What irritates you the most with your own language?

CurlyMoustache@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 200 points –

Mine is people who separate words when they write. I'm Norwegian, and we can string together words indefinetly to make a new word. The never ending word may not make any sense, but it is gramatically correct

Still, people write words the wrong way by separating them.

Examples:

  • "Ananas ringer" means "the pineapple is calling" when written the wrong way. The correct way is "ananasringer" and it means "pineapple rings" (from a tin).

  • "Prinsesse pult i vinkel" means "a princess fucked at an angle". The correct way to write it is "prinsessepult i vinkel", and it means "an angeled princess desk" (a desk for children, obviously)

  • "Koke bøker" means "to cook books". The correct way is "kokebøker" and means "cookbooks"

I see these kinds of mistakes everywhere!

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(American) English: Inflammable vs flammable vs non-flammable.

Inflammable means flammable?! What a country!

Inflammable and flammable don't strictly mean the same thing.

Flammable can be set alight

Inflammable can set itself alight.

I've known the difference ever since I decided to look it up one day, but I've always felt the 'in-' prefix was the wrong choice (especially when labeling potentially dangerous substances). "In-" is more often used to qualify a word as "not".

"Autoflammable" would have been my choice.

It's prefix is in- because of "it can become inflamed".

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Ambiguously used words like "biweekly". Does it mean twice per week? Every other week? Business meeting calendar scheduling terminology is especially bad with this.

Odd phrases like you can chop the tree down. Then but then you proceed to chop that same tree up.

Parking in a driveway and driving in a parkway is also a good one.

A driveway is where you drive to get the residence, vs the walkway. Parkways are landscaped with park-like greenery .

After your alarm goes off... You turn it off.

Norwegian is more accurate. "Biweekly" means "annenhver uke" (every other week)

It does here too. It's not an unclear thing, just not used all the time so people don't remember.

Biweekly is every other week, fortnightly.

Semiweekly is twice a week.

How numbers are pronounced.
In German the number 185 is pronounced as "hundred-five-and-eighty" (hundertfünfundachtzig), the digits are not spoken in order of their magnitude.
Not terrible, not great.

Same thing for Dutch. For example, when we see 74 we pronounce it as four and seventy (vierenzeventig) and it makes no sense.

I guess it’s a Germanic language thing.

This is the same in Danish, but weirdly not in Swedish.

We say four-seventy for 74, and hundred-four-seventy for 174. But the swedes does it like the English. Don’t know about Norwegian though. Maybe OP can provide me with some new knowledge.

French: 80 is four twenties ("Quatre-vingt")

Edit: not four tens, four twenties. I can't count in any language, dammit!

And 90 - 99 are even worse, in that they are basically eighty-ten, eighty-eleven, etc.

Makes zero sense to my English speaking mind

Oh, it's worse than that.

80 is basically four-twenties. 17, 18, and 19 are basically ten-seven, ten-eight, and ten-9. Which makes 97, 98, and 99 four-twenties-ten-seven, four-twenties-ten-eight, and four-twenties-ten-nine.

I remember reading that one of the Scandinavian languages had a specific (successful) governmental policy to change from German-like numbers to English-like ones. I don't remember which of them it was.

It is true, at least here in Norway: https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den_nye_tellem%C3%A5ten ("The new way of counting").

Our parliament deceided in 1949 that 21 should not be pronounced as "one-and-twenty", but as "twenty-one". It was because new phone numbers got introduced, and the new way gave a lot less errors when spoken to the "sentralbordamer" (switch operator ladies).

It depens on age and/or dialect. My dialect is from the middle of Norway (trøndersk), and I say 74 as "fir'å søtti". Other parts of Norway may say "søtti fire". Luckily we do not do the weird danish numbers.

It depends on how old you are here. If you say "fir'å søtti", you are at least in your 70s. If you say "søttifire", you are not 70 but younger.

And, to cause a bit more confusion, it also depends on your dialect, and if your dialect is the cause, your age isn't. Easy.

Wait, a case where English is more logical? There must be some mistake!

It's not so much a feature of English as it is a recurring bug in the way people use the language...

If you write "of" instead of "have" or "'ve" you need to be taken out back and beaten with a dictionary, preferably until you can apologize to your ancestors in person for the effort they wasted in passing down the English language to you.

Incidentally, when did people start saying "on accident"? It's by accident! Has been for ages! Why this? Why now? I hate it.

With that out of the way... English isn't a language, it's five dialects in a trenchcoat mugging other languages in a dark alley for their loose grammar.

Edit: With regards to OP, "a cookbook" and "to cook the books" are similar phrases in English, too, but have, eh, wildly different meanings. XD

"of" in place of "have" certainly had to come from people mishearing/misunderstanding "ve." There's no other explanation.

The accident one is funny. I had to really think about when I'd use "on", and it's when I say something like: "he did it on accident." Which is wrong when I think about it, but I know I've said this countless times. I can only guess it grew from "an accident" like "it was an accident."

Even though "on"and "by" are the same length, "by" sounds like it takes too much effort to say. How weird.

Prepositions are so arbitrary. So it's really stupid to be so angry about "on accident". But I can't help it.

