The English language is the greatest fucking troll ever. Why?

Tenses

Present tense - I bake a cake

Past tense - I baked a cake

Present tense - I make a cake

Past tense - I made a cake

The pronunciation of ‘ough’

Rough = ruff

Cough = coff

Although - altho

Ought - awt

Through - throo

Plough - pl ow

Thorough - thurugh

*The US spellings/pronunciations might be different.

The ‘in’ prefix

Voluntarily = Willingly

Involuntarily = Unwillingly

Flammable = Able to catch fire

Inflammable = Able to catch fire

This word

Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia- the irrational fear of long words. Imagine trying to diagnose someone. Plus, as if that’s not bad enough, it’s spelled ‘sesquipped’ rather than ‘sesquiped’ as in sesquipedalian which means either characterised by long words or polysyllabic.

There are so many more examples but I think you catch my drift.

As Eric Pepke says in his spot-on answer, English is a kind of creole language with a voracious appetite, and as Quora User's answer suggests, the British and later American empires took it so many places that to speak of English as a single language is not really accurate. The old joke is that Britain and the US are two countries divided by a common language. The richness of English--and I do think it is an incredibly rich language--stems partly from how it spread around the globe and adapted and changed and brought in loan-words and so on.

The central fact about English is that it is a hybrid of Germanic and Latin roots, because of the Battle of Hastings (1066, for those of you too young to have been there.) English has at least two words for almost everything, except the most functional elements like personal pronouns, which all go back to the Old English roots.

I can say anything I want in at least two ways, which leads to endless possibilities. I can say "He gazed at me with a malevolent countenance, so I eviscerated him," or I can say "He looked at me wrong so I cut his guts out." Same meaning, one Latin, one old English.

And the loan words are beautiful, too--have you ever run amok? dealt with a juggernaut at work? had difficult understanding how a chrysalis turns into a flutter-by? Languages from ancient Greek to Tagalog inform our tongue, and the language changes every year, faster and faster--something that one can only hate or love, and as a poet I love it--I'd even learn how to twerk to keep this sort of change going.

It is a wonderful but very hard language for literature. Wonderful because the breadth of possible expression is so huge, with at least two words for every concept, and sometimes twenty. Dante, Cervantes, and Shakespeare are the great triad who create modern literature in the West, but it is Shakespeare who had the most language available to him, because he had the Latin by way of French (with Chaucer as the middle term in that equation), and also the old tough syllables of Beowulf and the anonymous poet of "The Wanderer."

Hard, because unlike the Romance languages, nothing really rhymes very well--you have to coax the music out. My old teacher Robert Fitzgerald, who was good at Greek and Latin, once told a class that when English lost the sounded "e" at the end of words like Chaucer's "soote"--pronounced "soo-tay," and meaning sweet--as in "When that Aprille cometh with her shoures soote..."--it was an enormous loss to poetry in English. It is so easy to rhyme in French, Spanish, and Italian that poets stopped doing it a long time ago, for the large part.

English is an imperial language--we must never forget that. Britain and then the US basically forced the rest of the world to speak it--only Spanish and Chinese come close, in terms of that hegemony. But it is a fine tool to work with.

I find English to be a fascinating language. Among the Indo-European languages, it is probably the most analytic language. In the most basic terms, this means that individual words in English contain less grammatical information than in other Indo-European languages. Instead, English relies more on word order and prepositions to identify parts of speech.

However, even though grammatical markers are greatly reduced in English, it still holds onto a few. English is a genderless language, yet it retains the "he" and "she" pronouns when talking about people. English doesn't have a case system, but still adds an "s" to the end of words to indicate possession, a holdover of the genitive case from when English still had a case system. Verbs don't conjugate to match the pronoun, except for "be" and the third-person present singular (e.g. I see, he sees) unless helping verbs are used (I can, he can).

A unique quality of English is do-support. Instead of simply changing word order to indicate a question, as in other Germanic languages, or indicting negation with just "not", also as in other Germanic languages, English inserts "do". I've heard some speculation as to why English does this, but nothing really definitive. It's completely unnecessary, no one knows where it came from, yet there it is.

