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Comment by tomcam | Hacker News Reader

George Bernard Shaw often railed against the inconsistencies of English. Its grammar and spelling are unbelievably inconsistent and a constant headache even to native speakers. I love English and think it’s a very expressive language. I used to be an incredibly good speller (AutoCorrect has made that less important). I have a superb grasp of its grammar as both a speaker and a writer.

But boy, do I have sympathy for anyone, native speaker or not, who has to deal with these bugs. They bring a lot of grief and embarrassment, with little return for all the heartache.

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Those bugs and inconsistencies are really just manifestations of the complicated history of the language. There are few languages which have as many diverse parent languages as English has.

No offense, but are you sure about that or are you monolingual? You'd be surprised what rich history even obscure languages have.

This is largely true of European languages:

http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/language.gif

That Norman invasion was a big deal.

To a certain extent, although that’s a large simplification. There’s a lot more cross-pollination between European languages than on that diagram, most obviously with English nouns being adopted (le weekend, etc) but also in slightly more unexpected ways. For example, Swedish has a fair amount of French vocabulary (’glass’ for ice-cream when all other Nordic languages use ‘is’) because of a desire to integrate with the French court (which lead to Carl ‘Jean-Baptiste’ XIV Johan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_XIV_John_of_Sweden ).

Heh. "Rumanian" has 2 roots on that list: proto-Indoeuropean and Latin.

In reality, lexical analysis of Romanian shows that it has the following roots:

* pre-Indoeuropean (some words with unknown origins, just a handful, but still)

* proto-Indoeuropean (another small bunch of words)

* Dacian/Thracian (original Indoeuropeans to settle the region; another somewhat small contribution)

* Latin (40% but basically the core vocabulary)

* Slavic (30%, especially nouns, but rarely verbs)

* French (around 20%, imports from the late 18th century onward)

* German, Turkish, Hungarian, English, etc.

So, you were saying? :) Even if you disregard the minor contributions, there's 2 prehistoric origins (pre-Indoeuropean and proto-Indoeuropean), 2 ancient origins (Dacian and Latin), 1 major medieval influence (Slavic) and 1 major modern influence (French).

The European continent had waaaay more invasions than the British Isles, don't forget that ;)

If anything that understates it because there were successive invasions of vikings and Norse after the initial settlement and then a huge second influx of Greek and Latin roots in the early modern period as scholars reintroduced them.

Absolutely. This is no consolation to non-native (and most native) students, however.

It's not so much an issue of parentage as an issue of orthography. Loanwords are often spelled in accordance with the orthographic rules of the source language, and words are generally not respelled to indicate changes in pronunciation.

This is fairly unusual within Europe, but not so much in Asia -- Thai and Burmese have large numbers of loans that I don't think were respelled. And then there's Japanese.

Agreed, I read a report that children learning English have to devote far more time to learning spelling than speakers of other languages, but this comes at the cost of time spent studying other subjects. I have never seen an argument against standardizing spelling, but I guess there is no political will and academic support to do it.

One problem is the the sheer number of countries that use English, and the lack (in any of those countries) of a standards organization for the language (take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_language_regulators)

Note that standards organisations for natural language are routinely ignored. How many French people use "couriel" and how many use "e-mail"?

There are several levels at which these organisations make standards, though.

Sure, the new words they propose often get ignored, though "couriel" was proposed by the Québec organisation, not the French one, and it is absolutely used in Québec.

But the orthography changes that they propose are much more accepted, because they usually match phonetics instead of trying to change the course of the language. In the latest reforms in France quite a few accents got "corrected" (from é to è, like événement -> évènement), displaced (aiguë -> aigüe) and silent letters dropped (clef -> clé) and these changes have been widely accepted almost immediately. Quite a few were already in use before that anyway, although incorrectly. A few changes that are more controversial are not much used, and if they don't see actual use the Académie will drop them eventually. They just try to standardise the language, not turn it into something wholly different.

> the lack (in any of those countries) of a standards organization

This is not a bug.

It is the very feature that has made English a world language.

As far as I'm aware, all natural languages are about equally expressive and native speakers can't really make grammatical mistakes when speaking (writing is a different topic).

People make grammatical mistakes all the time when speaking. E.g. inserting like everywhere.

Speaking from a linguistics point of view, you are wrong. Those people are speaking completely valid English. Who are you to say that those are mistakes? Speaking is different from writing. Native speakers can make performance errors and definition errors, but they won't make grammatical ones.

Further, words such as 'like' and 'um' play an important role in speech.

If your usage means you are misunderstood, or it is harder to understand you, that's an error.

Like as a filler makes speech harder to understand.

You can make definition errors where you misuse a word, like a malapropism or spoonerism. A native speaker will not consistently make grammatical errors when speaking. Linguists are essentially in agreement on this.

I urge you to look into the study of language, languages are fascinating and many things are not intuitive.

Perhaps you mean a careful, educated, adult speaker (by definition, since there's no governing body setting English grammatical rules).

The term "native speaker" is ill-defined enough that there's no reason a native speaker can't make grammatical errors in speech. For instance, a child is a native speaker, but children make plenty of grammatical errors. Even adults misuse who / whom and was / were all the time.

Whom/who was/were are not at all related to English grammar. Your definitions are off.

Of course they are. The first is about picking the correct case (this being one of the few words where English has cases) and the second is picking the right number (you being a special case since the second person is always plural in English).

If this isn't grammar, what is?

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