The past tense of lead is led, which is pronounced like lead but is not pronounced like lead.

That second example is..... Wow.

These are all real examples. Here's a picture of someone posting that they want to give away a princess desk princess desk

Last sentence, "godt brukt", means "well used"

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In French they fucking have the same word for "no more" and "more", and only differs in pronounciation of the last letter:

"J'ai plus de pommes" pronounced as "j'ai plu de pommes" means "I have no more apples" (nobody says the "ne" particle)

"J'ai plus de pommes (que toi)" pronounced as "j'ai plus de pommes (que toi)" means "I have more apples (than you)"

Which is even worse because usually last letter is not pronounced, so that makes it an exception to the rule

Simply emphasise the last letter more.

But the last letter is silent.

Yep.

In some Caribbean Englishes, the pronunciations of the words "can" and "can't", which are opposites, differ only in vowel length: kyan, kyaan.

So does that mean you can't tell them apart in writing? Or in writing would that "ne particle" you mention be there?

It depends, sometimes «ne» appears, sometimes people just skip the last letter, so they write «plu» or «pu» to mean «no more»

Now try "I have more apples in my car" and "I don't have more apples on my car".

Sounds like the people who try to keep french pure and proper should focus more on the 'ne'.

The four cases. Nominative, Genitive, Dative, and Akkusative with their accompanying articles. It makes learning German as a second language a nightmare and even native speakers struggle with it a lot.

Ah man, I think cases are great! I learned Russian in college, which has six cases, and they can be used to express so much with so little. English used to have them, you can see remnants in the apostrophe ‘s’ when denoting possession, and I’m bummed they went away.

I’ll give it to you that they’re a pain in the ass to learn, but once you get the hang of them I think they’re super neat!

Edit: they also allow for variable sentence structure which can be super fun and, again, express a lot of meaning just through text (at least in Russian, not sure if that’s the case in German).

Ha! We got 7 cases. The poor expats struggle learning Czech is real. I know only a few that speak on a decent level. Great respect for them.

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Not my native language, but the one I speak the most is (American) English.

So many homophones-words that sound the same but are different in meaning or spelling such as knight/night, altar/alter, ail/ale, isle/aisle/I’ll.

Also homographs-words with same spelling but different meaning and/or pronunciation like minute, bass, capital, wind, moped.

So confusing for people trying to learn English and also for people that actually speak it

I can't speak for all native English speakers, but in my experience we're very accepting of imperfect grammar from non-native speakers because we know how crazy this language is.

Homographs are just cruel. As a native english speaker, it's like... bullying for someone trying to learn the language. Read vs. Read - evil.

It can be pretty confounding, the words that look the same but are pronounced differently. Through, though, thorough, tough, trough.

There are no rules, you just have to learn it. And it could be confusing if you mix them up. Through and throw, for example.

English has never had a spelling reform, but you can see the "real" spelling in informal language sometimes. Through = thru (in texts and chats). Tough = tuff (in slang and brand names).

"I threw the trough thoroughly through the thoroughfare" was a sentence my english teacher had us say and write. Good times!

"Though the tough cough and hiccough, plough them through."

Capital is always pronounced the same, but the similar word capitol is a homophone in most accents.

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What I hate about English is what I love about English. The spelling.

I hate that it's an impossible system to teach in any logical way. No child can sound out common words like "once".

But I love that the ridiculous spelling of our words gives you a look into the history of the language. That it's not just transliterations of the sounds, but letters in a pattern that holds more information than that.

"Do you mind ..." has been mis-answered for so long that yes means no. It's hard to explain because written down, yes/no have different meanings, but when speaking to someone it depends on tone, context, and body language.

"Do you mind if I take that seat"

"No" "Yeah" depending on tone can both mean, "I'm fine with you taking that seat". Most people will add on to make the intention clearer like, "Yeah, go ahead" but not always. Absolutely crazy.

Norwegian is easier. If you see a vacant seat, you don't use it because sitting next to some one is what psychopaths do. You're not a psychopath, are you?

In these situations, when people say "take that seat", they usually mean it literally. As in take the seat with them and use it at the table they actually want to sit at.

The problem is that "do you mind if" is really just an indirect way of saying "may I." People often tend to reply to the actual meaning rather than the literal meaning.

Hebrew. I hate how everything is gendered. You cant communicate with a person without assuming his/her gender. You cant ask "how are you?" or "what is your name?" without using the other person's gender. Its worse than spanish/italian. We have genders for verbs, our "you" is gendered, heck, NUMBERS have genders (two girls, two boys - you use a different word for two).

Have you ever spoken to a person and werent sure about their gender? In hebrew you would be screwed.

Portuguese is essentially the same.

But voce, tu, and numbers arent gendered though.

você, tu

These pronouns adress the other person directly but the moment I have to ask or say something connected to said person I have to start using gendered words

And numbers can be gendered.

Two girls, two boys.

Duas raparigas, dois rapazes.

And things only get weirder from this point forward. It is possible to have a somewhat genderless conversation but it requires a good degree of effort and it is not a common form of speech.