English contains a large library of sounds. While it varies according to dialect, the number sounds any English speaker is familiar with far exceeds its 26 letter alphabet. In connection with this, there is a large variety of sound combinations, with many forms of consonant clusters. It's my pet theory that one of reasons English has such a large vocabulary is because of this. Because of the sheer variety of possible sounds, there is no real uniformity of sound (e.g. all nouns ending with -o). This a big problem when searching for rhyming words for songs and poetry. To get around this, English pulls in words from other languages which rhyme with the words they want to use.

Another interesting feature is "a" and "an". While other Indo-European languages change their indefinite article, they do so to match the gender of the noun. The distinction between "a" and "an" though completely depends on the opening sound of following word, regardless of what part of speech that word is. So you have "an ant", "a big ant", or "an annoyingly big ant". I don't know of another word any other language which does this.

I think that the English language is a strange and wonderful beast. It changes constantly, the written form is not phonetic, it contains words from many other languages, and there are numerous words with the same meanings.

English is a West Germanic language with Scots, Scandinavian, Old Norman, French, Latin, Greek, Old Norse, Caribbean, and Indian influences, to name just those that I am aware of. English has no standard pronunciation, dialect or global spelling, making it an incredibly rich, diverse, and adaptable language.

Perhaps the most delightful aspect of English is the ease with which we can swear. There myriad English profanities, and words which may be used in polite conversation can become swear words in other contexts. The words suck and balls are perfectly polite, but when combined they become offensive, as in you suck balls.

The ability to combine swear words with pejorative terms makes it possible to invent creative new insults. My current favourites are Cockwomble and the famous Wankmaggot,which appeared on a talented protester’s placard at one of the recent Trump demonstrations in the UK:

“I'm missing Wimbledon for this, you Tangerine Wankmaggot.”

I hate it with my entire soul. It is a nightmare to learn, it is nightmare to pronounce, it is a nightmare to read, it is a nightmare to write, it's a nightmare, period. It is a enragingly inconsistent with its own rules, swallows whole words with their pronunciations, only making the job even harder.

Yet. Here I am. I am currently C2 in proficiency, I have actually passed out as native for many people thanks to my spelling, grammar and vocabulary, and if I have to say something nice about this language, it’d be how rich and incredibly flexible it became, to think you can use such specific words with such precise meaning, the language itself is really flexible in the way you can make sentences, and has one of the richest vocabularies out there. The English has about 6 million words, Spanish for instance, has 320000~. It has a crapton of flaws, but the English language is a language that has been exposed to hundreds and hundreds of different languages, consequence of it being the lingua franca, and when a language is exposed to so many different sources, it becomes harder for it to remain socially pure and untouched, more people will know more, and will want to be like them. The same way we take anglicisms in Spanish or Japanese, the language takes words from different cultures to grow and become more communicative and deep. It's a pain in the ass, but it's natural for it to happen and is something we can scape.

The word English is a most significant word. We know that English is a language. On the other hand, English is the name of a nation. The name nation of English are very helpful and peaceful. Without it English is an international language. It is a common language all over the world. so the communication is very easy for this language all classes people in the world.

People from other countries have told me that English is an easy language in the beginning, as James Goose pointed out; but it takes longer to really master it.

That can be seen from the fact that the simplest sentences do tend to take advantage of simple syntax in English. Consider:

The dog chased the cat.

There are few rules involved here. Basically, you need to recognize the common syntax:

<subject> <verb> <object>

Then add “the,” a definite article, which is unvarying in English. In other languages, you may have to apply a complex chart to figure out what form of “the” to use.

Finally, the past tense is formed (in this case) by just adding a “d” to “chase.”

That’s it!

But yes, it does get more complex as you get into irregular verbs. The past tense of “bite” is not “bited” but “bit.” There are a couple hundred irregular verbs and you just have to learn them.

Also, English gets tough for two reasons:

1. The vocabulary is so vast — although that is a great strength for native speakers who write in the language.
2. English spelling is atrocious. We all admit that.

