Minimal News_

‘English speakers know that their language is odd. So do people saddled with learning it non-natively. The oddity that we all perceive most readily is its spelling, which is indeed a nightmare. In countries where English isn’t spoken, there is no such thing as a ‘spelling bee’ competition.´

The author has no clue - try French spelling ( there are no spelling bee competitions but grammar+ spelling ones). As a native speaker of multiple languages, I’m a bit surprised at the confidence with which the author writes things which are either wrong or obvious ( and don’t make English exceptional in any way ).

What is really odd is that the author is a professor of linguistics - maybe I’m missing something here?

Something I’ve noticed that I’ve never seen remarked on: English has weird pairs of opposite where only one is Germanic/Nordic and the other one is “made up” or otherwise unclear.

Examples:

German: man

Unclear: woman (not frau or kvinna)

German: white (weiss/vit/etc)

Unclear: black (bläck means ink in Swedish but?)

Swedish: up

Unclear: down (not undan or ner)

German: full (voll)

Unclear: empty (not leer or tom)

I dunno. English seems to be the easiest language for me.

I speak german (the grammer (!), The koffer-words with possible lengths of tens of characters, the sheer amount of words/combinations in some millions), then I speak russian (for me the beautyfulst language in terms of expression. Grammer (!), the spelling of words is difficult), then I spoke french for a time (for me difficult to pronounce, grammer is difficult too for me), then I speak chinese - which is a picture-resque language. One talks in pictures and metaphors. So beautyful!!! and then, one could think of finnish. That's what I would call a weird language. But not english.

so I do not have a feeling english is weirdly different from other languages, as the other languages are more difficult to master. These other languages may not only be more difficult in their grammer, but also have different spelling of same characters indicating different tenses (finnish) or meanings (chinese) - just to name a true weirdness.

so long! Greetz from OG!

Polish language spelling bees are ubiquitous in primary school in Poland, although Polish spelling is an order of magnitude less messed up than English spelling.

> This muttly vocabulary is a big part of why there’s no language so close to English that learning it is easy

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