Yes I do. I like all the little grammar rules that don’t make any sense whatsoever, and the ways people break them. I like the millions of adjectives that have tiny little differences in meaning. I like how it doesn’t have gendered nouns (nouns like “table” that are inherently “masculine” or “feminine.”) I’m glad I learned it as a kid, though, because I’d go insane if I had to pick it up now.
Hell, I even like the “th” dipthong. Can’t say my real name without it. And I love how one of the most versatile words in the entire language is “fuck.” Really says something about those Anglo-Saxons, doesn’t it?
But most of all, I like it because I’m real good at it.
($@##!&*!! first-year russian…)
I like English too, since it’s the only way I really know how to comminucate other than rude hand gestures. One of the thing that bugs me about the language though is words like “dipthong” aren’t anywhere near as exciting as they sound.
The English language is stupid. ‘ph’ and ‘gh’ pronounced like an ‘f’. Letters used in words for NO REASON WHATSOEVER like the ‘gh’ in ‘thought’. The plural of ‘sheep’ being, er, ‘sheep’. To, too and two. etc etc.
Also: those who have a problem pronouncing the letter ‘s’, are told they have a ‘lisp’. Why torment them by naming their condition with ‘s’ as a prominant letter? And: poor sods who have problems in spelling are ‘dyslexic’. For gawd’s sake! How stupid is that!?
The funniest thing I ever saw regarding the English language and how it is pronounced was during a conversation between me and my boss about phonetics. He wrot “photi” on a paper and told me to pronounce it using phonetics. So I said “FOTEY”. I dunno, slang for forty? He said no, it’s “fish”. PH = F like in PHone. O = I as in wOmen. TI = SH as in naTIon.
I’ve always heard it as “ghoti” (gh as in rough). I’ve also seen it attributed to G.B. Shaw, but then I see that the alt.english.usage FAQ attributes it to an “enthusiastic convert” to Shaw’s spelling reform system.
RedNaxela
Sure, I love this language, too. Our grammar’s too simple, our case system’s a disgrace and inflection for noun gender should really be brought back. The Germans, French, Spanish, Russians, Portuguese, Italians and a lot of other people get along just fine with it. Let’s throw in extra levels of deixis, too, just for flavour. Grammatically, English is simple (unless your mother language is even simpler). The hard part’s spelling and vocabulary. We use so many idioms (‘I have to’ for ‘I must’, ‘there is’ when it doesn’t mean that it exists over there, etc.) and our tenses are formed with massive heaps of auxilliary verbs that must go together perfectly, lest the sentence be misunderstood.
Okay, maybe English is not so simple. But I’d be much happier speaking Old English - grammatically very similar to German, only with the TH sound. It’s like ice cream with honey - two good things in one.
Oh, and the Greeks used PH - F is really a form of P, pronounced with the lips looser, and the H was used to indicate that it was to be pronounced thusly. GH used to be a sort of ‘hocked-up K’, until we stopped pronouncing it as such. A lot of our letter combinations make sense if one knows the history behind them. But some make about as much sense as an inflatable dartboard…
Just wait 'til you try teaching the damn thing, especially to folks whose native language isn’t Indo-European (in my case, Japanese).
Japanese has only two real tenses: present, and past.
Japanese has no plural. Ever. One person, two person, ten million person.
Japanese has no articles. No “the,” no “a” or “an.” In fact, when I taught there ca. 1990 one of the best sellers was a several-hundred-page tome entitled “A, An and The,” which tried to explain the concept to mystified Japanese students. It’s the one aspect Japanese speakers of English never seem to quite master; my Japanese professor had lived for 20 years in a community with almost no Japanese speakers, and still made the occasional mistake.
Oh, and in English we express much of our meaning through tone of voice - each of “Mary went to the store,” “Mary went to the store,” and “Mary went to the store” conveys entirely different information. In Japanese, the tone of voice wouldn’t change - instead, the syntax would.
My hearts go out to the poor furriners trying to learn our tongue. It amazes me that so many do, and so well.
That would be diphthong, Dao. Which makes it nearly as hard to pronounce as phthalein or phthisis (although we can blame the Greeks for those two). I’m right with you on the word “fuck”, although I try to use it sparingly myself.
sirjamesp
I have a friend whose surname ends in -ough and I had to ask him how he pronounced it. Bizarre to think you should meet someone from your own country whose name is in the first language for both of you, yet you can’t guess how to say it.
First, ‘dyslexia’ is not an English word. As are many medical terms, it’s Greek.
Second, dyslexia is much more than having problems spelling. It’s a learning disability with symptoms that include difficulty in recognizing written words, in rhyming, in determining the meaning of simple sentences, and may sometimes affect one’s ability to write and perform arithmetic.
I love the English language too. Far from being frustrated by the rules and nuances of the language, I revel in it. I immerse myself in it.
I imagine mathematicians feel the same way about math. It makes no sense to me, but for some it’s as beautiful to them as grammar is to me.
Note: I probably made any manner of grammar errors. Just because I love the language doesn’t mean I’ve mastered it.
Actually, there are two sounds represented in English by the letter pair “th,” the voiced and voiceless interdental fricative. Neither of them are diphthongs. A diphthong is one vowel that changes into another vowel within the same syllable.
Those “th” sounds are still pretty cool though, because they are relatively rare in the world’s languages.
I feel I should point out: so does English. Technically speaking, English has no future “tense”, as (say) Spanish does (yo comí, yo come, yo comeré).
What we have got is a past tense and what’s called a “non-past” tense, with the future being a mood of the non-past, since it’s constructed the same as with other modal verbs (I will go, I can go, I must go…).
There are a few other languages, such as German, that do likewise.
This is of course a fairly abstruse point, and in everyday usage most people are quite content to call them past, present, and future.
Just giving you a hard time, there, Dao.