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[SoHowAreYou]

Because I know there are so many non-native English speakers I want to know what the rest of the world thinks of English. Technically I am a bilingual American but the other language is Latin. I just want to see your guys opinions on this language out of curiosity.

[RedKing]

Spoiler: Last panel says it all. (click to show/hide)

[SoHowAreYou]

To be fair the French also screwed with the language after William came in.

[King DZA]

In my personal opinion, the English language is pretty fuckin' snazzy. If seemingly a big mangled mess at times.

[SoHowAreYou]

After Latin the best thing is the lack of endings.

[Twiggie]

the fact that its a big mess is what makes it awesome.

[RedKing]

English, as with any language, reflects the history of its people.

Which in the case of the English, meant Celts conquered by Romans, conquered by Saxons, conquered by Normans (who were themselves descended of resettled Vikings). It's a mongrel language, with all the good and bad that entails.

[Sir Finkus]

I'm a native English speaker and I don't really like the language all that much.

[Skyrunner]

I'm a bilingual with English and Korean!

I'd say that English is pretty nice in way because it's so weird. I always am amazed at the poetry created by lyric writers in musicals like Les Mis. Each line rhymes with words I never knew existed/could be used that way. o-O

Its grammar is a mess and I'm glad I don't need to learn it the hard way. Compared to a Romance language, English is just a convoluted tangle of exceptions.

[RedKing]

I'm a bilingual with English and Korean!

I'd say that English is pretty nice in way because it's so weird. I always am amazed at the poetry created by lyric writers in musicals like Les Mis. Each line rhymes with words I never knew existed/could be used that way. o-O

Its grammar is a mess and I'm glad I don't need to learn it the hard way. Compared to a Romance language, English is just a convoluted tangle of exceptions.

Which is your 1st language, English or Korean? Or did you grow up bilingual?


EDIT: One of the things that must drive non-native speakers nuts is the frequent use of verb phrases (verb + preposition) that impart a huge variety of meanings to the same verb.

For example, look. You can:
look about
look after
look around
look at
look away
look back
look down on
look down upon
look for
look forward
look forward to
look in on
look into
look on
look out
look out for
look over
look through
look to
look up
look up to
and, look upon.

But if you're just starting out and trying to translate "look", it can be maddening. German does a lot of these phrasal verbs too, but the difference is that they frequently agglutinate the preposition onto the verb, thus making it a new word that you can look up in a dictionary. For example the verb sehen, to see/look:

absehen
ansehen
aufsehen
aussehen
besehen
durchsehen
einsehen
ersehen
nachsehen
übersehen
umsehen
versehen
vorsehen 
 

Of course, English being part German, it does this as well, so in addition to all those "look+preposition" phrases, you get German-style words like overlook (which is different from 'look over') and outlook (which is different from 'look out').

[Skyrunner]

^{_{Well, my family speaks Korean, and I was born there, but I moved to America at 1 month old and used English til 4th grade, then moved to Korea and used Korean until 10th grade and then am in America but shortly will return to Korea.}}

So yeah, bilingual.

[Askot Bokbondeler]

it's incoherent but intuitive, like a dumbed down romance language: half the words, half the rules, four times as much exceptions. it also wasn't designed for the latin alphabet, pronunciation isn't properly represented in the way it's written; to live, going live, etc.

[Skyrunner]

The pronunciation is always what gets me.
I know lots of words but not all of their proper sounds. >.>

[Mr. Palau]

I hate phonetic spelling exceptions (which, thankfully, are few). It's easy to use in an informal context, hard to learn, and medium-hard to learn to speak in a formal, educated, way. Oh and good god the grammer, makes no sense whatsoever.

[Starver]

English, as with any language, reflects the history of its people.

Which in the case of the English, meant Celts conquered by Romans, conquered by Saxons, conquered by Normans (who were themselves descended of resettled Vikings). It's a mongrel language, with all the good and bad that entails.

You forgot the fact that classical Latin and Greek got compounded onto it[1], and at the same time as we exported Empire to a lot of the planet, we imported various loan-words from them.

And the process hasn't stopped, because we're importing not just words but grammar from the Americas.  (My Dad's always talking about "Have you a <foo>?" being replied to by "Yes, I do.", instead of "Yes, I have", IIRC, but then he's a lot older than me[2], and my grammar maybe contaminated by significant post-war 'Americanizations')


Tell me, though, all you English-As-A-Foreign-Language people...  Do you see the problem with the phrase "I could of done something"?  A lot of native English speakers don't.  Drives me mad.


Tell you what, though, I admire the Acadamie Francais (sans the properly-accented letters, there; sorry, AF!) for their attempts to keep the language pure.  I find it ironic, though, that it wasn't they who came up with the term "couriel[le]" as the non-anglophonic alternative to the loan-word variants of "email".  An elegant word (similarly compare "l'aerogliser" and "l'hovercraft") that I wish I could use more; but I'm largely non-francophonic, unfortunately.



Anyway, the problems with English, native-English-speaker-who-doesn't-like-it-much, is almost certainly a problem with any natural language.  The most common verbs and sentence constructions were solidified through common usage before more global rules came in.  Look at "to be" in its various forms, in most natural languages (possibly excepting some 'reformed' ones, if they've given it a real go at standardisation).  "I am", "You are", "He is", "Du bist", "Ich bin", "Je suis", "Il est", "Nous sommes", as just various samples that I think I'm fairly accurate in quoting...

Spelling-reform has been discussed for the last few centuries (but never really caught the public imagination) so unlike some other places, we do tend to have the odd exceptions.    The "ough" pronunciation being the oft-quoted example.

[1] Sometimes at the same time... "Television".

[2] Obviously, he's older than me, but the point is that he's a lot older than me.  And I'm no spring chicken myself...