English: A Broken Language?

[Sovaal]

I mean, Japanese is largely only spoken on the home islands, while many of the most wide spoken languages in the world(as in both population and area) are Western in origin.

"Home islands"?

As said, it's another term for the Japanese Archipelago.

[Republic of Keshiland]

English isn't the only language to do this. For example, several words in the spanish language, despite ending in a vowel that would mean that they are one gender, but instead have the opposite gender descriptive noun(? El, Ella, etc) instead.

Fair but still does not excuse it.

Plenty of other languages have plenty of loan words in their vocabulary. How is English having the majority of it's vocabulary being loan words a bad thing?

Because it means that we have several "alien" rules in our language that would not otherwise be there making learning it so much harder even if its your mother tongue.

Uh, no. This is extremely stupid. They'res a reason said words are there, and they literally do no harm.

This would make all the worlds phonetically spelt. The harm they do is they confuse learners of all ages.

Again, English isn't the only language to have these.

Does not make them any less stupid

Examples? Or do you mean homophone? Because those aren't the same as antonyms.

Accept, Except. Then, Than raise, rase (The dough is raising, I will raise the city to the ground.)

And what's wrong with these? They can be annoying if you don't remember their contexts correctly, but they're not that bad.

Its mostly just the fact that is can hurt peoples careers or make arguments seem mute just because you use the wrong word. If its more complicated written its bad.

What you get when there is no central authority for the language.

I wish we had a central authority for English like many other languages do, that way it keeps up to date.

Do you know what such a change would require? We would have to completely revamp every written medium at great cost for little gain.

Nothing already written would need to be changed. Everything after would be changed so that way we keep the historical difference but move forward in the future.

The hell do you mean by this? Never read any English poetry? No Robert Frost? Have you read political pieces such as those by Thomas Paine?\And I'm pretty sure that plenty of banks use plenty of other languages as well.

https://thoughtcatalog.com/pierce-nahigyan/2015/12/17-words-we-dont-have-in-english-that-describe-feelings-we-have-every-day/

Again, that would "fix" nothing. English's broken qualities have more to do with writing then it's actual vocabulary.

True, I just think Germanic is more fun to speak and here then Romance.

[Republic of Keshiland]

OMG yes. yes English is broken when written specifically but also just as a whole.

1. We have exceptions to every rule. What is the point of rules if they are not followed.
2. We are a combination of Anglish, French, Spanish, and Latin. We should not be like this. Just get rid of all the non germanic words that simple.
3. Silent letters. THEY MUST ALL DIE!
4. Words that are spelt the same or that sound the same that means the opposite. >_> Seriously could you be more confusing.
5. Tons of words have several meanings. Your, you're they're, there, their here, hear too, two, to, Bye, by, buy just to name a few.
6. Different spellings for American and commonwealth English.
7. Letters with no sound. (C, X) C(S-K) X(KS). They need to go bye bye.
8. Lack of emotional words. English is not the language of banks for nothing.

How would I fix it?
Make English consist of only Germanic words.

1. I don't think so, give examples. I'd be suprised if you found very many.

2. English is English, it isn't "mixed" with anything. It took vocab from languages it contacted, a good example of other languages that have a large portion of their native vocab replaced are Romanian (heavy Bulgarian and Church Slavonic influence), Japanese (heavy Old and Middle Chinese influence), and Maltese (heavy Italian and English influence)

3. Remove silent letters are you can't tell homophones apart in writing, way to go, you just made reading alot harder.

4. What? Sounds the same with opposite meaning, never seen it.

5. That's because they're NOT the same words, they're homophones. Words that evolved to sound the same over the course of the language's phonological history.

6. Simply convention, not an issue really.

7. Again, due to English's history. Our soft C before E and I is from absorbing French vocab, and hence mimics the historic palatalization of Latin [k] to [s] in Western Romance, this change is also responsible for Italian and Romanian [tS] before I and E. Letter X is inherited from Greek through Latin.