Coming from a native English speaker myself, I still struggle with the English language, specifically in grammar. There are so many grammar rules and some of them don’t make any sense. For example: the use of passive vs. active voice. Active voice means the subject directly performs the verb. Passive voice means the subject is acted on by the verb. The “grammatical rule” is to not use passive voice. However, I don’t really see why you can’t use passive voice because ultimately the two voices are describing the exact same scenario. English grammar can be wack sometimes! 💙

*if you want to know active vs passive voice

source: Active vs. Passive Voice

I think it’s great. I’ve spent my life learning it, and my career teaching it. I’ve studied lots of other languages, too, but I love English for its ability to be used so wonderfully for comedy, poetry, and for expressing emotions. When using this language, one can speak in a lofty, formal way, like British royalty, or in a low-down, working class way, like Cockney, Geordie, Australian English, or Bostonian. The cadence of well-spoken English is very musical; there’s a reason that English works so well for writing poetry, especially iambic pentameter. Plus, studying the etymology of English words is akin to getting a history lesson.

I can say this in all honesty. Of all of the languages that I know/currently, I do not know of a language that is more versatile and adaptable than the English language. English has such an interesting and diverse history, and it draws its identity from all sorts of different roots. Many people are even considering naming it a “hybrid language” because its Latin and Germanic elements are both in such plenitude.

I hope this helps explain

Furthermore, its adaptability leads it to grow at a rapid rate, with words finding their new homes in the language, and some words that were originally meant for one purpose find their place in other jobs as well.

I think that this is the case because Germanic languages (I believe English is, in fact, at its core, Germanic) are simple and simplicity leads to versatility. e.g. Windowsill, freezer, shoehorn, racquetball, laptop, deathbed, graveyard &c. It’s so simple to communicate these basic ideas.

It’s probably bias, as I am a native speaker, but I do believe that English is an amazing language, and that its versatility and adaptability partly lead to its sustained global success.

Well funny thing is while I find English my second language I also find it quite annoying how in English you Have some buzz words that are name for something that has no logic for example brunch in my country we Have only one word for break fast but they mixed lunch and breakfast so that word sound pretty annoying that is the reason I never liked Tolkien since He tried so hard in Lotr to write epic that is annoying for common hardworking lower class man who has no time for honorific speeches also I am quite annoyed with all those sentences some historic guys said basically all those words Have same rooth negation of previous said

It is a popular language , it make you understand in the most countries in the world because it world wide using and the cause of the return to the television and music most of the media production as films and series by English language so there is no human in the world didn't see a single english movie or listen to only on English song so he can know this language or have a simple vocabulary of it .

English is an international language for a long time. It was a language spoken by more people from different countries and territories than any other 80-90 years back. In this early years it was not due to the USA; the main reasons were i) the British empire spreading on almost all continents ii) the UK being a great trading nation and, hence, the British became the most travelling people in those days, and iii) the UK was/is the financial center of the world (storing gold reserves of various countries in London banks for security of its vaults has a long history). So it became the language of finance, banking, business besides much more.

Due to the wide interactions around the world and the rich literacy and literary traditions the English language has borrowed and incorporated terms from other languages, and a lot. This is natural for a living and active language; it keeps on adding more vocabulary and sometimes dropping some. So it gets richer every day.

The USA, with the largest users of the language and its impact in every facet of life around the world, has added to the language’s even wider use, especially since the end of World War II.

As the language with the largest publishing industry (paper) for a long, long time many in the world have to use books in the language, and still do (paper or electronic). Even countries that tried to develop and employ their local languages for education, have to acquire English language publications or subscribe to research products (paper/electronic) now-a-days. I have visited libraries of universities in such countries and observed that they have quite a rich, up-to date and thriving collection of such publications in hard copies as well as tapping them online.

With the language of science, technology, aviation, etc., and the Internet having growing influence in our life (productive or leisure/pastime) the use of the English language has even more impact and reason to be international.

