When I was learning English (thirty some years ago. Immigrated from Russia, legally, with not a lick of English under my belt) reading it was so confusing. I still to this day do not understand the pronunciation of “Colonel”.
The best way i heared it is English waits in dark corridors to beat up other languages then rummages through their pockets for words and grammar.
But also for the writing blame the Dutch for why it is so bad. Many languages go through a great vowel shift ours just happened at the time the Dutch came over with printing presses. So the printing presses standardise writing, yet this is happening at the same time how it is all said is changing and then applied through how the Dutch would do it. I know the gh combination is affected by this but there are some others as well.
English also received its word order (SVO) from the vikings. Old English and Frisian used SOV, but then the vikings conquered the northern part of England for 300 years. They called the area "The Danelaw" because that's where the Danes lived, and the languages mixed.
Yeah that mixing is one of the reasons we got rid of cases I think? Basically tried to make things simpler because so many people were mixing. I loved studying Anglo Saxon literature, it's a difficult language but I think it just looks beautiful. They had too many words for 'the' lol.
I would argue that it is more that English doesn't have a governing body to do spelling reform. If you look at Dutch you realize just how badly we spell our language.
I think in part it has to do with your neighbors and actually hearing the words pronounced. Ombudsman has been butchered so long without anyone to correct them it's just stuck that way.
The thing with French words is that it depends when they entered English. If they were introduced by the Normans, they they're from an old, particularly Germanicised, dialect that's distinct in some pronunciations from more typical French of the time.
And sometimes, we have two words, one derived from Norman French and another derived from Middle French, or Modern French.
And the words we changed the spellings of to look French, for a laugh.
So, so you process English through translation in your brain still? A friend once explained to me she hears the words in English, translates it into Spanish in her head, answers it in Spanish in her mind and then translates it back into English to speak. Ever since I’ve been in awe of multilingual people. Tried Spanish in high school, twice, same class. Failed miserably both times
So your friend is not an efficient bilingual if she still translates in her head. I'm multilingual, I think in the language I'm currently speaking/writing. If I'm just thinking on my own, the brain picks the language it wants. The best way to learn a language is to learn it like a child. Think about your mastery of English, you don't translate "water" in your head by example, you know what water is and that the sounds for "water" mean this thing. You apply this to all languages. That's also not efficient because languages are rarely literally translatable into one another.
56
u/Adventurous-Bee4823 20h ago
When I was learning English (thirty some years ago. Immigrated from Russia, legally, with not a lick of English under my belt) reading it was so confusing. I still to this day do not understand the pronunciation of “Colonel”.