8. What do you mean "lack of emotional words"? English has no shortage of terms for emotional states.

1. http://mentalfloss.com/article/72704/11-rules-and-their-exceptions-help-conquer-your-spelling-woes

2. In English's case, they just added letters and rules that make no sense.

3. Okay well maybe keep ones that are used to tell the difference between 2 words. But the rest can go.

4. I raise my, children. I saw them raise the city

5. I guess that makes sense but surely we would sub out similar words for Germanic or old English words.

6. True. Unless your in school and get docked points lol.

7. Still hate them. This makes me hate Romance influence over Germanic even more.

8. https://thoughtcatalog.com/pierce-nahigyan/2015/12/17-words-we-dont-have-in-english-that-describe-feelings-we-have-every-day/

[Sovaal]

English isn't the only language to do this. For example, several words in the spanish language, despite ending in a vowel that would mean that they are one gender, but instead have the opposite gender descriptive noun(? El, Ella, etc) instead.

Fair but still does not excuse it.

It means that it's not really a problem when other widley spoke languages speak it.

Plenty of other languages have plenty of loan words in their vocabulary. How is English having the majority of it's vocabulary being loan words a bad thing?

Because it means that we have several "alien" rules in our language that would not otherwise be there making learning it so much harder even if its your mother tongue.

No, not really. It simply means that we have a shittonne of loan words.

Uh, no. This is extremely stupid. They'res a reason said words are there, and they literally do no harm.

This would make all the worlds phonetically spelt. The harm they do is they confuse learners of all ages.

Not really. We use them every day. EHll, they make up the majority of our scientific vocabulary.

Again, English isn't the only language to have these.

Does not make them any less stupid

They're not the dumbest thing in existence, however.

Examples? Or do you mean homophone? Because those aren't the same as antonyms.

Accept, Except. Then, Than raise, rase (The dough is raising, I will raise the city to the ground.)

Those aren't antonyms. Their meanings are not opposites.

And what's wrong with these? They can be annoying if you don't remember their contexts correctly, but they're not that bad.

Its mostly just the fact that is can hurt peoples careers or make arguments seem mute just because you use the wrong word. If its more complicated written its bad.

I don't think messing up their and there has ever destroyed a person's career. And the only way I see this making someones argument moot is when they are acting like they are the intellectual superiors to everyone else.

What you get when there is no central authority for the language.

I wish we had a central authority for English like many other languages do, that way it keeps up to date.

>Wants to keep English up to dtae
>Wants to get rid of non-Germanic vocabulary
You can't have your cake and eat it too. And English is probably [b[the[/b] most up to date language.

Do you know what such a change would require? We would have to completely revamp every written medium at great cost for little gain.

Nothing already written would need to be changed. Everything after would be changed so that way we keep the historical difference but move forward in the future.

Try reading Canterbury tales in it's original Middle English. If you want people taught your system to be able to read past documents, they would have to learn English all over again, or we would have to update all English literature. Both very expensive.

The hell do you mean by this? Never read any English poetry? No Robert Frost? Have you read political pieces such as those by Thomas Paine?\And I'm pretty sure that plenty of banks use plenty of other languages as well.

https://thoughtcatalog.com/pierce-nahigyan/2015/12/17-words-we-dont-have-in-english-that-describe-feelings-we-have-every-day/

Doesn't mean that English is a non-emotional language.

Again, that would "fix" nothing. English's broken qualities have more to do with writing then it's actual vocabulary.

True, I just think Germanic is more fun to speak and here then Romance.

Doesn't mean that your system would be a good one, especially in our world.

[Sovaal]

1. I don't think so, give examples. I'd be suprised if you found very many.

2. English is English, it isn't "mixed" with anything. It took vocab from languages it contacted, a good example of other languages that have a large portion of their native vocab replaced are Romanian (heavy Bulgarian and Church Slavonic influence), Japanese (heavy Old and Middle Chinese influence), and Maltese (heavy Italian and English influence)

3. Remove silent letters are you can't tell homophones apart in writing, way to go, you just made reading alot harder.

4. What? Sounds the same with opposite meaning, never seen it.

5. That's because they're NOT the same words, they're homophones. Words that evolved to sound the same over the course of the language's phonological history.