You can kind of get around the gendered stuff sometimes.

'How are you' can be מה נשמע

What's your name can be איך השם

My language is diglossic - it has a written form and a spoken form that are very different to each other. It's quite difficult to understand the written form if you've only grown up speaking and listening to the language, as the written form is essentially the language as spoken in the 1600s.

To compare it to English, it would be like saying "Where are you?" to someone over the phone, but then having to send them "Wherefore art thou?" as a text.

"wherefore" means "why" not "where".

She wasn't asking him "where are you?" but rather "why did it have to be you?"

Ah I see, thanks for the correction! (It also kind of demonstrates the problems I have with my own language :P)

Great example. Wherefore doesn't mean where. Lol

**Don't mean this snarky. Do find it funny tho.

"Whither" (to where) might be a closer fit than "wherefore" (why)

English having no consistent spelling, grammar or pronunciation.

Spelling and pronunciation were actually standardized and spelling technically still is. The problem is that the standardization is from a previous version of English with different pronunciation.

Same as the norwegian "hjerne" and "gjerne". They are pronouced the same, but the first is "brain" the secon is "yes, please"

"Hjort" and "gjort". Also pronounced the same, but the first one is "deer" and the second is "have done that".

Easy

The thing I hate about English is that it pretends to have formal rules for sentence structure and grammar, and they are all basically optional to some degree, but plenty of English speakers get really grumpy when people break them. English isn't like French where there is a literal governing body who is in charge of setting the formal rules for the language - English is a cluster fuck of borrowed words and structures mashed together in a barely coherent mess, stop acting like "should'a" is a violation of section 16.4 subsection 4

It's mostly a bunch of feeling over what sounds right. Like big red rubber ball sounds infinitely better than rubber red big ball.

I draw the line at "on accident" though.

I wish to subscribe to your newsletter. "On accident", fuck me. "I could care less", too.

We got a governing body that decides what is correct or not when it comes to our two written languages, bokmål and nynorsk. They do not control speach and what is "correct" to say. I recent years the younger generations (I'm millenial, so not young any more 😢) have began merging two sounds, the sj- /∫/ og kj-sounds /ç/ with only the sj-sound. They can't even hear the diference. This results in funny situations for us who can hear and pronounce the different sounds when used in words.

Kjede, pronounced with /ç/ at the start, means chain (can be used to describe various types of chains).

Sjede, pronounced with /∫/ at the start, means vagina.

The younger generation pronounced both words with /∫/ at the start. This makes the word "kjedekollisjon" not mean "chain collision" any more, but "vagina collision". "Halskjede" with a /∫/, suddenly means "neck vagina", not "necklace". And so on. Language is fun.

I think it's precisely because there is no governing body for English and all the rules are colloquial, developed through usage, that people do get grumpy! They are the only ones who can create and enforce the rules! Each English speaker feels personally responsible and compelled to correct use they perceive is in violation of the rules the way they want them to be. If they don't do it right then and there, no one else can.

We are English speaking and as someone raising a kid it's really difficult at their age to teach and explain all the words that are spelled the same but can sound different. She loves to learn so I try my best. I wrote a sentence down that she likes to show people and read to them just to start but always asks why it is the way it is.

"My daughter liked when I read her a book the other day so I make it a habit to read 1 book a day with her"

That's the sentence she's practicing. There is a lot more to get through though.

Along the same lines, through, thorough, throw, tough, thought, though. Just the slightest variation of spelling. English makes no sense.

"-sts" and "sps" et al

e.g. ghosts, frosts, wasps, clasps, flasks, basks.

Just a stupid sound.

i propose we return to the germanic roots of english and replace the endings of those words with "-en", ghosten, frosten, waspen..

"Frosts"!?

Sure, the morning frosts began a few weeks ago around my area. That's when everything frosts over from the humidity and cold temps.

Inconsistent sounds for the same spelling, as in: tough, cough, through, thorough, bough, dough.

All those stupid English place names: Cholmondeley, Leicester, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire.

Or how about all the words that are spelled the same but have different pronunciations.

  • Invalid - The data is invalid.

  • Invalid - The old man is an invalid.

  • Content - I'm content with my lot in life.

  • Content - The website's content is full of ads.

etc.

Old joke. You can tell a contractor from a chemist based on how they pronounce 'unionized.'

I actually have a list somewhere of all these that I have come across and remembered to write down, sort of a game I play I guess. I haven’t tried to sit down and find all the possible examples of this (that’d be no fun), just stumble across them over time. Anyway the list is longer than you would expect, and now I have to add Invalid!

Don't forget Towcester! I find it very funny that there's a town called Toaster.

German: I hate that we use comma as a decimal separator. Makes working with international documents a hassle, my numpad on pc makes a comma so I cannot even type a date.....we like to complain about us imperial units as much as anyone but our comma is almost as stupid!

The funny thing is, that most of the world uses commas as decimal separator and comma is the preferred decimal separator by ISO. But instead, in English speaking countries, the period is used as the decimal separator. Actually it comes from the original decimal separator, that was used in the British Empire called interpunct ⟨·⟩. When they were changing units to metric, ISO didn't recognize interpunct as a decimal separator, because it was too similar to the multiplication sign used in other countries. So after some debate in the UK, they've adopted the period, because the US was already using it. From the British Empire, South Africa instead adopted the comma.