All languages have some seeming oddities, some uses may not look ‘logical’ for some discerning persons. Some new learners wish they could simply generalize certain usages, for example some patterns or inflexions. But that is not how naturally evolved languages work. That holds true for all languages. We just have to get used to it. So English will remain the language of the world.

An artificially created or designed language may follow some regular pattern, if you want to craft it as such. That was attempted with the Esperanto language. It never took off. Not many people may have heard about it. I knew about it from my linguistics courses in my undergraduate days at university, and that was in early 1970s.

No one is obliged to use the language; but it definitely has practical advantages over any other language. So not relevant to bring arguments such as population size of this or that language which, anyway, are very confined to limited geographical area.

This is based on my answer to a question on the viability of English as an international language.

Thank you.

Its very malleability.

The fact I can make up ridiculous words.

Turn ridiculous phrases.

Peak ridiculous. See?

Silly silly silly.

Tiny little inside jokes embedded into each individual word, each odd phrase.

Turning concepts onto their head.

Is that person Deaf or hearing?

Deaf impaired.

Definitely Deaf impaired. It's a thing.

Do Deaf impaired people qualify for chocolate?

And all this is just the bare surface!

The peak ridiculous of englishing.

I say je ne sais wtf out of nowhere and no one bats an eye.

How silly, to know what a phrase means and yet to not know!

What the what?

Yes, yes, exactly. My very feels on that matter.

Inflammable and flammable are perfect interchangeable synonyms.

Pity someone forgot to tell people that, yes?

KABOOM.

We manage to weave symbology and mythology into the most mundane of things.

Consider:

Why oh why didn't I take the blue pill?

We take the meanings inherent in the things that others create…

Pretzel them into our image.

Over and over again.

The most mundane thing about English, and clearly the most unforeseen.

Silly putty, play doh, I roll the words in my hands.

I have too much fun with the individual units of language.

Englishing. Sciencing. Fooding. Adulting. Verbing.

Language changes. Language is malleable. Context can be created wholesale.

With thy English I thee communicate, play, shatter the preconceptions.

English as we have been knowing it in its present official state is the language of egoism, or at least of egocentricity. It is in its present state a perfect language for Trump and a language whose most typical speaker is none other but Trump. Why so? It is the only language of the world where the first person pronoun nominative is always capitalized, towering like a Trump tower. It is the language of the big I. I know of some French-speaking punk writer, Michel Brûlé, who wrote a whole book about his impression about English, based on the ugly and ugliness-fostering cult of the big I he observed when learning it so as to sing his style of punk poetry for a wider audience : Anglaid Amazon.ca: Brûlé, Michel: Books(“Do you speak uglish?”).

Most fortunately though, the story does not end where punks such as Michel Brûlé and other no-futurists think it must stop for good, as every defect in linguistics naturally calls for its correction in the wider scheme of long-term evolution : cynics are always proven wrong. Thanks to Internet texting, the second person pronoun, no matter the case, is more and more systematically capitalized too : U. The big U is now answering back the Big I, at last, like the Blue states are answering back the Red states. All it takes now is the official decision, to be confirmed by the NYT or like decisional linguistic authority, to accept U as academically correct for the second person singular familiar form (like Dutch U indeed, French tu and German du), while the traditional orthography You would be kept for the polite form when capitalized and the second person plural when kept lowercase. I hope Biden will have the guts to make the big U official and thereby make English become, by a bold U-turn, the language of altruism as well, the language of I and Thou as wished for by Martin Buber, the language of self-conversion as well as of self-assertion. Such a decision makes even more sense that singular U generally receives a different prononciation from You as of now : in most regions of America such a U is pronounced more and more like the pure high-pitch vowel Ü of German or U of Dutch, together with unaccented long u generally as in occupy, while polite or plural You is still pronounced as a two sound combination. All it takes for English to cease at last to be the language of capitalized egoism and of Donald Trump is you taking care of writing all your U’s with one letter capitalized when addressing to near or loved ones and categorically refuse to be corrected by old-schoolers in that respect when engaging in official correspondence.

English has become the world’s language number 1 because of the military superiority of the USA and their close allies. It has nothing to do with English as a language. Actually I find it rather poor, like my own mother tongue, Danish. These two languages are by the way very closly related.

