Post Something Interesting About English

The English language is lots of fun. Post a fact about grammar, spelling, vocabulary, definitions of words changing with time, pronounciation, something factual and cool. I’ll start.

  • The origin of the word “bird” is unknown. As simple and common a word as it is, they don’t know where it came from. It has no obvious comparisons to any other Germanic or French word. The Old English for avian animals was “fugol,” from whence we get “fowl.” So why bird? No one can say.

It’s spelled “grammar.” Unless you’re Sideshow Bob.

Ouch, I’m goin’.

English has 37 words for “snow” but no word for “rain”.

:confused:

Hey, RicJay originaly mispeled “grammar,” dammit!

:wink:

The English word “duck” does not echo. No one knows why.

There are only three words in Modern-ish English that end in -gry; hungry, angry, and puggry…:0

Also, English is a whore of a language picking up whatever suits its fancy…

All your language belong to us.

All senses of the word “check” (to control or limit something; to examine or test something; a piece of paper indicating either you wish to transfer money from your bank account to someone else or indicating that you owe someone else, like a restaurant, a certain sum of money; a mark used as an indicator; a claim check; a good hard whack with a hockey stick; a pattern made up of a grid of squares; etc., etc., etc.) come from the same original meaning: An attack on the king in the game of chess. The word “check” itself comes from the well-known Persian word for king, shah.

invisible is an antonym of visible
inappropriate is an antonym of appropriate
…etc…
*inflammable *is a synonym of flammable

The origin of “acorn” seems like a no-brainer. It’s from “oak corn” (“corn” = “seed”). Nope. But the folk belief in that meaning did lead to it’s current spelling.

The word ghost is spelt with an h due to Belgian typesetters working in the early printing trade in England. The word for ghost in Belgian or Dutch is gheest. Ghastly is spelt the way it is for the same reason.

English has a more complicated system of grammatical aspect than most other major languages have. So there are actions you can easily express in English which are more complicated to accurately express in other languages.

What English word changes pronunciation when capitalized?

polish -> Polish

What English word changes number when you add -s, and then changes number and gender when you add another -s.

prince -> princes -> princess

A fat chance and a slim chance mean the same thing.

If you ask people out loud to name three common words that end in the “gry” sound, they think of “angry,” and “hungry,” but never think of “pedigree,” which to an oral riddle is a perfectly good answer.

Pirates doubtfully spoke any differently from any other person of the same socio-economic class of their time. “Talking like a pirate” is a Disney invention. It’s based on the dialogue written for Robert Newton, the actor who played Long John Silver in Treasure Island and Long John Silver. It’s some 20th century American Disney writer’s idea of the the way someone with a Scottish accent would have spoken Georgian English in a story written by a Victorian. Robert Louis Stevenson, FWIW, doesn’t have Silver speaking with things like the present subjunctive (ie, “So if that be my end,” as opposed to “So if that is my end”). The writers of the earlier version of Treasure Island, didn’t give Silver so many oddities, albeit, they did try to give the film a Georgian flavor, and Silver still has the Scottish accent. Or, Hollywood Scottish.

Being up the creek and being sold down the river: either way, you’re screwed.

Okay, I gotta ask, do you pronounce pedigree pedigry, or do you pronounce angry and hungry angree and hungree? Because those words do not end with the same sounds in any dialect I’ve ever heard.

Many languages have gendered nouns, and while English no longer has them, at least one gendered pair survived.

two/twain are such a feminine/masculine pair. “Twain” is almost entirely used in semi-archaic phrases like “split in twain” and “never the twain shall meet” (and for scanner image formats).

I can’t even imagine what sound you are referring to. “Gree” and the “gry” of those words sound exactly the same to me in the dialects of English I’m familiar with, namely /ɡɹi/.

ETA: Just to be sure, I checked wiktionary, Merriam-Webster, and Dictionary.com, and they all have the same ending for “angry,” “hungry,” and “pedigree.”