Is it the definite article?
So, to reiterate, when it comes to when to use the “the”, the only universal rule is this:
Some rules (such as the two you’ve given) might hold 95%+ of the time, but unfortunately there may be weird and arbitrary exceptions that you’ll just have to learn.
Is it capitalization?
Because a cursory look at the Wikipedia page for capitalization also reveals that it is not without its quirks.
For example:
planets and other celestial bodies: “Jupiter”, “the Crab Nebula”; and “the Earth”, “the Sun”, or “the Moon” should be capitalized according to the International Astronomical Union based on its manual of style, but style guides may suggest differently.[19]
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalization_in_English
Is it the fact the way something is written almost has no bearing on how it’s pronounced?
Please tell me your thoughts.
IMO, the weirdest thing about English is something every speaker does but probably never thinks about.
Whenever multiple adjectives describe a single noun, there’s a particular order in which they must go. If you have big tractor that’s also green, you would call it a “big green tractor” but you would never call it a “green big tractor”. Not only does it sound wrong, it’s grammatically incorrect.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/one-weird-trick-for-adjective-order
Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac.
Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How To Turn the Perfect English Phrase
100% this. No one is ever taught it as a rule in school. You’re never tested over it. But all native English speakers intuitively know it.
That officially you have “whom” on the books, but then if anyone uses it, they are seen as weird.
The disparity between written English and its pronunciation. Identically written words represented with vastly different sounds, and no real and consistent system whatsoever.
I agree. I like it (the spelling often shows the history of the word, relationships between words) but for an allegedly phonetic system it’s nonsense. Not sure it’s worse than French, but Spanish is so phonetic I can read aloud stuff I don’t even understand!
I learned to read as I was learning to talk, more like a language than a skill - kids learning in school are taught phonics, and I would despair if that was how I was taught.
Once. Really? The word Wonss is spelled Once?
Mandatory reference here: The Chaos (Poem)
It’s that it’s being driven by influencers and popularity, and not being improved incrementally according to consistent rules and patterns.
Other languages have steering committees; we have vapid tiktok influencerati trash steering the evolution of English.
Fucking hell.
I think what is exceptional for English is that negation and forming a question require a modal verb. You can say “I love apples” but not “*I not love apples”, nor “*Love I apples?”. This is rare in a language. (An exception for negation could be “Apples, I love not”, but this does not sound like everyday speech.)
Fun fact: “Love I apples?” and “Apples, I love not” are how German works, and English used to be like that (back when it was still turning into English)!
– Frost
“Apples, I love not”
It’s funny how learning different grammar can change the way you think. I read this and think, “Ah yes, perfectly normal Japanese word order. Topic first, with verb + negation at the end.”
I have to be careful when I talk sometimes, because my mental grammar structure is all over the place now.
“Colonel” is pronounced “ker-nel.”
HOW THE HELL IS THERE AN R SOUND IN THAT?!
Italian sourced spelling with French sourced pronunciation. So not an English word, just a bastardized loan word.
I knew exactly what video this would be from the quote. Timeless classic!
One I always find weird is how often we reuse the exact same word with the same spelling and pronunciation to mean wildly different things. For example, the word ‘jam’ can mean:
- a fruit preserve
- to play music
- heavy traffic
- a door that won’t open
- to cram something into something else
- a difficult situation
Or ‘saw’, which can be to look at something in the past tense or to cut wood. The word ‘run’ apparently has over 600 different meanings!
We also have contronyms, which is when a word also means the opposite of itself. For example ‘dust’, which can mean to add dust or remove it. Or ‘left’, which can mean remaining (“I only have three left”) or departing (“They left.”)
I remember my English teacher telling me the word “set” was the worst example of this, with over 200 definitions in the unabridged Oxford dictionary.
Chinese would like a word
A door can get jammed on the door jamb
I always thought the celestial bodies thing was just another case of proper nouns. Jupiter is always capitalized because it’s a proper name.
But “the Moon” can be either. “the Moon” is the proper name of Earths natural satellite so should be capitalized, but “the moon” is a description of any planetary body’s natural satellite so should NOT be
Similar for “the Sun”. “the Sun” is the proper name of Earths star, but “the sun” is any solar system’s star. I like that in so much science fiction they’ve figured this out and use a distinct proper name, “Sol”
I vote for standardisation. So it’s ‘wierd.’ I before e. It’s more Germanic that way too. Food, moon, and good all pronounced the same way. Etc
The wierdest thing? That it’s used in so many places instead of good, solid, consistent Latin
English was screwed by the advent of the printing press.
From the beginning of the renaissance up to the 1700’s, English underwent a vowel shift which saw a lot of words change pronunciation. When the printing press arrived in England in the late 1400’s, there was a push to set standard spelling. But because the printing press arrived while the vowel shift was still ongoing, the new pronunciation of some words was revised with updated spelling (consistent with other words at the time) but other words would receive new pronunciations after their spelling was already set in stone.
