english is a crazy language

Let's face it -- English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.

We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices?

Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend, that you comb through annals of history but not a single annal? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?

If teachers taught, why didn't preacher praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? If you wrote a letter, perhaps you bote your tongue?

Sometimes I think all the English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell? Park on driveways and drive on parkways?

How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and wise guy are opposites? How can overlook and oversee be opposites, while quite a lot and quite a few are alike? How can the weather be hot as hell one day and cold as hell another.

Have you noticed that we talk about certain things only when they are absent? Have you ever seen a horseful carriage or a strapful gown? Met a sung hero or experienced requited love? Have you ever run into someone who was combobulated, gruntled, ruly or peccable? And where are all those people who ARE spring chickens or who would ACTUALLY hurt a fly?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which an alarm clock goes off by going on.

English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race (which, of course, isn't a race at all). That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible. And why, when I wind up my watch, I start it, but when I wind up this essay, I end it.

this was in my e-mail today.

[quote author="anonymous"]Let's face it -- English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren't invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren't sweet, are meat.

We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

And why is it that writers write but fingers don't fing, grocers don't groce and hammers don't ham? If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn't the plural of booth beeth? One goose, 2 geese. So one moose, 2 meese? One index, 2 indices?

Doesn't it seem crazy that you can make amends but not one amend, that you comb through annals of history but not a single annal? If you have a bunch of odds and ends and get rid of all but one of them, what do you call it?

If teachers taught, why didn't preacher praught? If a vegetarian eats vegetables, what does a humanitarian eat? If you wrote a letter, perhaps you bote your tongue?

Sometimes I think all the English speakers should be committed to an asylum for the verbally insane. In what language do people recite at a play and play at a recital? Ship by truck and send cargo by ship? Have noses that run and feet that smell? Park on driveways and drive on parkways?

How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and wise guy are opposites? How can overlook and oversee be opposites, while quite a lot and quite a few are alike? How can the weather be hot as hell one day and cold as hell another.

Have you noticed that we talk about certain things only when they are absent? Have you ever seen a horseful carriage or a strapful gown? Met a sung hero or experienced requited love? Have you ever run into someone who was combobulated, gruntled, ruly or peccable? And where are all those people who ARE spring chickens or who would ACTUALLY hurt a fly?

You have to marvel at the unique lunacy of a language in which your house can burn up as it burns down, in which you fill in a form by filling it out and in which an alarm clock goes off by going on.

English was invented by people, not computers, and it reflects the creativity of the human race (which, of course, isn't a race at all). That is why, when the stars are out, they are visible, but when the lights are out, they are invisible. And why, when I wind up my watch, I start it, but when I wind up this essay, I end it.[/quote]

It's really called a "handburger", because it's not made of ham, and you eat it with your hand.

George Carlin?

It could also be William Saffire.

originally writer was

Charlie Indelicato


I dunno him or who he is...

You can wait here, in the sitting room, or sit here in the waiting room...

Peace,
Paul

The letter K is completely pointless in the English language, it can be replaced in every instance by the letter C.

[quote author="Steve Jones"]The letter K is completely pointless in the English language, it can be replaced in every instance by the letter C.[/quote]

"Can be" is an incomplete point. It should read "Can be replaced and still SOUND the same". -That doesn't mean that it conveys the same amount of information, specially when written.

Stand-alone and phonetically, perhaps... but as part of a 'compound consonant' it differentiates VERY helpfully. ("...ck" for example)

It also occasionally differentiates on its own: a DISC is a circle, but a DISK is a part of a computer... just one example off the top of my head...

..My point is that just because two things sound the same doesn't mean they should be spelled the same. -So careful with that over-simplification there, Steve. :wink:

Keith

I love the Drive on the Parkway and Park on the Driveway.

Hamburgers originated in hamburg

why is it that you have 1 mouse or 2 mice wouldn't you then have 1 house 2 hice :green:

Also USAinians stress different syllables in words, for instance they say "buraaaaaaay" and we just say beret with equal stress on each end of the word. There are many more which I can't think of "at this time" - ah Chevrolet where we put the stress on the Chev and USAinians stress the laaaaaaaay!

We can all, of course, say nuclear unlike one idiot currently being missed by his village somewhere in Texas - not for much longer !!!!!

However, many folks in the UK cannot pronounce football properly - they say "foo'baw", the t being dropped and the L replaced by a W. We refer to these as W people!