6. Simply convention, not an issue really.

7. Again, due to English's history. Our soft C before E and I is from absorbing French vocab, and hence mimics the historic palatalization of Latin [k] to [s] in Western Romance, this change is also responsible for Italian and Romanian [tS] before I and E. Letter X is inherited from Greek through Latin.

8. What do you mean "lack of emotional words"? English has no shortage of terms for emotional states.

1. http://mentalfloss.com/article/72704/11-rules-and-their-exceptions-help-conquer-your-spelling-woes

2. In English's case, they just added letters and rules that make no sense.

3. Okay well maybe keep ones that are used to tell the difference between 2 words. But the rest can go.

4. I raise my, children. I saw them raise the city

5. I guess that makes sense but surely we would sub out similar words for Germanic or old English words.

6. True. Unless your in school and get docked points lol.

7. Still hate them. This makes me hate Romance influence over Germanic even more.

8. https://thoughtcatalog.com/pierce-nahigyan/2015/12/17-words-we-dont-have-in-english-that-describe-feelings-we-have-every-day/

2)No, they didn't. The words make perfect sense, and the grammar rules are largely unchanged since Anglo-Saxon.
3)That's pretty much what all of them do.
4)Again, not the opposite meaning.
5)A lot of them are Germanic in origin.
6)That's different then having your career ruined.
7)Why?
8 )Again, doesn't mean English isn't an emotional language.

[Ardrentt]

Broken in that it's a bastard child with words of millions of origins, yes.

And it's wonderful for that reason. <3

But yeah, it's definitely got a lot of irregularities, but at the same time we just stick with it because eh, changing it deliberately is quite challenging.

[Aillyria]

Broken in that it's a bastard child with words of millions of origins, yes.

And it's wonderful for that reason. <3

But yeah, it's definitely got a lot of irregularities, but at the same time we just stick with it because eh, changing it deliberately is quite challenging.

Actually, English has very few irregularities. As I've said already, the spelling conventions are actually very predictable.

[Ardrentt]

Broken in that it's a bastard child with words of millions of origins, yes.

And it's wonderful for that reason. <3

But yeah, it's definitely got a lot of irregularities, but at the same time we just stick with it because eh, changing it deliberately is quite challenging.

Actually, English has very few irregularities. As I've said already, the spelling conventions are actually very predictable.

Well, are there more irregularities than most languages?

More noteworthy one I know is that though, through, thought, rough, etc. all have different pronunciations for the "ough" part.

[Lady Scylla]

Actually, English has very few irregularities. As I've said already, the spelling conventions are actually very predictable.

Well, are there more irregularities than most languages?

More noteworthy one I know is that though, through, thought, rough, etc. all have different pronunciations for the "ough" part.

While termed irregular, these aren't as irregular as one might think. Nearly all languages have certain irregularities, and this is either due to inter-language borrowing, or that these are historical leftovers from a time in the language when such irregularities were likely 'regular'.

An example are English irregular verbs:

Irregular verbs in Modern English typically derive from verbs that followed more regular patterns at a previous stage in the history of the language. In particular, many such verbs derive from Germanic strong verbs, which make many of their inflected forms through vowel gradation, as can be observed in Modern English patterns such as sing–sang–sung. The regular verbs, on the other hand, with their preterites and past participles ending in -ed, follow the weak conjugation, which originally involved adding a dental consonant (-t or -d). Nonetheless, there are also many irregular verbs that follow or partially follow the weak conjugation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_irregular_verbs

[Aillyria]

Actually, English has very few irregularities. As I've said already, the spelling conventions are actually very predictable.

Well, are there more irregularities than most languages?

More noteworthy one I know is that though, through, thought, rough, etc. all have different pronunciations for the "ough" part.

Not really, English is pretty normal.

