What are the most annoying things about English?

Kolanaki, 10 months ago

The word “colonel.”

Where is the god damn R sound coming from?!

WadeTheWizard, 10 months ago

The pronunciation came from French and the spelling came from Italian.

ji88aja88a, 10 months ago

…same as lieutenant, pronounced leftenant… and then there’s Cholmondeley , pronounced “chumley”

ScOULaris, 10 months ago

It’s only pronounced that way in the UK, if I’m not mistaken. I went most of my life thinking that lieutenant and leftenant were seperate terms before learning that it’s simply how the word is pronounced in Britain. Pretty bizarre, IMO, but that’s English for you.

Personally, I kind of enjoy the chaotic nature of English compared to other more consistently structured Latin languages. I feel like there is a wider variety of ways to phrase things in English than there are in many other popular languages around the world, which is a nice perk.

Silviecat44, 10 months ago

Or lieutennant in British and Australian english (Left-tenannt)

XTL, 10 months ago

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonel

By the end of the late medieval period, a group of “companies” was referred to as a “column” of an army. According to Raymond Oliver, around 1500, the Spanish began explicitly reorganizing part of their army into 20 colunelas or columns of approximately 1000-1250 soldiers. Each colunela was commanded by a cabo de colunela or column head. Because they were crown units, the units were also confusingly called coronelas, and their commanders coronels. Evidence of this can be seen when Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, nicknamed “the Great Captain”, divided his armies in coronelías, each led by a coronel (colonel), in 1508.

It’s a mess.

Nemo, 10 months ago

In response to yours:

\1. They’re super useful. “I don’t want this spoon, I want that spoon.”

\2. To make text more readable.

\4. Because English is a mutt of a language, Germanic grammar and common words with Latin, French, and Greek chunks stirred in and a sprinkle of everything else.

\6. Like your article complaint, hardly unique to English. Spanish does both as well.

\7. Better for both building suspense and for poetry.

Things that annoy me: When one letter makes multiple sounds, or when you need to use multiple letters together to denote a sound.

sagrotan, 6 months ago

Capital letters let you read faster.

afraid_of_zombies, 10 months ago

The way they show up asking to buy some tea and before you know it they are running the show. Also now everyone is hooked on opium.

nyternic, 10 months ago

We have overlapping terms that describe things we already have terms and words for.

We need to think of newer words, than just applying an already made word to mean several different things.

KingInk70, 10 months ago

I agree that this is annoying, but I think your belief about its cause might be a bit of an assumption - as I understand it, this kind of thing is usually caused when dialects have different meanings for the same word and then they merge, rather than a simple lack of creativity.

Stan, 10 months ago

Mr. Bean.

Oh sorry, I thought you said The English.

Aliendelarge, 10 months ago

What do you have against Johnny? Any issues with Edmund Blackadder?

Mostly_Gristle, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

All the words that sound the same and/or are spelled the same. I always thought sentences like I saw the saw saw the seasaw must be hella confusing for non-native speakers.

Stan, 10 months ago

Shouldn’t there only be two saws in a row there?

Mostly_Gristle, 10 months ago

Now there’s only two.

RemembertheApollo, 10 months ago

I acknowledge english has many confusing and contrary facets, but I must counter with why do other languages assign gender to things and make others neutral? A car could be female, the muffler neutral, and the window glass male.

Also, I don’t have much to offer regarding adjectives other than it doesn’t matter. The human brain is capable of sorting both “the car blue” and “the blue car” just fine.

mizu6079, 10 months ago

5 makes sense because possessive pronouns never have apostrophes (yours, hers, etc.), while contacted forms do (can’t, he’s, etc.).

mekkagodzilla, 10 months ago

My biggest gripe as a non native speaker is phrasal verbs.

Unless you know exactly what they mean, you are screwed. You can’t decypher them, there’s no link between the meaning of the component parts and the phrasal verb.

As my English teacher used to tell us jokingly: you should never say: “I get on with my brother, but I get off with my sister”.

DannyBoy, 10 months ago

@Xylight When they taught you a really really important rule of the language and this rule has a little exception. Then another exception, also another exception, please add one more exception, around of applause for another exception, and another exception...

The cycle continues until you see that the "rule" should be the exception and all those "exceptions" should be the rule.

Xylight, 10 months ago

I before E, except after C. Except when your foreign neighbor Keith receives eight counterfeit sleighs from feisty caffeinated weightlifters.

XTL, 10 months ago

The rule with more exceptions than matches

CylonBunny, 10 months ago

I like these things, makes it feel quirky and weird. I don’t want my natural language to work like a computer language!

freamon, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

English lets you get away with saying things you don’t exactly mean. A lot of the efforts from groups that might be disparaged as ‘woke’ over preferred terminology exist because it allows for so much ambiguity.

To use a common example: there’s a difference between “Group X struggle to get bank loans” and “Banks have consistently not loaned to Group X” in terms of where the fault lies, but because English allows us to use the former to mean the latter, it seems like an imposition to be reminded.

Other languages - e.g. German - don’t allow for this: your intended emphasis changes the word order, so you have to think about what you really mean.

Falmarri, 10 months ago

let’s

freamon, 10 months ago

Fixed, thanks.

XTL, 10 months ago

en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Time_Enough_for_Love

In the first place, very little thinking was ever done in English; it is not a language suited to logical thought. Instead, it’s an emotive lingo beautifully adapted to concealing fallacies. A rationalizing language, not a rational one.

freamon, 10 months ago

That book seems stacked for quotes.

“Son, I hate to say this — because, if you’ve been reading a lot of English, I see how you reached that opinion — but you are one hundred percent wrong.”

Jourei, 10 months ago

Why the fuck are there no rules for pronunciation?? There is very little consistency in English.

I mean cases like yes - eyes, Kansas - Arkansas.

hundertzwoelf, 10 months ago

English orthography is highly opaque because when words are loaned, they typically keep the spelling of their original language, whereas the pronunciation might differ

LaVacaMariposa, 10 months ago

Yes! Fck this. There’s no way to decipher how a word is pronounced unless someone tells you.

Jourei, 10 months ago

And even then, going to another dialect, you’re still in the wrong.

Ceon, 10 months ago

Check out the poem "The chaos". It uses many of the inconsistencies in pronunciation

Nepenthe, 10 months ago

I've never seen this before, and I both adore and loathe it. If I hadn't grown up with this language, I'd contemplate giving up.

pavnilschanda, 10 months ago

There are so many, and I think it comes down to the fact that English is a mix of at least two language families and how a bunch of grammar nerds overcorrected it.