What would you like to change about the English language? What would you like to add? Are there parts and qualities of other languages that you think English could benefit from? Are their any specific words from foreign languages that you would like to see become common English? Are there old mistakes that you think should corrected?
I would like to simplify the spelling. English has some the most counter-intuitive spelling of any language. Knight, Dairy, Journey, Colonel, are all examples of words that have odd, or just plain insane, spelling.
Also, I would like to see the Japanese word Mu become a common part of the language. It would go with yes and no, but mu means that the question itself is flawed. The famous example question of faulty logic “Do you still beat your wife?”, could now be answered, mu.
I haven’t given it much thought in general, but the word mu is incredibly cool. I’ve always thought that there should be a way to respond to questions that don’t make sense… I’m going to use that whenever the need arises, now. You’ve made my day.
Mu does sound like a neat word to add to English - guess I will have to get people using it. That is the nice thing about English, if we see a shiny foreign word we can just take it.
I also agree on the spelling thing; too many words sound nothing like how they are spelled.
I’d like a usable gender neutral third person singular because writing s/he and the equivilents drive me nuts because they are clunky and the other option “The student should turn in their work” is both incorrect and grating. And, yes, I know that we can write around it, but I want simplicity here. For the record, I know about the made up pronouns, but they are silly.
It may be confusing, since that’s very different from the meaning of mu in Japanese. Then again, it won’t be the first time English borrowed a word and assigned a new meaning to it.
Anyway, I’d like to change the word or. I think it would be neat to have separate words for inclusive or (meaning one or the other, or both) and exclusive or (one or the other but not both). As it is, I have to write “and/or” if I want to make it clear that it’s an inclusive or. I hear some langauges have that already.
Another thing I’d like to see is an all-purpose title that can be substituted for Mr., Mrs., Miss, Dr., etc. Japanese has two which sort of fit the bill, except they are postfixes: -san and -sama. Many English-speaking colleagues in my field have already learned to use -san when speaking with Japanese colleagues, as in “Tanaka-san, what did you think of Suzuki-san’s presentation?”
I’ve thought that the word “we” can be confusing. Suppose person A and person B come up to person C. A says to C, “We love each other.” He could be talking about him/herself and C or him/herself and B. Maybe this is nitpicking, but I still think it’s annoying.
I would like multiple words for “I’m sorry.” For example, an easy, simple, commonly understood way to differentiate between:
I’m sorry meaning “It’s my fault and I regret it.”
I’m sorry meaning “I feel compassion for your difficult situation over which I had no real control.”
I’m sorry meaning “Maybe if I say this code word you’ll shut up and move on to something else.”
I’m sorry meaning “Excuuuuusssse me, you idiot, that was your own fault.”
I’m sorry meaning “I hope what follows isn’t going to offend you, even though it might, but I’m going to say it any way.”
I suspect there are other meanings and shades of meaning as well. Sometimes both parties to a conversation are on the same wavelength and sometimes there’s a big whoooooosh.
I do realize we have alternatives
I apologize for the first
Oh that must hurt, feel awful for the second
Let’s talk about something else and come back to this later for third
I love y’all, but if you use it in parts of the north (or in the UK) people look at you funny. They will often stop what they are doing. Silence will fall, and the entire room in perfect unison will say “Y’all?” Personally, I think this is fun, but mileage may vary.
I appreciate where you’re coming from, but the solution doesn’t compensate for the loss of the phrase’s utility. In using “I’m sorry” clarity isn’t really the point. The beauty of using the phrase “I’m sorry” is that while the speaker can mean, “Maybe if I say this code word you’ll shut up and move on to something else” the listener can take it to mean, “It is my fault and I regret it.” Both parties are then happily assuaged.
At least that’s how it works between my spouse and I.
Well, the conservatives believe that y’all is a choice–I mean, you have the ability to either y’all or not. No one forces you to y’all.
On the other hand, the more libral folks think that y’all is what your born with, and no discrimination should ever take place against the y’allers.
Many deaths have occured as one side tried to convince the other that it was right, until the compromise of 1996, when both sides decided that this was a silly thing to argue about, made up, and then banded together against the “yins” in western PA (as well they should).
Wow. So many good ideas that never occured to me. I would love to see a gender-neutral pronoun and a gender-neutral title of respect - especially because I keep encountering people with gender-neutral names and I don’t always know the person’s sex.
As far as “sorry” goes, I’d be content with one word to mean apology and another to mean sympathy. (One of my pet peeves is, when someone pours out their troubles to me and I respond with “I’m so sorry!” and they reply “Well, it’s not your fault.” I KNOW it’s not my fault, you ass, I was expressing sympathy and if you’re too dense and/or nitpicky to get that, I take it back!)
And in my humble opinion, we need to do away with words that sound different but are spelled the same. “Separate” for example. One spelling for the adjective, and another for the verb.
I think English could use a nonspecific word to be substituted when the speaker is at a loss for words, like the Filipino “ano.” Literally, “ano” means “what,” but Filipinos also use it as a substitute for nouns, verbs, and adjectives when they can’t think of the specific word for the situation. Not as much of that word-on-the-tip-of-my-tongue thing for Filipinos.
For example: “Anohin mo yung ano.”
“Do the thing to the thing.”
Of course, the meaning is only intelligible in context, and this usage is only acceptable in speech, not writing, but it’s still a rather handy word to have.
All of these ideas are great. I especially like the neuter 3rd personal singular idea and seperate forms for inclusive and exclusive ‘we’. The ‘we’ thing has always bugged me, because it’s not always possible even in context to tell whether or not a speaker’s use of ‘we’ includes the person they are addressing.
English also used to have a pronoun for things further away than that: ‘yon’ or ‘yonder’. I’ve always loved this word. I think we should bring it back. This book, that table, and yon chair.
I wish English had more case forms; it would really free up word order. For instance, we have an objective case form for pronouns: me, him, her, us, them. But our word order has become increasingly fixed- we have to say “He kissed her” instead of “Her kissed he”. Technically both sentences should carry the exact same meaning, but because of the somewhat infelixible nature of English word order, most people would assume that the second sentence was a mistake for “She kissed him”. But I recognize that it is much simpler without case forms, so maybe this isn’t such a great idea.
I’d also like to see auxiliary verbs fade out of usage, with more specific tenses replacing them. For instance, in English you have to say “I have been going” to indicate an ongoing action that began sometime in the past and has continued into the present- two extra verbs whose purpose is only to clarify tense. I’d like to see new conjugations of verbs so that this idea could be expressed with a single word. The Chinese call them ‘empty words’- words that have no meaning in themselves but serve only to clarify other words within the sentence.
English is also highly idiomatic, and I’m a little torn on this issue. I like the richness of our idiom, but it does make English rather difficult to learn as a foreign language.
I always wanted gender-specific words for “cousin” – we really out to adopt the French version, cousin and cousine so you could specify if it was your aunt’s son or your uncle’s daughter you were talking about.
I’ve been thinking for a while that we need exactly what Innanna suggests. The idea of a non-gender neutral is clearly not going away, but it’d be nice if we could do better than “their” when that’s clearly against the rule in question.
