I don't think anyone would say that those are examples of multiple languages.

Or another example would be if you wrote English with the international phonetic alphabet (a very good thing to learn, by the way). It would still be English, would it not? But if you started pronouncing every English word like it is spelled, that would be a much bigger change to the language as a whole.

In fact, when you write English, you are actually writing 15th-18th century English phonetically. It was around that time that:

1) People started paying attention to how a language "Should be", and not how it actually is. For them, this included spelling.
2) The printing press was invented. That meant (there's another one Razz) that the above standardization was needed.

But the problem was that people were so busy paying attention to how words "should be" written that they kinda forgot about how things ought to be. So when stuff like the great vowel shift happened, the spelling didn't adjust.

People have been speaking languages for a very long time (possibly millions of years according to some scientists - we can never know for sure, obviously). People have been writing languages for a few thousand years. Many languages today do not have a writing system. Writing really is this thing that gets tacked on at the end.
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