I did not know that. Very interesting, thanks. Not so fun fact: Switzerland, although German speaking, does not use the comma. Also their keyboard Layout is all over the place with German French and Italian influences.

I speak Spanish and being 100% honest about it i love it, the only shitty thing is the fact that the dialects vary a lot (also i kinda hate the tilde).

I live in the north of Mexico, sometimes when I speak with people from the center I need to look up words that they use

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In Dutch, the proper way to say it's e.g., 8h30 is "half nine".

Makes it extra confusing when they say the same in (British) English for 9h30. So short for half past nine.

You wouldn't pronounce €8.50 as "half nine Euro".

Even worse: the correct way of saying 8h40 is "10 past half nine".

10 past half nine

My brain kicked on and asked me if I wanted a migraine trying to read that.

8h30 = halv ni

9h30 = halv ti

€8,50 = åtte euro og 50 eurocent (we do not use Euro in Norway)

8h40 = ti over halv ni

Can you say 10 before half nine for 8:20?

Yes.

8h23 would be 7 before half 9.

But most people while speaking would just say 8.23 or 23 past 8.

Any number higher than twelve is said the wrong way around, for example instead of ninety-two we say two-and-ninety.

In the Welsh language we say the number of tens then the number. One - Un (pronounced een) Ten - Deg Eleven - Un deg un - one ten one

Three - Tri Thirty - Tri deg - three ten Thirty-one - Tri deg un - three ten one

(English)

So many people treat the letter S like it's special, regardless of why it's there.

Instead of Gus's, they'll say Gus' when they are talking about a possession of the singular Gus.

If the S is part of a name, it doesn't activate the plural-possessive rule for dropping the S after the apostrophe.

Burns's poems
Samus's starship
Kass's theme

In English, lack of second-person plural, aside from a dozen regionalisms: y'all, yinz, youse, etc.

No distinction between inclusive & exclusive 'we': if I say "we've got to go now", do I expect you to come?

Unnecessarily generated pronouns. I know 'they/them' has been used for individuals for ages, but I still find it awkward. I wish we just used one set of ungendered pronouns for every specific person.

Englishes have words for the second-person plural pronoun, but Standard English doesn't have one word for it.

If two speakers are from the same background, they probably share a word for it. If they're from different places or different races, they might not.

In general I think Spanish is a well formed language without (or at least not much) crazy shit.

But I still don't know why we have the same fucking word for weather and time. While using the same word for different meanings is ok, these two are ridiculously common concepts used a lot and it's not hard to get into situations where it's hard to know which is which. Absolutely stupid.

As a Spaniard with kids living in UK, it's very hard to teach them the gender of words that should not really need to have a gender. Why does "car" need to be masculine?!

It's easier if you don't think it as actual gender, and just as grammar. You have "el televisor" (masculine) and "la tele" o "la tv" (femenine), both meaning "the tv". It's more about how the word ends than anything.

Still, it's something that if someone gets it wrong, it sounds off but everyone still understands. No one is going to care for a foreigner saying that wrong. There's no really a confusion to be had there.

But time/weather can lead to actual misunderstandings.

it's less of a Spanish thing and more of a cultural slang thing that is really not more of an issue than any other slang in any language can create, which is to say, rather minor.

That's why in Italian it's feminine.

There, problem solved!

😄

So if we bring Spanish and Italian cars together, do they make more cars?

Kids split words in American, too; or they join the words. We see examples like:

  • Incase
  • aswell
  • shutdown (wrong as verb)
  • backup(wrong as verb)

Or wrong splits:

  • back up (wrong as noun)
  • under stand

Or just plain dumb:

  • emails
  • till (instead of 'til)

I wish I could say it was better in English, but we're being dragged down with them.

What's wrong with emails?

Not OP, but I think I could answer.

Traditionally, mail is uncountable. One can count letters and packages, but not mail. Thus "I received three mails" is currently grammatically incorrect, while "I received three pieces of mail" or "I received three letters" or "I received three packages" would all currently be grammatically correct.

It seems logical that email should follow the same rules of grammar. Thus "I received three emails" should be incorrect, while "I received three pieces of email" or "I received three messages" would all be grammatically correct.

But English grammar is not consistent. Email is a new word and the folks that use it have decided that it is countable.

I don't mind this, but it seems OP does.

Till is actually a word that predates until.

Many assume that till is an abbreviated form of until. Actually, it is a distinctive word that existed in English at least a century before until, both as a preposition meaning “to” and a conjunction meaning “until.” It has seen continuous use in English since the 12th century and is a perfectly legitimate synonym of until.

Source

OP, I appreciate the examples. Thanks to them, I see what you mean, and agree.

Briefly, I was thinking “I don’t want to read a word that’s as long as a sentence, no wonder people break things up”, but that wasn’t what you meant at all.

For English, what irritates me is not knowing what to do with possessive apostrophes, especially if the word already ends in “s”. I know I’ve gotten it wrong many times, but oh well.

