How do you say it?

[fender3x]

As the great historian of comedy once said, when you analyze a joke the thing that is usually lost is the humor.

I was not actually trying to be literal. I am an American with about half the family roots in Quebec. That makes it hard for me to resist teasing Aussie and Canadian friends about their sometimes latent Anglophilia. Not a knock on the UK, British pronunciation (whatever the heck that is) or any of it's former colonies. More a manifestation of my own Character flaw ;-)

When I taught ESL in Europe, my boss, a Brit, used to say that we were "two countries divided by a common language." That's funnier than it is true. Since I am a terrible speller, I take comfort in the fact that standard spelling is a relatively new feature of English, which went for a very long time without it.

Here in Miami, I use Spanish almost as much as English, and can tell you that the accent and idiom differences put us to shame. They use 7 different versions of "you" with 5 different verb conjugations, and use varies dramatically from region to region... and don't get me started German...

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[Simon Barden]

English is quite complicated to learn in detail, but a lot of it is very simple and unlike a lot of other languages, can be understood when some words are left out, or wrong tenses used. In some languages unless it's 100% right, you just get a blank stare and a look of total incomprehension.

Yes, we forget that a standardised English is a relatively recent occurrence. Same with French. Only once cars became more common and people started moving around their own country more did things really start to standardise. Radio helped a lot as well.

[JohnH]

English is quite complicated to learn in detail, but a lot of it is very simple and unlike a lot of other languages, can be understood when some words are left out, or wrong tenses used. In some languages unless it's 100% right, you just get a blank stare and a look of total incomprehension.

This happens to me a lot. I’ve been learning mandarin for a year or two, and if the inflection of the syllable is wrong, it’s usually meaningless. Also, if you forget something like a measure word before a noun, it’s again rendered meaningless. Add to that my Aussie accent and I get a lot of blank stares or laughs when I try to speak! But, it’s enjoyable to learn, and it’s an interesting language, so I’ll perservere

[fender3x]

Learning English has its challenges, but so do most other languages. Mastery of English is difficult, but it's relatively easy to get the basics at least compared to other European languages. Articles are the same (there are at least 10 words in German that all me "the"). Eight verb conjugations (compare to 99 in Spanish, including a number tenses we don't even have in English, and two different forms of "to be"). German verbs have four different forms--which are different depending on what sort of vowel is stressed and which of the three genders it is.

Grammar is simple in English, so we need to mess it up some other way. One way is by having the most nonsensical rules for spelling and pronunciation of any European language (to two too). We write with 26 letters, and use no diacritical marks even though we all speak using more than 40 phonemes. We love to completely change the meaning of verbs by adding preposition: (it blows, it blows up, it blows over...)

You can almost always tell how to pronounce a word by seeing it written in most European languages. When you see words like "enough" "thorough" and "bureau" you wonder why we even bothered to standardize spelling English.



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[fender3x]

I meant German nouns rather than verbs...

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[Rabbitz]

As a writer and editor I disagree about grammar being simple in English. In the spoken form, many grammatical rules are ignored or glossed over. In the written form it gets far more tricky.

But if we are to boldy go into an multi-cultural future, adapt we must.

(Red pens at the ready).

[DrNomis_44]

Here's something interesting, the English language as it is spoken in England evolved from it's West Germanic origins and contains words from other languages, like French, Latin, and other European languages, the word England was derived from the Old English word "Engalaland", which meant "Land Of The Angles", the Angles were one of the Germanic tribes that settled in Great Britain during the early middle ages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_English


I'm part English and part Hungarian, I know how to speak some Hungarian words but I mainly speak English, anyway, since I'm part English that means I also have West Germanic heritage in me.

[fender3x]

I think writing well in any language is difficult. But I'll stand by my statement that it has simple grammar compared to other European languages. To say otherwise you'd have to be able to identify a language with simpler grammar.

English has lots of complexity. Biggest vocabulary of any European language, more rigid syntax than most, pronunciation that only vaguely resembles spelling...

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[dave.king1]

English has lots of complexity. Biggest vocabulary of any European language, more rigid syntax than most, pronunciation that only vaguely resembles spelling...

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There certainly are subtle differences

[dave.king1]

As a writer and editor I disagree about grammar being simple in English. In the spoken form, many grammatical rules are ignored or glossed over. In the written form it gets far more tricky.

But if we are to boldy go into an multi-cultural future, adapt we must.

(Red pens at the ready).

Hmm, so are we going boldy or boldly

Should add, I have been known to massacre our written language so shouldn't throw stones