So in many ways I feel we are forced to speak this simpleton language. I guess it was a little better in the days of Shakespeare and I guess British is a little better than American.

Fortunately, I know two other languages which are better. French and Arabic. The latter being the most superior of them all. However, I am only at the intermediate level so I cannot bring on hand examples although I already know many things which prove that Arabic is the most superior of all languages in the world. No offense to any nation or language who are also rich in language and culture but if you just reach the intermediate level in Arabic anybody will notice how amazing it is.

Concerning French compared to English, then French is better and actually my theory is it being better due to strong influence from Arabic. In fact most languages may have taken their root from Arabic or the language of the semitic tribes.

For me, two words — flexibility and adaptability.

I grew up in 13 different countries around the world and work internationally. I know five languages — fluent and flawless English and Chinese, plus working French, German and Italian, but pathetic Lebanese Arabic. I can also pick up conversational Farsi in two weeks flat in the company of Iranian ladies — but that’s another story for another time.

For me, English races truly miles ahead of any other language I know (or think I know).

To put it concisely:—

The English language has almost limitless ways to express the same idea or situation, with or without added nuance.

I like to analogise the situation to the Windows operating system. We have multiple ways of carrying out the same task to create a new folder — multiple ways to copy a file — multiple ways to access files.

I could say or write either “I’ve been living in London for 10 years” or “I am living in London and have been so for 10 years” will (on most counts) mean the same thing.

I could write the below — and even non-native English speakers will see it’s really the same thing:—

• “The police hunting for the killer of a part-time police officer stabbed in her northwest London home are seeking a man in a white hooded top seen running away from the scene.”
• “The police, in their hunt for the killer of a part-time police officer who was stabbed in her home in northwest London, is looking for a man wearing a white top with a hood who was seen running away from the scene by the officer’s neighbours.”
• (In ‘telegramspeak’) “Police hunting cop killer in London home crime now looking for man in white top seen running from scene.”

An enormous choice of words at my disposal — or to press into service.

Self-explanatory. The English lexicon has something ridiculous like a million words. Trim away the scientific words and we’ve still got a ridiculous quarter of a million words for all sorts of everyday and literary uses.

Many of the words have multiple meanings — a ‘feature’ and not a ‘bug’ to me. So I could literally use “literally” in both its literal and figurative senses. I have access to “statuesque” to praise someone, or “statue-like” to diss — there, ‘diss’ is another one.

The stuff that some bitch about (or over) is totally irrelevant for me:—

So what if English isn’t phonetic in spelling?!

Neither is Chinese. Has anyone ever tried to pronounce an unknown Chinese character?

Just memorise the wretched thing. Write “red” for the colour. Write “read” for the past tense of the verb. Write “redd” for to put something in order (‘to tidy’). English isn’t entirely unphonetic, you know.

Just memorise that a line of people is a “queue” but pronounced “kew.” If my friend texted me “Don’t come! Big kew of ppl” — I know he’s spelling phonetically and there’s context that it’s a queue of people — not the stick cue as in snooker.

We don’t have to know the etymology of the word to use English words.

Don’t put your future in ancient ruins — etymologies don’t necessarily relate to the actual modern meanings in usage anyway.

Has it ever helped anyone to use the word “avenue” knowing its Latin roots ad (to) + venire (come)? It’s probably more useful to know an avenue is doctrinally a road that’s lined on both sides by tall, slender evergreen trees.

Accept that all languages operate on their own rules.

I’m not going to go into someone’s home and piss on his carpet, but I’m not going to be fed manure and call it foie gras either.

English has English grammar, Spanish has Spanish grammar, and Arabic has Arabic grammar. Your trouser crotch may be deeper or shallower than someone else’s pair of trousers. Stop shoehorning someone else’s cojones into your own.

Stop agonising over punctuation.

As a printer and a trained typesetter (plus being a trained secretary), punctuation is pretty much the same all over the world.