Rule of thumb is to add an apostrophe at the end of a word ending in S, otherwise add 's. I imagine this is only because the extra S sound gets cut off when you sleak

My biggest apostrophe pet peeve isn't a fault of the language but with the misuse when pluralizing acronyms and years.

It's not the ABC's, it's the ABCs. It's not the 1970's, it's the 1970s. You don't need apostrophes to pluralize.

What do mean "a sentence"? It is clearly one word : minoritets­ladningsbærer­diffusjons­koeffisient­målings­apparatur

When Swedish translators try to create a Swedish name for an English character it always ends up sounding silly. Batman was named "läderlappen" (the leather patch) for example.

Yesterday I heard that they translated Pennywise the clown as "clownen Snåljåpen", which I guess gets the literal meaning across but also makes him feel like more of a stingy old man than an actual villain.

dutch: our accent is the absolute worst thing.

Something I do kinda like though is that we often don't translate English things or names. Ask a Dutch child who Spiderman is and they'll know it because we don't call him Spinman or something like that.

New Zealand: hold my beer caaaaant

My dad is really proud of his deck - he had all of his mates over the other weekend to help him wax it

Problem: ambiguity of date terms like saying "this Wednesday" on a Thursday. Is the speaker referring to yesterday or the coming Wednesday six days from now? Not always clear.

Solution: I propose standardising our understanding of the week as beginning Monday, ending Sunday. At any point in the current week, "this whateverday" refers to that day in the current week, no matter if it's past or future. "Next whateverday" refers to that day in the upcoming Monday through Sunday week.

"This Wednesday", on a Thursday, is referring to yesterday.

"Next Wednesday", on a Thursday, is referring to a day six days from now.

(I also suggest adopting ISO 8601, writing dates in year-month-day order to avoid that ugly ambiguity.)

Better: say "this past" or "this coming" to indicate the direction in time.

There are some words that have fallen out of use that may be helpful. Overmorrow and score ( as in "...fourscore and seven...") come to mind. There may be others and I think it would be interesting to research.

Point being that English may have already solved this problem and forgotten the solutions.

We have the same, and the reason I always ask for a specific date.

"Førstkommende onsdag" = "the first coming wednesday". WHAT? Give me a date.

"Denne helga" = "this weekend". OK, it works, but to be sure I want to have a date for friday, saturday and sunday.

"Ikke førstkommende helg, men den etter" = "not the first coming weekend, but the second." ... Fuck off!

The main problem I have with English is that spoken English and written English are two different languages. Inflection and emphasis and even volume aren't carried by the Latin alphabet. We can do things like this sometimes but even that is limited.

I mean, how many of us have had English teachers tell us we can't write essays the way we speak.

None? I never heard any teacher say that.

I think they were referring to being instructed to not write academic papers in a conversational tone.

My English professor absolutely talked about how we can't write essays the way we speak; but she was referring to how speeches need to be repetitive so the points ticking people's minds and written works and did not be repetitive because it bores the hell out of people. Not to say that speeches don't bore the hell out of people; that's a different story though.

Fellow Norwegian here. Seems like you've encountered a classic "sær skrivingsfeil". (For non-norwegians: The type of mistake described in the main post is called "særskrivingfeil", "sær skrivingsfeil" means "odd/weird writing error" and is itself a mistake of the "særskrivingsfeil" type.)

Personally I would probably answer the sj/kj issue, but I saw that you've mentioned it in a comment, and after thinking a little about it there is a bigger issue I have: People don't love the langauge. What I mean is that Norwegian is a beautiful language with many amazing words, but because people don't love it there is a perception that the langauge is "limited" or "boring". I'd love to read books in Norwegian, but the fact is that most authours/translators I've come across aren't very good at Norwegian, and it makes the book worse to read. Part of this issue is with machine translation. I was talking to a family member about this, and he mentioned that he had noticed a trend in the Donald Duck comics (which are/were hugely popular in Norway) from when he was young, and the lead translator of the comics was a teacher of Norwegian who loved the language, and the newer ones, after machine translation has taken over, and the difference was night and day. However, just to not be entierly negative I'll give you an example of someone who did this well: the people who translated the Spook's series (Den Siste Lærling) did a stellar job in my estimation with giving the names of things good Norwegian names and generally translating it well.

English, on the other hand, I feel like has not suffered as much from this, because they have benefited greatly from prominent writers who loved the language. I'm talking particularly within the sphere of fantasy, as that is where I am most familiar, where people like Tolkien and Gary Gygax are both extremely prominent writers who loved English and would use all those words that would (I think) have fallen out of the language if they hadn't put them in the public eye. I also think that while others who aren't as invested in the language would go on and write later, they would borrow some of the style from these earlier writers, because that's what the genre "sounds like". I think Norway needs a movement like this. People who dig up obscure Norwegian words that they can use as lables for things, and by doing that thrusts those words into the minds of readers, who will look up the definitions of those words and have richer lexicons as a result.

