Languages are awesome.
Not only do they let us all talk to each other and start fights on forums, they impart new methods of thinking and let us absorb mind-blowing facts about how other people in far away places live. So mind-blowing are some facts that you end up thinking "How the hell do they get these people through the day?!"
I'm a native English speaker, and from what I've learned English is probably one of the simplest languages to learn the basics of. We've got no noun genders, most plurals just get an "s", we've got progressive tenses by converting verbs into adjectives, we've got no cases anymore, we've got nice and simple rules for word order and capitalization, we don't have to much agglutination and the verbs don't conjugate too much, although quite a few are irregular.
But English does have some strange stuff going on though. Phonetics is a particular area where English has a lot of strangeness:
1. An old classic, Ghotti is "fish".
2. I wound a bandage around my wound.
3. Farmers work to produce produce.
4. What sort of car is sought once your money is sorted out?
5. I don't feel good, am not in the mood to see the blood on the floor, especially as I've just had food.
6. I can present a present to my girlfriend, but how do I intimate that I want to be intimate?
And then there is the word "up". An absolutely terrible word that completely ruins everything. What does "up" really mean? Well, it refers to something vertically above you, easy right? Well I must speak up here. This might brighten your day up, or it might make you feel completely used up, perhaps even make you throw up. I don't want to stir up trouble, but if you think you know what's up with the word up then I suggest you call up some friends, and you can bring it up with them and maybe write it all up, if they're up for it. I give up, it's up to you if you want to look up.
Do any language nerds want to share some oddities from any language?
Not only do they let us all talk to each other and start fights on forums, they impart new methods of thinking and let us absorb mind-blowing facts about how other people in far away places live. So mind-blowing are some facts that you end up thinking "How the hell do they get these people through the day?!"
I'm a native English speaker, and from what I've learned English is probably one of the simplest languages to learn the basics of. We've got no noun genders, most plurals just get an "s", we've got progressive tenses by converting verbs into adjectives, we've got no cases anymore, we've got nice and simple rules for word order and capitalization, we don't have to much agglutination and the verbs don't conjugate too much, although quite a few are irregular.
But English does have some strange stuff going on though. Phonetics is a particular area where English has a lot of strangeness:
1. An old classic, Ghotti is "fish".
2. I wound a bandage around my wound.
3. Farmers work to produce produce.
4. What sort of car is sought once your money is sorted out?
5. I don't feel good, am not in the mood to see the blood on the floor, especially as I've just had food.
6. I can present a present to my girlfriend, but how do I intimate that I want to be intimate?
And then there is the word "up". An absolutely terrible word that completely ruins everything. What does "up" really mean? Well, it refers to something vertically above you, easy right? Well I must speak up here. This might brighten your day up, or it might make you feel completely used up, perhaps even make you throw up. I don't want to stir up trouble, but if you think you know what's up with the word up then I suggest you call up some friends, and you can bring it up with them and maybe write it all up, if they're up for it. I give up, it's up to you if you want to look up.
Do any language nerds want to share some oddities from any language?
