What do you find the hardest about the English language?

[Hobbes]

was/were at times

was is singular, were is plural (except for singular they)

you forgot "you were" and the subjunctive mood

Hm, that's a good question and I don't actually know how to answer it. Right now, the main difference I can think of is you use "a" when the direct object is alive? Or something that directly receives the action? IDK. "Yo le pago a la señora", "yo le doy de comer al perro", "ella le habla a su mamá" as opposed to "yo pago la renta", "yo como papas", "ella habla inglés"? Not sure, to be honest.

the explanation i eventually got was something along the lines of "use it for humans and animals you empathise with, but not when the verb is tener"

Makes sense. What I like about Spanish is that it's quite flexible and you can order sentences pretty much any way you want and they'll be correct.

 

[Time Turner]

I've never actually heard of a singular they. Whenever I speak I say "They were" instead of "They was" because I think of "they" as plural.

"They was" isn't technically accurate; the singular they usually only refers to using the pronoun to refer to a single entity while still respecting other grammatical standards. For example, "I need a tutor. They can help me with my studies." Or, "The culprit is in the building. They are the ones responsible for the crime!" Or even, "I want to tell someone that I like them, but I don't know how." In these cases, the sex of the person being referred to is unknown, so instead of assuming something or using a clunky "he or she" (using this phrase is like putting a brick wall in the middle of the road), we use "they" and its derivatives. It can also be used for people who simply prefer to not go by standard male/female pronouns. I have a friend who insists that they're gender neutral and naturally, we call them "them".

This is what happens when someone studies literature for a living. They become a nerd.

 

[Walkazo]

Reminds me of a TED talk by the guy who writes Dinosaur Comics lamenting how English forces us to convey irrelevant gender info when retelling stories and whatnot without needing to use awkward "he/she" constructions (he didn't talk about singular "they", tho, but that in itself would raise eyebrows for some people, and either way, it's second nature for us to just say the gendered pronoun - even when talking about the birds we catch, my friends and I have a habit of saying "he"s and "she"s instead of "it"s, despite being srsnsbsns scientists in theory; we don't go so far as to name the wild animals, however).

 

[Magikrazy]

http://www.qwantz.com/index.php?comic=2079

In this comic, the T-Rex mentioned the issue, but was against using it. Not sure if that reflects Mr. North's thoughts on the matter, but it's worth pointing out.

 

[RandomYoshi]

oh right

HYPHENS

when2use

 

[Sabre]

one thing i don't understand about the english language is why bologna is pronounced baloney

Because it's not a word from the English language.

 

[Hobbes]

You know something I hate about many languages? When they translate names. They're a name, for fucks sake, they don't need to be translated. That leaves us with stupid stuff like Jorge Washington and King "Enrique" VIII. Hell, when I first heard Queen Elizabeth I had no fucking clue who she was until I realized she was Queen "Isabel".

 

[RandomYoshi]

What do you mean by translating names?

 

[Icemario]

Nothing about writing (that's the best part), but pronouncing certain types of words makes me cry internally.

 

[Time Turner]

What do you mean by translating names?

Like "Jacques" being a translation of "James"/"Jacob" in French or "Panagiotis"/"Παναγιώτης" being translated to "Peter" from Greek to English. The names are close approximations of the original.

You know something I hate about many languages? When they translate names. They're a name, for fucks sake, they don't need to be translated. That leaves us with stupid stuff like Jorge Washington and King "Enrique" VIII. Hell, when I first heard Queen Elizabeth I had no fucking clue who she was until I realized she was Queen "Isabel".

I've had plenty of French teachers who struggled to pronounce some of the names in our class before saying "to hell with it" and going with the closest pronunciation in the language. Some sounds commonly used in one language could be basically non-existent in others, so some names have to be changed for ease of communication. Case in point: try saying the Greek word for milk, "γάλα". It's not "yala"; it's close to "gala" but saying that would also be wrong. Try throwing the word in Google Translate and using the listen button to understand what I mean. It's hard to describe while comparing it to English because there's really no sound like it in English.

 

[Magikrazy]

sounds like gala with an h sound before the word

like how some people pronounce whip

 

[Hobbes]

Yeah I mean, it's understandable when the sounds are completely different, but George, Elizabeth, and Henry are perfectly pronounceable in Spanish and I just never understood why they were changed.

 

[Walkazo]

^What he said.

 

[Sabre]

Probably the same reason why we have English names for other countries.

 

[LeftyGreenMario]

PRONUNCIATION. It's not a surprise that I had speech therapy at one point in elementary school.

I pronounce "finite" as "infinite" without the "in".

I pronounce "rotisserie" as "raw-tis-sare-ee".