I've hear the argument "Norwegian is a poor language" before, and people usually argue that the English language has many more words to choose from. When pressed, people like that are borderline illiterate and haven't written anything meaningful in years. And they're fucking horrible at english too

English isn't really a language, it's a shambling amalgamation of a bunch of different languages so it's got all sorts of insane, nonsensical rules and exceptions. I can totally understand why it's a frustrating language to pick up, and IDK that I would've bothered to learn if it wasn't my native language.

As a norweigan, it is one of the easiest languages to learn

Hmm, maybe I should try learning some Norwegian or Sami...

Did you know any other languages before you learned English? Also, when did you learn it?

I didn't speak any other languages than my native tongue before english, and I think I started learning English when I was around 10. This was early 90s, and they perhaps start even earlier now.

We knew alot of english before we had it in school. Music and films were a big influence on us, as it is still today.

Ah yeah, I forgot about the shitloads of media we pump out. Being constantly exposed to a language over a long time definitely makes it easier to learn.

eh i don't really understand why people are so obsessed with rules in language, like that's not how humans inherently learn language anyways and just memorizing rules seems like a great way to make yourself use the language wrong for a long time.

The ideal way to learn languages is immersion, expose yourself to the language as much as possible and your brain will just automatically start making sense of it, and when you do it this way the regularity of the language is basically irrelevant.

So in German we have these weird symbols: äßöü one of them is even in my name. In my opinion they are not necessary and cause more trouble that they are worth.

UTF 8 has alleviated some of the pain. However I still regularly find documents encoded in old character encodings and I have to manually fix all these accents.

I also have one of them in my name. In the past in school a SYS-Admin entered my name with an ö instead of the alternate form oe. All was fine. I was about 13yo, so I had no idea about backups and didn't care. I stored all my files on their NAS. One day they had drive failures and could recover all data except from students with accents in their name. I don't know what shitty software they used but I am still annoyed at this.

We also have das,dass which I always get wrong while writing texts.

There are some good things. The time forms can be pretty fun to use.

All in all German is a 6/10 for me could be better could be worse.

In Russian to say "I saw a video" sounds like "Ia VIDel VIDeo" which just sounds stupid too. Everytime I say it I have to rollback, find a synonym, and repeat the sentence in less stupid way

The English words "video", "visual", and "view" are all from the same Latin root, but imported into English from Latin and French at different points in history. The letters "vi" are not pronounced the same in any two of them.

This kind of shit just happens with language. It's normal.

The letters “vi” are not pronounced the same in any two of them.

That varies by accent. I pronounce the "vi" in "video" and "visual" the same, but "view" is different.

Thresh + hold = threshold. Why did they drop the middle 'H'? You still have to pronounce both 'H's, and they don't even have the same sound. They're the worst kind of portmanteau, but they're in the dictionary.

Hitchhiker is spelled with two hs in the middle?

As for threshold, it's an ancient word...

https://www.etymonline.com/word/threshold?utm_source=app

Good point, my mistake on hitchhiker. My brain just merged it in with my hatred of threshold.

It doesn't matter how old threshold is. They merged the h of hold with the h in the sh sound of thresh. There is an H missing from how it should be spelt.

Linguists aren't sure the second part is "hold".

Liberman (Oxford University Press blog, Feb. 11, 2015) revives an old theory that the second element is the Proto-Germanic instrumental suffix -thlo and the original sense of threshold was a threshing area adjacent to the living area of a house.

Ancient words are weird; meanings/ spellings change and are lost to time. It's what makes it all so interesting. You're not wrong, but this might be a bad example.

I'd accept this as a bad example if it wasn't pronounced "hold". Like, you say "thresh hold" and not "thresh old", and that's why I get ticked off at it only having one H. Even if there's an explanation, it's irritating.

The fact that it can be read so many different ways depending on the accent. I have a different accent than those around me, and it's inevitable to feel expectations violated.

Apparently people also find it funny when I say the word "envelope". "Hey it's Leni, say envelope" they might say, maybe with me responding "guys, I'm not a freaking circus seal" like Jango Fett has a secret pet in denial.

In German, the formal address is the same as the third-person plural, just capitalized. This can lead to ambiguities when talking.

All the French that's embedded in it. Stupid Normans making it sound weird if I go to a restaurant and order pig.

Actually, I find the french and double dose of viking influence quite fascinating. English etymology is a wild ride!

I can respect that. Normans are basically pesudo norwegians.

When they got the question "what do you want to eat, sir?", the reponse was "gris, di fett!" (give me a pig, you cunt!)

Yeah, it really is. "I'll have the pig, please" sounds kind of humorous. "I'll have the pork chop" sounds totally normal and way more elegant.

What really fascinates me is how English lost its cases and endings. Old English could outdo modern German, but then the Vikings came along, and later the French.

I think most of the declinations were already gone by the time the Normans invaded though. Supposedly Old Norse and English were pretty mutually intelligible, so if you drop the pesky endings, you end up with something that everyone understands pretty well.

It's becoming more common in English for people to say "whenever" when it should just be "when." It's like nails on a chalkboard when I hear it used wrong like that

I love that English has a way of marking nouns/verbs in a sentence but I hate that when written it's completely erased (although sometimes a comma can help) "The old man the ship" threw me for like 5 minutes before I realised that man can be a verb.