The "ough" in English is pretty weird, true, but ultimately explainable. The Anglo-Frisian languages have a peculiar interchange between the phonemes [x] and [f]. For example the West Frisian word "after" (yes, same meaning as the English word), it's pronounced approximately the same as our word in this form, but it has another common form "achter" [axtə]. English "through" is related to the German "durch", but our original final consonant represented by "gh" was lost in speech.

[Ardrentt]

Well, are there more irregularities than most languages?

More noteworthy one I know is that though, through, thought, rough, etc. all have different pronunciations for the "ough" part.

While termed irregular, these aren't as irregular as one might think. Nearly all languages have certain irregularities, and this is either due to inter-language borrowing, or that these are historical leftovers from a time in the language when such irregularities were likely 'regular'.

An example are English irregular verbs:

Irregular verbs in Modern English typically derive from verbs that followed more regular patterns at a previous stage in the history of the language. In particular, many such verbs derive from Germanic strong verbs, which make many of their inflected forms through vowel gradation, as can be observed in Modern English patterns such as sing–sang–sung. The regular verbs, on the other hand, with their preterites and past participles ending in -ed, follow the weak conjugation, which originally involved adding a dental consonant (-t or -d). Nonetheless, there are also many irregular verbs that follow or partially follow the weak conjugation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_irregular_verbs

That's a good point; a lot of how we pronounce words can shift as well and they often become independent from the way words were pronounced before, and thus how they were written down before in an attempt to mostly capture the pronunciation of their time...

Hell, in the sense of English being a broken language, dialects of English could be implied as "broken" despite their own set of rules still very much being in place (The dialects of Chinese, AAVE vs "Standard" English, etc.)

[Zanera]

This is the second time I have heard this assertion in a week.

Ok, imagine correcting someone on english but not understanding that english is a broken language. Guys, I love commas, they make my world go round. Tell me why english isn't a broken language.

English is not a broken language because there are millions of people across the world -- 1,500 million, with only 375 million being native speakers -- who manage to learn the rules and use it effectively.

English is the language Shakespeare, Chaucer, J.K. Rowling, Ian Fleming, Chinua Achebe, and Charlotte Bronte wrote in -- writers who are very widely read even hundreds of years after their deaths, in some cases. The English of the King James version of the Bible is some of the most beautiful and lyrical -- shall we even say naughty -- language there is:

Cant.7
[1] How beautiful are thy feet with shoes, O prince's daughter! the joints of thy thighs are like jewels, the work of the hands of a cunning workman.
[2] Thy navel is like a round goblet, which wanteth not liquor: thy belly is like an heap of wheat set about with lilies.
[3] Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins.
[4] Thy neck is as a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fishpools in Heshbon, by the gate of Bath-rabbim: thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon which looketh toward Damascus.
[5] Thine head upon thee is like Carmel, and the hair of thine head like purple; the king is held in the galleries.
[6] How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights!
[7] This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes.
[8] I said, I will go up to the palm tree, I will take hold of the boughs thereof: now also thy breasts shall be as clusters of the vine, and the smell of thy nose like apples;
[9] And the roof of thy mouth like the best wine for my beloved, that goeth down sweetly, causing the lips of those that are asleep to speak.
[10] I am my beloved's, and his desire is toward me.
[11] Come, my beloved, let us go forth into the field; let us lodge in the villages.
[12] Let us get up early to the vineyards; let us see if the vine flourish, whether the tender grape appear, and the pomegranates bud forth: there will I give thee my loves.
[13] The mandrakes give a smell, and at our gates are all manner of pleasant fruits, new and old, which I have laid up for thee, O my beloved. -- Song of Solomon

Those who call it broken while not capitalizing "english' as a proper noun, those who say they love commas and then abuse them with reckless abandon, those who intersperse their posts with 'lol's to fill the gaps in their arguments, those who do not understand that paragraphing is a simple enough prospect: that different ideas require new paragraphs.... yea, verily, I say unto you, that it is not English that is broken but your grasp of the rules of English.