I don't know how to pronounce "solicit". Is it "saw-liss-it" or "soe-liss-it".

My stresses are all over the freaking place for some words.

 

[Natalie J.]

Solicit is suh-lis`-it.

 

[Walkazo]

I pronounce it "soh-liss-it".

 

[Specific Neptune]

one thing i don't understand about the english language is why bologna is pronounced baloney

Because it's not a word from the English language.

still don't quite understand

we've changed words for our own usage for a long long time, and other countries have done the same

so why stop at bologna

it surely must confuse a lot of people, seeing bologna and hearing it as baloney

 

[RandomYoshi]

but Neptune

rendezvous

 

[fantanoice]

one thing i don't understand about the english language is why bologna is pronounced baloney

Because it's not a word from the English language.

still don't quite understand

we've changed words for our own usage for a long long time, and other countries have done the same

so why stop at bologna

it surely must confuse a lot of people, seeing bologna and hearing it as baloney

From what I can tell its because English speakers can't speak Italian

 

[LeftyGreenMario]

one thing i don't understand about the english language is why bologna is pronounced baloney

Because it's not a word from the English language.

still don't quite understand

we've changed words for our own usage for a long long time, and other countries have done the same

so why stop at bologna

it surely must confuse a lot of people, seeing bologna and hearing it as baloney

I know, why don't people pronounce "champagne" as "cham-pag-nee"?

 

[Time Turner]

one thing i don't understand about the english language is why bologna is pronounced baloney

Because it's not a word from the English language.

still don't quite understand

we've changed words for our own usage for a long long time, and other countries have done the same

so why stop at bologna

it surely must confuse a lot of people, seeing bologna and hearing it as baloney

I know, why don't people pronounce "champagne" as "cham-pag-nee"?

English just stole the word from French and changed nothing.

but Neptune

rendezvous

Parlez-vous français?

 

[Hobbes]

To be honest I hate it when languages force poor changes of foreign words into themselves. Why the fuck is Spanish so insistent on changing "hot dog" to "jotdog", "tweet" to "twit", and "google" to "gúgol"? It drives me crazy.

You know what I love about English? That it is so flexible. It doesn't have a tyrannic organization ruling supreme over everything related to it and dictating what is correct and what is not, it instead relies on the most common usage, which makes the most sense for something as changing as language.

 

[Time Turner]

You know what I love about English? That it is so flexible. It doesn't have a tyrannic organization ruling supreme over everything related to it and dictating what is correct and what is not, it instead relies on the most common usage, which makes the most sense for something as changing as language.

You'd be surprised how many English teachers argue exactly the opposite.

I do get what you're saying though, there are plenty of reoccurring suffixes, prefixes, and morphemes in English. For example, take "ject", which has fallen out of modern usage but was derived from the Latin jacero, which refers to something being thrown or thrown down (can be interpreted as lying down). This morpheme can then have the prefix "in" (inside) placed on it to create "inject", which refers to throwing something inside of something else. In most cases, "ject" doesn't literally refer to throwing something, but merely the displacement of an object or even something more abstract than that. Another example would be "subject", combining "sub" (under or below) with "ject", which clues you in on the meaning (something that lies underneath something or someone else). From there, you can start to notice the patterns: "project", "reject", "objective", "trajectory", "conjecture", "adjective", and the list goes on and on. It's not something you need to study to pick up on: as you see the same few words crop up, you automatically associate them with each other, which helps immensely with comprehension. It's easy to create words just by taking a common word and sticking a prefix or a suffix on it ("serve" has "conserve", "reserve", "deserve", "observe", "servile", "servant", "service", "server", and so much more) Even with words that seem esoteric, like "obnoxious", it's a simple combination of "ob" (against, also in "objection") and "noxious" (harmful or dangerous), or with "mnemonic", which uses the common "-ic" suffix (pertaining to something else) while also being where "meme" comes from. The English language is one heck of a mixing pot, but it certainly has its clever tricks, even if those tricks may be borrowed from other languages. It wouldn't be much of a mixing pot if those languages weren't there, though.

i had an english teacher obsessed with the roots of words and i fear that he rubbed off on me

 

[Sabre]

one thing i don't understand about the english language is why bologna is pronounced baloney

Because it's not a word from the English language.

still don't quite understand

we've changed words for our own usage for a long long time, and other countries have done the same

so why stop at bologna

What do you mean? It's a word from a foreign language. Even if they use the same roman characters, the pronunciations associated with them differ by language.

it surely must confuse a lot of people, seeing bologna and hearing it as baloney

I guess it may confuse some young children who aren't yet familiar with the concept of 'borrowed' words in English. But generally speaking, people understand that these words come from a different language, so they wouldn't be confused as to why the words sound different.