This is probably because english is not my first language, but I didn't understand this at all

Edit: I got it!

Honestly English has a lot of little things that I don't like about English but I can only imagine how you make the distinction between "Prinsesse pult i vinkel" and "prinsessepult i vinkel" when speaking and does that phenomenon effect other speaking situations at least with my home state our accent involves giving up on pronunciation halfway through the word so you can just listen for when centince has definition and transitions to mumbling to hear when one word ends and the other starts

Another Norwegian here. The sidene between the two is that words have stress, and compound words thus (generally) only has one (primary) stress. So "prinsesse pult" has stress on both words while "prinsessepult" only had one stress. (Also, in my dialect "pult" meaning desk is pronounced /pult/ while "pult" meaning fuck is pronounced /pu:T/ (capital T standing in for retrofleks t in this case) so pronounced that way "prinsessepult" becomes "fucked like a princess")

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English.

When we use a new loan word that we already have a word for.

When companies refuse to regionalize products for American English despite our having far more native English speakers than the next three countries, two of which gave English as a secondary language. None of them is England - they're in 6th place.

The absurd number of accents and dialects. Fortunately the Internet is helping grind away at this part. Standardization helps prevent misunderstandings.

I would say English has the least variety in terms of accent, though stardardization can definitely be important (regional British English from old people can be super annoying if English isn't your native language)

English's acceptance of old world spellings and superfluous letters. Everything should be spelled phonetically and consistently, and we should change the alphabet to get rid of confusion. Here's my suggestions:

  1. Everything is spelled phonetically. No exceptional letter rules, and names are included.
  2. Vowels change sound with an accent, not a silent e or modifier. So Kate is now Kāt. Vote is Vōt.
  3. C can always be replaced with an S or K, so now it makes the CH sound. So cat is kat, chase is cās.
  4. X is bullshit and doesn't mean anything, so we'll use the Mayan version and now it makes the SH sound.
  5. Y can always be replaced with an i or e, so we'll go old English and now it makes the TH sound.
  6. The -ed and -er sounds don't need the E. It doesn't do anything.
  7. Double letters are unnecessary , so now the vowel sound of U,(ū) makes the oo sound. The original sound is now ēū, as in kēūkumbr.
  8. G is now a vowel. Put a line on top for the J sound.
  9. Since j is now unnecessary, it makes the French J sound, or DZh. We don't us it much but it's nice to have.
  10. Since ū has changed, it can now replace W, ūic kan bē asīnd ā nū soūnd låtr az nēd bē.
  11. Z is on thin fucking ice, but for now it'll replace soft s' where it's used. Or ēūzd, if ū ūil. It will be the difference between prōnoūns and prōnoūnz.

So naū anē budē kan prōnoūns anē ūrd imēdēetlē, and nō ūun ūil sā unuyr nām rong. Yis haz Ben mī Ted Tok.

Hmm, could probably use a long a letter. Tok doesn't feel right. Maybe the French ê?

I'm not sure about the NG sound. Maybe J is also a vowel, and G accented is NG? I'm open to suggestions. Sugjestxunz.

Edit: also dates. It should be YYYY/MM/DD. Categories should always go from least to most specific.

On that subject, even though it's not language specific, we should have thirteen four week months with names that make sense. Every date of every year is the same day, planning ahead and due dates are simple. It makes 364 days, so new years day and leap year are extra special holiday days, nobody works or buys anything. If you have an emergency on one of those days, and can't make it til Sunday the first, yo either call an acquaintance who can help, or lose and die. Sorry mate. Buy three days worth of food on Saturday the 28th of Thirtember. Hope the power doesn't go out. Or move the free day to July, which is now called September.

No. Just no. "anē budē"

budē. Really. Body. Any. body.

There is much difference between ˈbɒdi and ˈbʌdi. This system fall fowl of bad regional accents. Using phonetic symbols goes some way to managing and recording these differences.

Much like many US podcasters I hear reading out their domain names as

"dɒt kɑːm" (dot carm) not "dɒt kɒm" (dot com)

Descriptives and Prescriptives Assemble! this is a battle that eill never end well.

I do however agree 110% on thr date format. YYYYMMDD feels sensible using current calendar.

While I'm not liking your phrase "bad regional accents" I do think you have a point. There are many, many different English accents and to attempt to capture that in the orthography is too much hassle and detail. The "dictionary pronunciation" is really more of a proto pronunciation than actual dialect-ized speech. It is a generalization and standardization and to an extent "the correct" way to say something Which is prescriptive, ugly and discriminatory and quite likely also racist. But there really is a need to simplify and standardize instead of capturing every tiny nuance of all dialects.

In my mind the best way to do this is just pick what you believe to be the most standard English accent and use that. Acknowledge that there are countless dialects. But this is the standard.

I agree with the regional accent issue, but I don't like the choice of example. Body on its own is clearly an o, but anybody is much more commonly a u sound. That's less a regional thing and more just language evolving over time.