However, despite the beauty of the language and its proliferation across the world over the centuries, it does possess a number of irregularities (as do other languages). Some cite its difficulty in learning the rules as its proof of being 'broken'; Mandarin with its tonality and pictograms might arguably be quite a bit more difficult, yet no one claims it is broken

What do you think? Is English a broken language? Why or why not?

It gets messages across and has many words with which to do so, as I am doing right now with my input. Better still, you have those that can do brilliant and complex things with the language, like Shakespeare. English does what it's supposed to and goes even further still. There's nothing to really fix for it to be broken, at least to me.

[Jelmatt]

It really makes no sense to describe English, or any other language for that matter, as "broken." What does that even mean?

Irregular, sure. English has hundreds of irregular verbs and a few irregular nouns, but so what? Most languages do, and those that don't aren't necessarily any better than others.

As for the OP's rant near the bottom; remember that writing, for the most part, is just a way to represent spoken languages. The fact that someone has shitty punctuation or capitalization doesn't mean they're bad at English. It means they're bad at English punctuation and capitalization, which are devices used for writing the language and not a part of the language itself.

[The Archregimancy]

[

Plenty of other languages have plenty of loan words in their vocabulary. How is English having the majority of it's vocabulary being loan words a bad thing?

Because it means that we have several "alien" rules in our language that would not otherwise be there making learning it so much harder even if its your mother tongue.

And that's been visible within language systems almost as soon as they emerge into history.

See, for example, the Sumerian-Akkadian sprachbund, and the problems inherent in using a writing system (cuneiform) originally designed for an aggluginative language isolate like Sumerian for the Semitic languages based on triconsonantal clusters that were dominant in the region over the next couple of millennia.

I mean, if you think English orthography and loanwords are confusing, you should try reading or writing Akkadian or Aramaic in cuneiform.

[Kainesia]

Is there any language that doesn't have quirky rules here and there?

[Mad hatters in jeans]

Is there any language that doesn't have quirky rules here and there?

Binary computer language I suppose. At least until the machines rise up.

[Ardrentt]

Is there any language that doesn't have quirky rules here and there?

Binary computer language I suppose. At least until the machines rise up.

They might start talking in... base 3!

[The Two Jerseys]

Binary computer language I suppose. At least until the machines rise up.

They might start talking in... base 3!

Relevant

[Katganistan]

And honestly, the spelling irregularities come from the fact that it's absorbed so many other languages into it.

But other languages -- like Spanish -- also have their quirks when dealing with words absorbed from other languages. For instance: in Spain, the humble peanut is el cacahuate. In parts of Latin America, it's el mani. In Mexico, tomato is jitomate, while in Spain it's el tomate. In other words, there are words that Spanish absorbed in the new world -- the natives' words for things -- that are different from the Spanish word Europeans use.

No one seems much fussed nor confused about there being completely different words for the same thing, though.

And Spanish also absorbed a good bit of Arabic and Arab culture -- algodon is clearly quite close to قُطْن (cutton is what it sounds like), and ojalá from law sha'a Allah.

These influences don't take away from the beauty of the language -- it tells a great deal about the history and cultures that helped them evolve.

Indeed Spanish does. We are also a rather muttish peoples. Once indigenous words from the Americas entered the language, not to mention the Mudejar influence, for 800+ years and African words during the slave trade, Spanish is as mixed as English. Save very few languages like Japanese (and even Japanese has become rather mixed too now with influences from English), every language has had some tampering done on it.

We're a world of lingual mutts!!

And so much richer for it!

I think, though, that the best evidence that English is not broken lies here in this thread -- as we have both native and non-native users of the language communicating and understanding each other perfectly well, without muddling spelling nor grammar nor tenses.

Thus I would say that those complaining it is broken do not understand the rules of the language and project their frustration onto the language itself.

And we all know the sheep's just jealous.

[Katganistan]

Gauls and most Continental Celtic languages have been dead for a while.

I was thinking of the language that gave English a certain je nes sais quoi, but now is itself fading in favor of English. C'est la vie.

Who'da thunk it?

[Principality of the Raix]

Those who say that English is broken do not realize that it is one of the easiest languages to learn.