It just so happens English uses (say) more hyphens than Italian, French or Swahili. Just chill, man. English punctuation for English, and Esperanto punctuation for Esperanto.

We use the kitchen to cook meals and the toilet to do the business, not the other way round.

Thanks for the A2A.

Thanks:—

“1,000+ people were sent your answer in the Quora Digest.” (25 Jun 2017)

“10,000+ people were sent your answer in the Quora Digest” (02 Jul 2017)

Why do you like most about the English language?

The spelling, the grammar, the vocabulary, the meaning, the etymology, even the punctuation, anything.

What I like the most about the English language is that it was my native language, and I was born into a family who let me explore everything, English included. All I had to do was immerse myself in it by reading books, with minimal need for dictionaries, and no need to translate from another language into it.

If English were not my native language I would have had to spend so much time and effort learning it. I like everything about it: that it is accepted worldwide, that it has an immense vocabulary, has incorporated large parts of other languages, etc. There is nothing about it that I don’t like. I am very glad that English was my native language.

Oh, gosh yes. Not a day goes by that I’m not both mildly ashamed of the whole shemozzle and somewhat flabbergasted that anyone is able to pick it up.

Just look at the paragraph above. There’s Yiddish there, a sentence that begins with an antithesis, a phrase that could refer to the beginning of a romantic relationship or collecting litter (but actually refers to learning) and a complete neologism that refers to the slackness of the jaw induced by extreme surprise.

However, it is perhaps this very chaos that makes English suitable as a Lingua Franca. Like the Empire that distributed it, the language steals from everyone and everything and pays homage to none of them. After all, ‘homage’ is an English word, right?

Kind of like Evolution itself, English has developed in a manner that appears to be possibly due to intelligent design or dumb luck, and does so simultaneously. This is why it can birth dialects as diverse as those in Alabama and Australia and yet allow effective communication.

To prove my point, I offer just two words:

1. ’Enough’
2. ‘Though’

Native speakers will read both of those confidently, but will not be able to determine the tense of the sentence ‘I read those words this way’. They will also not be able to explain why they read them that way.

I rest my case.

1. It's just a language I use to chat with my mates. It's nice that I know it.
2. It's a coloniser of a language and results in the death of other languages. It also strengthens the UK and USA as it makes them ‘the centre of the world’ while it weakens everyone else’s political stance. It is NOT part of my identity but I expect everyone to know it.
3. While it does strengthen the USA and the UK and results in linguicides, it is the language of success and opportunity. Also, it is my language as a Syrian as much as it is their language as Americans and Brits in the globalised world and should just be called Global instead of English now to reflect this fact. It's a crucial part of my identity.

These were and are my views at different points in my lifetime, with three being the last one.

If not for its nonphonetic nature it would be pretty nice.

But for whatever reason English speakers decided they will preserve the spelling of borrowed words, causing the language to become a mess. Almost any vowel can be pronounced in some words as almost any other vowel, and often you just skip a few letters randomly when pronouncing words. That’s absurd. The only way to learn English correctly is to memorize each word twice - once to read/write, and once to pronounce it. At this point it makes no sense to use a Latin-based script - just make yourself some nice hieroglyphs and be honest about your writing system :).

It’s very inefficient, I feel for kids in English-speaking countries who have to learn to “read” on such complicated mess.

I can think of some words it lacks—we have aunt and uncle, niece and nephew, but only one word for cousin. We don’t have specific words for older or younger siblings, or for being the oldest or only child (we can say it, of course, but not in a single word.) We use brother-in-law or sister-in-law for two different relationships (I saw a greeting card that said: Happy anniversary to my brother-in-law and sister-in-law. Yeah, it does make sense.)

We have particular words for light red (pink) and light orange (peach) but not for light blue.

We don’t have a non-judgmental single word for “commit suicide.”

And don’t even get started on personal pronouns! Some people feel that we need more, or that we need a non-gendered singular pronoun (other than they.)

We don’t have a simple way to speak of ability in the future (as we do past ability: I could, I can, I will be able to. Kind of non-parallel.)

And I’m sure people who speak more languages will notice other gaps in English.