Quote:
Originally Posted by AOTKorby
The fact that English constantly breaks its own rules and its multi-rooted basis leaves it with the possibility of word confusion at every turn. It's not that hard to deal with as a native speaker, but studying Latin makes you look back at English and say "what a clusterfuck". Latin isn't even a very sensible language itself and it still looks completely orderly compared to English.
|
To be fair, the fact Latin is a dead language contributes a lot for its tidiness as a language. It's very rare to witness an healthy language nowadays that hasn't been influenced by others. For example, Portuguese has a LOT of Arab and Germanic influences added to its Latin roots, but in turn it influenced Japanese (aided by Dutch) and Indonesian (again aided by Dutch, but also Arab and Sanskrit).
What I find incredibly interesting about English is that it intertwines various families of the Indo-European group, like Celtic, Old Norse, Old High Germanic and Latin along with its natural Anglo-Frisian roots. So yes, English is indeed a mess, but by being a mess it allows people of other European languages to access it with much more ease because they'll recognize those influences with ease. That's partially why English stuck as a worldwide language (along with US hegemony), because most Indo-European languages users will find something they can hold on.
And, to be honest, we're all here for a Japanese manga and I don't think many here know how much of an headache Japanese is. Three writing systems that are many times thrown together, no spaces whatsoever to denote different words (and kanji united WILL have completely different meanings than separated), kanji that have completely different spellings depending on the context, kanji that sound exactly the same but are vastly different, a syntax that is almost alien for us Indo-European users and the utterly annoying
sokuon, that is both used to double consonants and final vowels and is just a reduced version of
tsu. It's like writing Massachusetts as "Ma
asachuse
ats." A very beautiful language, but sooooo hard to learn, so let's be thankful we're writing in English.
Quote:
|
That being said, English is a much easier language in written form than in spoken
|
QFT. I think that, in terms of speech, English is among the hardest languages to master, even above French and Japanese. The way you guys pronounce vowels is so counterintuitive is not even funny.
"Hey guys, here's a word: blood!"
"Blód?"
"No, you're thinking with your own rules."
"Oh, I see, since in English "oo" is pronounced "u", it's blud!"
"No, it's blãd!"
"...what?"