Someone needs to tell the BBC how to pronounce "Barack Obama". The emphasis is on the second syllable of Barack. It's his name and he gets to decide. :thumb:

-Chris

Cnapsack? Cnead? Cnight-Cit?

Peace,
Paul

Cnurled cnobs? How are we going to deal with the "kilo" abbreviation? There's a big difference between craft paper and kraft paper.

[quote author="SSLtech"][quote author="Steve Jones"]The letter K is completely pointless in the English language, it can be replaced in every instance by the letter C.[/quote]

"Can be" is an incomplete point. It should read "Can be replaced and still SOUND the same". -That doesn't mean that it conveys the same amount of information, specially when written.

Stand-alone and phonetically, perhaps... but as part of a 'compound consonant' it differentiates VERY helpfully. ("...ck" for example)

It also occasionally differentiates on its own: a DISC is a circle, but a DISK is a part of a computer... just one example off the top of my head...

..My point is that just because two things sound the same doesn't mean they should be spelled the same. -So careful with that over-simplification there, Steve. :wink:

Keith[/quote]

Your right, I was thinking like a Japanese student in that it always SOUNDS the same when spoken. The subtleties of written English are what make it such a complex language to master and then enjoy, and what also make it diabolically difficult to learn, far be it from me to try and ghettoize (is that a word?) it into a phonetic simplicity.

Imagine trying to learn English as a second language and being confronted by "yacht", or a word like accent, where you would be wondering why the first C sounds like a C, and the second C sounds like an S. Never mind words like haematoma.

The reason that English is the world's dominant language is probably because it is such a slut... it steals words from every language and converts them into it's own vocabulary.

BTW, what is it with the word Lieutenant between England and America?

I think English has been dominant because the UK and the USA have for better or worse policed the world for years.

Well my father was a Naval lieutenant during WWII, and he always cringed when he heard someone say "Loo-Tenant"! -I think that the British pronunciation however doesn't square with my assumptions at the word's etymological roots... I'm guessing that it's French in origin, "Lieu" and "tenant". -In that case the correct pronunciation would be "Lee-iw" and not "Leff". (but it certainly wouldn't be "loo" either!)

Yacht is a word which I sometimes deliberately pronounce to rhyme with "Datchet". -as it happens I have a pseudonym "Fug Datchett", and there's a hymn in the methodist hymn book called "Datchet" also, but I'm digressing.

Something which we would lose in homogenising the English language is the occasional delicate hint at a word's origin because of its particular spelling quirk... it might indicate a Scandinavian or Latin root, and thereby imply some further meaning... almost like accents do in other languages. -For example, the circumflex accent in French ('â', 'ê', 'î', 'ô' or 'û') usually indicates the fact that a letter 'S' has been dropped, which used to exist after the vowel... This small clue can give you just enough information to figure out an unfamiliar word's meaning: "vêtements" for example, or perhaps "côte"...

However, here are some possibly interesting explanations, for those who don't care enough about the language to work it out:

Quicksand: 'Quick' is another word for moving, or -in certain senses- 'alive'. "-the day when He shall come to judge the quick from the dead..." Is a fairly well-known example, or "cut me to the quick" in the sense of meaning to "cut to the life-blood". -Anyway Quicksand = sand which is not 'dead'... moving. -In exactly the same sense as liquid mercury = "Quicksilver"

"Not one amend" I'd also take issue with... it may not be common parlance, but amend is a verb meaning to re-ameliorate... look it up. 'Amends' as a noun is no more or less silly than 'amend' as a noun.

"If you wrote a letter, perhaps you bote your tongue?" -This from the nation (USA) which took "Dive" and decided that "Dove" should be the past tense... It may not sound funny to an American, but to an Englishman, it sounds as stupid as using "thunk" for the past tense of "think".

...And the expression "no spring chicken" is American in origin... -It's quite an amusing tale.

If the purpose of the original oft-carelessly-copied-and-pasted (and probably extended) bijou was originally supposed to be the promotion of thought about how the language evolved, then that's fine. If it really is an attempt to suggest that English is messed up, then that's not fine; that's where I stand.

unfortunately, most people who read it might take more of the latter than the former.

The USA policing the language??? -God help us all!!! :wink:

Keith

The British comedian Eddie Izzard once made a joke to the effect..."we say Herbs and not 'erbs, because there is a Fucking "H" in it..."

Ah ha, so now English is supposed to be a phonetic language, heh Ed? :roll: Carry on Leftennant :wink: