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.
That officially you have “whom” on the books, but then if anyone uses it, they are seen as weird.
It’s that familiar feeling…how do you say…?
“Colonel” is pronounced “ker-nel.”
HOW THE HELL IS THERE AN R SOUND IN THAT?!
I knew exactly what video this would be from the quote. Timeless classic!
Italian sourced spelling with French sourced pronunciation. So not an English word, just a bastardized loan word.
Now let’s do boatswain and forecastle. Military terms are their own class of strange.
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.”)
Chinese would like a word
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.
Or ‘left’, which can mean remaining (“I only have three left”) or departing (“They left.”)
I remember learning Spanish in school. Discovering the difference between “dejar” and “irse” drove this home for me. Dejar - to leave [a thing somewhere.] Irse - to leave [a place.] (“Salir” also works for the latter meaning, but it can mean more of “to go out.”)
“Ella se fue y dejó el libro en la mesa.” (“She left and left the book on the table.”)
Speaking of “driving (a point) home,” I’d say one of the weirdest/most interesting quirks of English is how many idioms we rely on.
A door can get jammed on the door jamb
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.
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.
Some countries have organisations that supposedly dictate the use of some official language, the French being a notable example, but whether anybody listens to them is a whole other story and frankly I think that’s probably for the best. Languages have always been influenced organically by the cultural forces at play, they serve and reflect the speakers not the other way around. They need to adapt to the experiences and lives of people that are using them and no steering committee is going to be able comprehend nor account for the totality of that. Maybe they’re useful for like helping a publication produce a style guide since they can defer to something “official” but that’s about it.
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.
(I tried to learn German once and am still salty about this)
Why do different languages determine the gender of a chair differently?
I believe it’s due to the endings of the different words and those are described as male or female. Just a term to describe a binary (remember, these languages were formed WAY back and were influenced by various religions), kind of like how quarks have “colours” that aren’t actually colours. Not many people actually believe a table is assigned male or female! And I think the gendered nouns can differ, something in French could be female while in Italian it’s male, since the word endings are a bit different.
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.
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 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.
This is my biggest gripe with English
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)
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)!
(edit: actually oops it’d be more “I love apples not”, see also “she loves me / she loves me not” – V2 word order, verb goes second)
– 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.
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”
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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.
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 so prevalent we can literally say “I’ll verb your noun” and it still gets the point across.
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.
You might not be a native to Roman languages, but it’s very easy to “vebify” a word for natives just like you would in English.
Tell me a noun you think can be verbed in English but not in Roman languages and I’ll give you an example of how it looks like.
Dearest creature in creation, The weirdest part is pronunciation…
I would say orthography and/or the great vowel shift. Or, further, that it’s very weird as Germanic languages go. Or, even further, the mix of old Norse and the various Saxon/jute/angle languages before the Normans came along (itself Norman french with old Norse admixture). Then throw various Celtic languages on that mess
Edit: completely left out those pesky Romans as well
The more I learn other languages, the more annoyed I get at the Great Vowel Shift in English. We could’ve been aligned with so many other languages, but no, we just had to be different.
It’s wild, since English has such a vast vowel inventory that we can pronounce a lot of words in other languages, but since we read letters differently, many people end up with accents that don’t need to exist. Consider people pronouncing Spanish words with English vowels, even though all standard Spanish vowel sounds are already part of the standard English repertoire.
Probably spelling, but there’s one quirk in English that makes it so you can build the arguably weirdest sentence in any language. Here’s the short version and explanation for people unaware of the 3 meanings of the word (which I’ll use 3 different spellings to make it easier to understand):
Buffalois a city in USA- a
buffalois another name for an animal also known as a bison - To
BUFFALOmeans to bother, or bully.
So a
Buffalo buffalois a Bison from the city of Buffalo. If a Bison from Buffalo were to bother another Bison from Buffalo, you get the common example of this phrase which isBuffalo buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo buffalowhich means Buffalo bison BOTHERS Buffalo bison. You can add an extra Buffalo at the start to make it a headline of a newspaper telling you where this happened, but that only gives youBuffalo, Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo buffalo…But we can make it better. See, in English you can add specifiers to a noun, the way we’re doing with Buffalo to specify this is a Bison from Buffalo, but the specification can be a full sentence. For example if we wanted to say that specify that the bison is known to bother other bisons you can call him a “bison bully” bison, or even if he’s from Buffalo and only bullies other bisons from Buffalo he’s a Buffalo “Buffalo bison bully” bison, or a Buffalo “Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO” buffalo.
Cool, so if a Bison from Buffalo known for bullying other bisons from Buffalo is bullying yet another Buffalo bison you can say that a “Buffalo Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo buffalo”… But what if the bison it’s bullying is also known to bully other bisons from buffalo? Then
Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo buffaloBut our bison might actually EXCLUSIVELY bully bisons that bully other bisons, so he’s a Buffalo bison BULLY BULLY, and if he’s from the city of Buffalo he’s a Buffalo Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO BUFFALO. So if our heroic bison made a mistake and bullied another Bison who only bullies bullies then:
Buffalo Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO BUFFALO buffalo BUFFALO Buffalo Buffalo buffalo BUFFALO BUFFALOAnd you can keep making the sentence infinitely long by specifying that tach bison in the story is a Buffalo bison Bully bison.
Chinese has something a bit like this too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den