If a language undergoes a vowel shift after its spelling is standardized, the phonetic rules remain mostly intact because they will trend towards changing consistently. If a language completes a vowel shift before its spelling is standardized, then the new spelling will just reflect its current phonetics. English was unlucky enough to be locked in time during its blunder years.
Personally I definitely think it’s the pronunciation, which is… self explanatory. Other languages have weird grammar rules too, but even French pronunciation is more consistent 😭
Which makes it funny when I hear fellow English speakers knock on French spelling. At least I can reasonably assume what a written French word is supposed to sound like. English doesn’t give us that luxury.
I vote spelling. English spelling makes less sense than French or Danish and they take mothereffing liberties as well. No naturally occurring, alphabet using language will probably score perfect on that but I suspect English will be in the relegation zone of that table.
Beware of meat and great and threat, they rhyme with suite and straight and debt…
It’s hard, can be understood through tough thorough thought though.
Final boss: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ruize-rijmen/De_Chaos
Pronunciation of same letters differently.
Rough. Bough. Cough. Sough. Lough. Dough. Though. Tough.
I also think the way we insert curse words is abso-fucking-lutely unique.
My favorite example: Lead and lead are both spelled the same, but pronounced differently and don’t rhyme with each other. They do, however, rhyme with read and read, which are also spelled identically but don’t rhyme with each other.
I still think this is less bullshit than languages with gendered nouns, however. Who the fuck gets to decide if a chair is masculine or feminine, and how is this decision reached? Why do different languages determine the gender of a chair differently? We already have plenty of human beings in the world with gender dysphoria, we do not need to be giving it to inanimate objects.
One convenience of gendered nouns is that you can use shortened pronouns and the listener immediately knows what you are talking about. “Sit on him!” means sit on the chair and not the sofa, for example, because the sofa is neuter. So it’s not a matter of chair being more “masculine” so much as having three different forms of “it” pronoun. Still not enough convenience to make it worth it to learn from scratch, IMO.
My nemesis are the words “chose/choose lose/loose”. I always have to go through a quick tonguetwister in my head whenever I have to write one down to make sure I pick the correct one.
I also tried to learn German and I remember this about gendered nouns:
The man = der mann (masculine)
The woman = die frau (feminine)
The boy = der junge (masculine)
The girl = das mädchen (neutral)
Not even genders themselves have the genders you’d expect lol
Also in French once you get past about 60 the numbers turn insane. E.g. 97 = Quatre-vingt-dix-sept, or literally Four-twenty-ten-seven.
Mädchen being neuter is because it is, in its origin, a diminutive. It literally meant “little maid”. It comes from the word Magt (maid, virgin, miss) with the suffix -chen, meaning “little”.
And all diminutives are, you guessed it, neuter.
Diminutives are interesting, I think it would be nice if English still had them. You can express that something is small without using the words “little“ or “small”, which gives it a different nuance. Sometimes you can do this in English with -y or -let (kitty, booklet) but it’s not very common.
I like that different pronunciations and spellings are a history of integrating different languages and cultures. Especially now with all the hatred, spite and racism, at least I get to be amused that the language they claim as their own has a fundamental “diversity, equity and inclusion “
And no the Brit’s can’t claim to be the mother language - maybe they were the melting pot that spawned its birth, but as long as their fanny’s are on the wrong side …
(As someone who has historically been too sheltered so thought some societal issues were over dramatized, nothing could make me so pro “diversity, equity, and inclusion” like today’s US politics.)
I mean, fanny has been the front bits since long before the yanks started using it as slang in ww1.
Is it the fact the way something is written almost has no bearing on how it’s pronounced?
For me as someone who speaks english as a 2nd language this is definitely a big one
Though on the topic of the definite article, as a kid I found articles in general to be weird as my native language has none, so there were just these “untranslatable” words in front of some nouns for some reason
Though on the topic of the definite article, as a kid I found articles in general to be weird as my native language has none, so there were just these “untranslatable” words in front of some nouns for some reason
Funny you mention this, cuz I have been trying to learn japanese lately and it not having articles is a big obstacle for me.
You know, I never thought about the opposite being a problem lol.
It’s mildly interesting to think about
You can verb pretty much any noun you like and get away with it, when used in such a manner the verbnoun takes on the typical action of the noun.
“Gunned down” is an example.
It’s possible to do so in other languages as well, we rarely need to because we have other words for things though.
In my experience, nouns and verbs are generally strictly separate concepts in Romance languages, making this not viable, although there are exceptions.
It’s so prevalent we can literally say “I’ll verb your noun” and it still gets the point across.
Dearest creature in creation, The weirdest part is pronunciation…