I'm far more interested in the changing of c and x to being actually useful letters, as opposed just replacements for other letters that we can easily change from reading to speaking. The y thing isn't entirely necessary, but we used to use it as a th, as in ye olde inn, and TH is a weird combo of you think about it.

G and J should get their shit together too.

I think I agree with much of this. I'll have to come back later and re-read more carefully but by and large this looks great.

But good luck getting English teachers onboard.

There actually already exists an international phonetic alphabet, which can be applied to English as well and is used in teaching English. Here. It would actually be pretty cool to see this used more in writing.

Every single one of these is straight cancer with no redeeming qualities.

The complexity of English is a beautiful thing, driven by its rich heritage of influences. The language is complex because the culture and etymology are complex. It's supposed to be.

“Koke bøker” means “to cook books”. The correct way is “kokebøker” and means “cookbooks”

Interesting idiom in English: To cook the books

This means to do dishonest accounting and make it look good for auditing. Might be two sets of books or similar fuckery.

I assume that "Koke boker" means to cook books physically on a stove or in an oven. But the way you stated it I might mis-interpret it to be dishonest accounting.

Yes, it means to cook books physically on a stove. I don't think we have the same expression for "cooking the books" here in Norway except for "accounting fraud"

It's a dishonest accountant's birthday.

You give them a cake in the shape of a book that's on fire.

This is a bad joke and they are mad at you.

To let the cat out of the bag: Idioms are always like this.

Amazon has a fantastic course on languages that I've almost completed and it blew my mind. Just seeing it laid out, how languages evolved over time.

Chief chivalry chameleon

All borrowed ( swiped? ) from French, as French changed. So we snagged the terms in mid-evolution :)

Did you know Hyrogliphs are sounds, to be read aloud just like the Roman Alphabet?!

Hieroglyphs were used for different things! They weren't always used to denote sounds, but sometimes whole words or parts of words. Some of the ways they were interpreted could seem like puns or puzzles today.

To make a very loose analogy, with emoji as hieroglyphs:

  • 🦆 — can stand for a duck, the actual waterbird
  • 🦆u — here, the sound duck is modified by another sign. This is the word duke.
  • 🦆o — similarly, this is dock.
  • 📐🦆 — by combining the signs for triangle and duck, we spell out the pronunciation of the word truck.
  • (🦒🦆🦒🦉📰) — the name Jack Jones, spelled as giraffe duck giraffe owl news.

This is an analogy; the point is that the same sign could be used for different things, especially at different times in history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs#Writing_system

You're talking about the way some signs ARE words, but that's much more like "I ❤️NY!" Than "the crocodile symbol means evil, and the fire symbol is the hell... They're warning us about an evil from hell!"

English is not my native but I hate how they just assemble bunch of words together to make a single adjective out of it, and you can't know that until the very end. It gets obvious how stupid this is if I replace all whitespace with commas.

A desktop, computer, environment.

Air, missile.

Air, plane.

Pocket, record, player.

Water, beer, pong, table, thong. Okey I made this one up

This is very popular in newspaper headlines. It's sometimes called a "noun pile".

Times chief editor: Thirteen-word headline noun pile author firing race controversy rebuttal!

(That is: "The chief editor of the Times has responded in the matter of the firing of headline writer Joe Jones. Jones alleged that his firing from the Times was due to racial bias. However, the chief editor claims in response, that Jones was fired for writing a headline composed of nothing but thirteen nouns.")

Beer pong is a party game played on a table. If you put the table in the pool, you can play water beer pong. Attach some floats so it doesn't sink, and it is a water beer pong table. If you then strap a skimpy swimsuit to that table, the swimsuit is a water beer pong table thong.

And when beetles battle beetles
In a puddle paddle battle
And the beetle battle puddle
Is a puddle in a bottle
And the bottle is upon
A water beer pong table thong
...they call this
A tweetle beetle
Bottle puddle
Paddle battle muddle
Water beer pong table thong

I kind of wish we didn't have gendered pronouns in English. So much fuss when we could just be using the same words for everyone like some other languages.

Psst, somebody tell this person about gendered nouns in every other European language

Oh I know about those, but they aren't my language so I'll leave that to someone else to complain about.

The words "funnily" "reasonableness" and "impactful".

Even though they're apparently all real words, they are clunky and make one sound unintelligent when there are more elegant synonyms available like "comically/humorously" "reason" (no idea why it needs the "-ness" to be a noun when it already is) and "significant".

"why are there more than like 80 words goddamnit? I hate that they exist 'cause what if I use them, then other judgy word-haters judge me for them?"

-this guy.

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My native language is English.

What irritates me most is the whole thing. The language is so incredibly contextual that it is a pain in the ass once you learn something less contextual. It seems deeply infected with all the parts of English/American culture that I hate. It feels like you cannot just say what you mean, you have to dance in circles and obscure the point. Theres no need for it to be so complicated.

You're describing culture, not language. You can absolutely say what you mean in English without beating around the bush. Start being more direct with people and watch your life improve.

Spanish has genderneutral terms and they are not the default, people are trying to move away from defaulting to masc pronouns but it's been hard to get everyone on board

It is not tied to a certain language. But I fucking h when I rhyme words by acciden