I agree, People only claim English is broken because there is over 2, 000 words in the English language and growing with Each generation. Making it not broken, but rather the largest growing language in general, now in use(it ties with Mandarin). Understanding this, just cause someone can NOT learn it easily. Does not mean it is broken, besides the greatest problem foreigners have with English is not the words; But rather the grammar.

[Engleberg]

English is not that broken, it just lacks the ability to compound words almost infinitely!

You'll never see a word like Donaudampfschiffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft in English!

[Katganistan]

OMG yes. yes English is broken when written specifically but also just as a whole.

1. We have exceptions to every rule. What is the point of rules if they are not followed.
2. We are a combination of Anglish, French, Spanish, and Latin. We should not be like this. Just get rid of all the non germanic words that simple.
3. Silent letters. THEY MUST ALL DIE!
4. Words that are spelt the same or that sound the same that means the opposite. >_> Seriously could you be more confusing.
5. Tons of words have several meanings. Your, you're they're, there, their here, hear too, two, to, Bye, by, buy just to name a few.
6. Different spellings for American and commonwealth English.
7. Letters with no sound. (C, X) C(S-K) X(KS). They need to go bye bye.
8. Lack of emotional words. English is not the language of banks for nothing.

How would I fix it?
Make English consist of only Germanic words.

Then it would be German. No thank you -- no offense to the German people. It's a perfectly good language, but I prefer my own.

1. EVERY language has exceptions to the rule. So that does not make English uniquely broken.

2. I don't know whether you're misspelling English when you write "Anglish", although you've used it several times. Unless you mean it as some weird combination for the several Germanic influences such as Angles, Saxons. and Jutes, in which case simply say "Germanic roots". You're forgetting Dutch roots in the language as well.

3. You realize those silent letters allow us to distinguish different words without a context. I know a knight is a man in armor, and no night is complete without one. Take out the silent letters and that sentence becomes gibberish.

4. What words are spelled or sound the same that mean the opposite thing? I can't think of one at all. I know of a whole two words that are spelled differently that mean the same thing -- flammable and inflammable, but that's not what you complained of.

5. And no, tons of words may be homophones but they have different meanings. Your means belonging to you. You're means you are. They're means they are. Their means belonging to them.
Your (belonging to you) inability to keep them straight does not mean they have 'several meanings' -- it means your understanding of the language is fundamentally flawed if you think they are the same word.

6. Of COURSE American English and Commonwealth English have different spellings. When they colonists broke away from Britain, both branches of the language continued to evolve separately. Spanish has different WORDS for the same thing where it came into contact with plants and animals in the New World that didn't exist in Europe.

Seriously, it's not that hard -- and even though may know there are two spellings dependent on which variant you've learned, you're only obligated to use one. There was an Aussie who taught in my school, who would give me her weekly spelling quiz to check over -- to make sure she was quizzing the students on American spelling rather than her native spelling. The spoken language is (generally) intelligible across the UK-US divide, and big surprise -- folks from the British Commonwealth can read American English. They might like to tweak us a bit about it, and we can tweak them right back.

7. Your so-called letters without sound do, in fact have a sound; else we would talk about ats urring and atching mice. You may need to get your hearing checked if you have difficulty hear plosives. And 'x' certainly has sounds -- without it we would have 'ehplosions' (explosions) and 'whylophones." (xylophones).

8. And lack of emotional words? What are you talking about? Open a thesaurus, she said in pain, agony, anguish, torment, affliction, and distress.

I love, adore, cherish, relish, delight in, am devoted to, am passionate about, and have a zeal for the English language!

[Katganistan]

Because it means that we have several "alien" rules in our language that would not otherwise be there making learning it so much harder even if its your mother tongue.

They aren't alien rules. They are the rules of English. Learn the language!

[Sovaal]

Because it means that we have several "alien" rules in our language that would not otherwise be there making learning it so much harder even if its your mother tongue.

They aren't alien rules. They are the rules of English. Learn the language!

What I find funny is that he wants to keep English up to date but also get rid of all non Germanic words.