A detailed analysis of why the English language sucks - General

[b]Preface[/b] [url=http://www.facepunch.com/showpost.php?p=22278466&postcount=30]Herr Sven said[/url] that I'm trying to be elitistic and that I hardly ever contribute to subjects I consider myself well versed in - that I never do anything but criticise everything with a superior attitude, regardless of whether I'm correct or not. I think I'll prove him right. yeah, this just got personal The thing is, I enjoy arguing the most when I need to exercise my brain. As a result, I often argue from a point of view that doesn't actually reflect my own beliefs, one that requires me to think to come up with reasonable arguments. I can easily see how this may make it look to some people like my opinions are completely insane, heartless, stupid or go against the common consensus - and that I can be seen wrong in three ways: by having the incorrect premises, by having faulty reasoning or by simply arguing for the wrong side. I have no problem with being wrong in the last sense, but I try my best to always be factually correct and logical. I do enjoy it when these same people are then unable to counter my arguments with logic, despite so clearly knowing that I'm wrong. Not to mention that it helps build my own opinions. [b][u]A detailed analysis of why the English language sucks[/u][/b] [b]Vocabulary[/b] It's a particular tendency of the English language to immediately adopt as much as is possible from invading cultures, especially if they're seen somehow superior. This doesn't mean that the language is vane-like - no, that wouldn't be nearly as bad - but rather that every new influence is immediately absorbed and combined with older information. A better comparison would be the Borg, but even that simile would have its downsides. While the Borg strive for excellence by selectively adopting only the best of outside influences, the English language strives for God knows what and absorbs influences like a sponge. And when you squish it you get some muddy mixture of chalk and water, unsuitable for anything. When a new term is created in an average language - either by artificially constructing it or by loaning it from another language - it is done because there is no suitable expression already present. English, however, treats words like a collector treats stamps. The old ones are valued and the new ones must be had for the simple purpose of having them. As a result, it would be incorrect to say that the English vocabulary improves over time. No, it simply grows. The past is always glorious and mustn't be forgotten. Normans invaded England in the 11th century, and they brought their language. French words started to dominate English in juridicial, intellectual and higher-class language. It was this point at which English flipped backwards and never turned the right way around again. At the time, every civilised society, apart from the vikings, was looking back. The greatest kingdoms in Europe remembered the might of Rome and aspired to unite Europe under their own rule as it once had been under that of the emperor's. The Holy Roman Empire is the perfect example of this. The French-influenced Normans were no different. Their very typical West European court quickly adopted the efficient bureaucratic systems set in place by their German- and viking-influenced predecessors. They introduced the Latin alphabet and established Latin as the legislative language in England. The laws were universalised with those of continental Europe's. Every step taken was towards Rome - backwards. They never got too far though. Latin and French were mainly used by the upper class, while the lower class still spoke English. Despite the immense amounts of words that were borrowed in that period, the commonly spoken language was hardly affected. If one used a French or a Latin loan word, it was most likely that they could also speak French and Latin and thus knew the origin and meaning of the word. And all the problems stem from here. English never loans just a word. The most basic rules concerning that word are also imported. Despite the fact that the word is now English it retains as much of its original spelling as possible. Even if the word wasn't pronounced as it should be, according to English pronunciation rules. This was made possible by bringing the Latin alphabet to England. French and Latin pronunciation rules are vastly different from English ones, but a common alphabet allows mangling them together without damaging their original spelling. At the time this didn't matter to anyone. Only the intellectuals who knew how to pronounce French were writing French loan words in Latin alphabet in English. Unfortunately, still being backwards, English never bothered to fix this later on. Correct spelling is always traditional spelling. Instead the problem was only worsened by Latinising the spelling of some words that were of French origin - even some of those that were actually borrowed to French from Greek. The final result, now that education has become common and the previously seperated vocabularies have become intermingled, is that English words are still spelled as if they weren't English, with no one knowing why, because now the average user of advanced English terminology does not also speak French and Latin. The will to conserve traditional spelling no longer makes any sense at all. [b]Alphabet[/b] There are multiple factors behind the usability of a writing system. At first, people used pictographs to write entire words. This was noticed inefficient and abandoned in favour of mimicing smaller parts of speech. In Europe, it was noticed that the best way to write spoken language is to use one letter for one phoneme because it leaves the amount of distinct symbols small enough and allows all concepts that can be spoken about to be written down identically. It is a logical choice and passes Occam's razor unharmed. The Ancient Greeks did it so, and it was so easy to learn that their literacy boomed. The Romans derived their alphabet from the Etruscans, who had copied theirs from the Greeks. The modifications done were mainly to ensure a one-to-one correspondence between phonemes and letters. One of the reasons why there was so little original literature in the Medieval times is the fact that the main alphabet that was used was Latin, which had, at that point, very little to do with the languages spoken (ie. English). One needs very advanced education to write their own language in a different language, which is reflected in how all the people who later on came up with their national written languages were intelligent people and scholars like Chaucer. When Latin can be said to have a close to 1:1 correspondence between its phonemes and the Latin alphabet, the comparable ratio of English phonemes to Latin alphabet is 0:0. If the letters were designed to be used with the language, learning to read and write would be a very simple thing to do. The letters A, E and I are diabolical. There is no logic behind the way they're pronounced anymore. They're too greatly affected by their positioning inside a word, the language the word was borrowed from and apparently even the background radiation and geographical location of the speaker - what else could explain the differences between the Australian and American accents. [b]Irregularity and regulation[/b] Inflection is minimal in English. Ordinary nouns have only two forms: singular and plural, and the plural form is usually formed with simple rules. The most obvious exception to this is that it's almost a rule that loan words keep their original plural form, resulting in a hideously long list of exceptions to these rules with languages like Latin and Greek. The correct plural of "octopus" is "octopodes" and the technically correct plural of "prospectus" is "prospectus" with a long u. The plural forms of these words are used very liberally; no doubt the definitely incorrect "octopi" is often acceptable. Despite the rest of the language no longer having grammatical cases, some English pronouns still retain possessive and objective cases. The genitive "my", possessive "mine" and objective "me" are required without exception in all situations. Other pronouns are given special treatment: the pronoun "who" is already abandoning its objective "whom" and its incorrect, standardised genitive "who's" is commonly seen, though still frowned upon. Grammatical cases might intuitively seem like an inelegant solution, and the minimalistic approach English is heading towards could be thought of as optimal, but it comes at a cost. The lack of an objective case naturally requires the indication of objects in a different way. In English, this is achieved with a fixed word order. It is obvious that this hinders the language's expressivity and creative use of the language becomes awkward and Yoda-like. This is undesirable because it distances people from both reading and writing poetry, short stories and other works of art that rely on the language's ability to tell so much with so few words. Many things worth saying and hearing are left without the attention they deserve. [b]The millions of cooks are still dragging it backwards (in the general direction of the pot full of Rome-broth)[/b] People have yet to realize that the English vocabulary is already absolutely massive. Words for new concepts are usually created out of a rather limited vocabulary by forming compound words. While this occasionally leads to words that appear as frightening monstrosities to those who do not actually speak the language, the logic behind them is apparent and their actual meaning is easily deduced; it's the sum of their parts. New English words are coined by salvaging Latin and Greek dictionaries. It makes the words seem important. Unfortunately it also means that people need to know Latin and Greek to decipher them. Sciences are especially guilty of this. Note that the problem is not having synonyms, but having official terms constructed from foreign languages when there are perfectly fine native alternatives. "All-powerful" should be favoured instead of "omnipotent". My keyboard's showing signs of wear, g'day to you 2001st post

Congrats on gold

I Like English It sounds cool

We still like it though. We also like the fact the analysis was written in English.

You didn't read it

Germany is far worse, I hate the fucking 'gender' of words.

English is the best language, sorry, try again

Nicely written article. :smug:

[QUOTE=Gummylamb;22285865]English is the best language, sorry, try again[/QUOTE] +1 also, if the English language sucks so much why did you write it in English? write it in the best language ever

English is the best one because it's so versatile.

English is the best, piss off

I am so glad english no longer has a gender class.

I still like English.

I gotta agree with Xyrec. German is a fucking mess (No offense to my German homies) Easy to talk German, (If you come from Scandinavia) But it's impossible to learn the grammar

Alright to read, but you gave few examples of what you complained about.

[QUOTE=ThePuska;22285779]You didn't read it[/QUOTE] You bet your ass I didn't.

It's hard to maintain any sense of uniformity over thousands of dialects, backgrounds, and places. The english language does well enough of a job to be understood by millions of people, even if some of its intricacies aren't known by many.

Russian is worse, not only does it have gender words but it also has "hard marks and soft marks" after words that change the pronunciation completely.

Is English the only language where you can totally decimate a word (like, misspell it massively) and people can still understand what you said?

Lithuanian is worse, not only ya get the two things said above, but ya also get 6 extra letters which have to be put according to previous words, gender and time of the sentence.

Colour.

Word gender gives me hemorrhoids for Spanish, which is another reason why English is superior

[QUOTE=ProboardslolV2;22285894]English is the best, piss off[/QUOTE]

OP, stop complaining, It's worked well enough for most of the world to take it as an official language, where languages designed to be simple (Espagnol) have failed.

You're like the Hitler of the English language, trying to isolate it, keeping the impurities of other influences out of our language. What's wrong with having loan words? If I know what rendezvous means, as well as the majority of the English-speaking population, I see no problem using it even though it's technically French. English is pretty much based off of other languages, anyway, and if we took that away, we'd have no language at all. That's the beauty of English. We have a colorful, diversified vocabulary.

[QUOTE=Shoupie;22286173]You're like the Hitler of the English language, trying to isolate it, keeping the impurities of other influences out of our language. What's wrong with having loan words? If I know what rendezvous means, as well as the majority of the English-speaking population, I see no problem using it even though it's technically French. English is pretty much based off of other languages, anyway, and if we took that away, we'd have no language at all. That's the beauty of English. We have a colorful, diversified vocabulary.[/QUOTE] Sounds like America

German and Spanish are terrible languages. (I speak both.)

I enjoy the redundancy of English. While you might argue there's no real difference between "nice" and "pleasant", I think that the sheer variety of words I can pick from to describe something is fantastic. English is a fucked up mongrel of a language, and as a result it's really interesting.

Mark Twain thinks German is pretty bad. [url]http://www.kombu.de/twain-2.htm[/url]

Russian is worse.