Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire English is stupid, who did this to us ...........and why?

Although I'm bi lingual english is my first language it's the one I use day in day out in the USA. I was recalling a situation with a friend yesterday where I was sternly scolded by my wife for telling my then 6 year old son that " English is stupid"

Of course sons typically look up to fathers until about 13 or 14. So I still had his attention and was now implying that he did not need to learn to read because english was stupid. The nearly instant evil eye I received from his (step) mom was concerning. She explained to me that I cannot say that to him or he will simply quit making an effort to learn to read and write with proper grammar, or to spell properly.

But I defended my self (in error) that english is actually stupid. Take the letter C for example. What is the use of this ridiculous letter? It's either a S or a K, why bother with the C?

Or why in the world did people as intelligent as Americans who can land on the Moon come up with the silent P? Why are we adding letters we cannot hear? How about other insanity of silent letters, Isle, wrap, knit, wrinkle, listen, herb, castle, One that is fitting for this is dumb!

It's not just letters that cause this stupid language to be far more complicated then needed, it's the words spelled exactly the same that have a totally different meaning! Horn, mole, duck, Seal, yard, pound, jam, foot, light, and this list could go on for a long time!

For that matter is there any functional reason for the letter PH sounding like F? really....... can we confuse this any further? ......... Oh we certainly can, How about the lowly letter X, its almost as worthless as the C, Not even the geniuses at XEROX can figure this out, They managed to use this letter as both a Z and and X!

I never saw Porky pig sleeping in a cartoon with the Letter X streaming out of his pink snout. Yet it is pronounced as a Z much of the time. If the Lettering system is not bad enough the spelling rules can beat that hands down. " i before e except after C".......... Really? All the time...... NOT. That's weird...... oh wait, I guess that word is quite fitting for this rule eh!

Does the period go inside or outside the quotation marks? When quoting at the end of a sentence? ( Anyone care.) Who is a subject, Whom is an object...... really this matters anymore? what are we living in the 1600's UK?

Alright, thanks for listening. Sorry for the rant. As an American I'm okay with our national language being English and would fight to keep it that way...... Ha ha, easy for me to say now that I understand it!......... sort of.

(Did you find the five ( at least) grammar errors in this post? Ha Ha.... English is a funny language!)

while not entirely disagreeing with you.....

what about the "c" in church?

Well, English does not require one to memorize silly irrelevant gender articles for every noun. There is but one article and it does not change depending on where it is in the sentence. Spelling aside, English is great. ;-{>8

Well at least we don't have genders for words like some languages.

The thing is many words have been adopted from other languages and their spelling was an attempt to be phonetic given the limitations of the letter in our alphabet.

English is, in fact, one of the more difficult languages to learn because of its many exceptions, quirks, and idioms. It is also one of the richest languages, with well over 600,000 recognized words - several times the number in other common languages. We have a range of words that describe very fine shades of meaning. For example: mad, angry, annoyed, piqued, furious, irate, cross, vexed, hostile, indignant, infuriated, incensed, raging, fuming, seething, livid, irked - plus idioms like hot under the collar and many more. All shades of meaning for one emotion - and in English we can select the one word of all those that portrays the exact level of anger we mean.

I'm monolingual. Not because I don't think other languages are good, but because I still haven't really REALLY learned this one yet. Give me another 70 years and I might get close.

I guess spanish makes more sense....ehhh hosehhh (Jose)

Regardless of the spelling issues, the English language is both very broad and very deep and provides a very large vocabulary compared to many other languages.

I would not trade English for any other language.

Steve

at this point, what effing difference does it make? laughing

I am fully convinced that everyone who speaks another language thinks in English and then has to translate it into their own language before saying anything.

As Rocky notes, the language is rich even if it contains more exceptions that actual rules, but I agree the spelling is ridiculous.

Bomb, tomb, comb.

Enough, dough, through, thought.

Done, run, cone.

Ate, wait, eight, height.

Spoon, hook.

Do not, don't.
Will not, won't - wth?

Why is "do I not?" contracted to don't I? We don't say "do not I?"

And many more.

We could get rid of several consonants and particularly vowel pairs that sometimes make a vowel long or not. Just put a macron over long vowels,ā as in ate. So ate would be spelled āt (and not eight or ait as in wait), at would be spelled at. Add a couple of letters to denote some particular consonant pair such as the sh or ch sounds.

The French and Spanish have academies or bodies that say what is proper in their language and what isn't (which doesn't stop some ridiculous spelling in French - want some or durves, I mean hors d'oeurves?), but that'll never happen in America.

ghoti = fish

'gh' as in enough
'o' as in women*
'ti' as in nation
................................

* There's another. A different sound for the 'o' in woman vs. women.

I am multi-lingual, but we need the "C." Otherwise we would never have Chevy.

If you don't like our language, go back to the Ukraine, Comrade.

What about German which has two different words for "you?" I had trouble figuring out when I had befriended someone enough to say "du" instead of "Sie."

Many of their words are combinations of several other words. For instance "metalwarenfabrik" means "metal working factory."

Yeah, Germans, like the French and Spanish, speak differently to close friends, children and underlings than to superiors or strangers. At least the French and Spanish separate the world into masculine and feminine. The Germans add a neuter gender with all kinds of resultant endings depending on what part of speech one is using - der, die, das; den, die, das; dem, der, dem (I think); however two or more of anything is always feminine.

One Spanish gentleman remarked that he liked coming to America because of our egalitarian way of addressing people - everyone was "you".

The Germans do have a pretty logical way of forming nouns even if it results in some long words. Like you said - Metalwarenfabrik tells you exactly what it is. A TV is a Fernseh - far see, a truck is a Kraftwagen - craft or work wagon, Luftwaffe means Air weapon, Flugzeug - fly thing, is a plane. Werkzeug - work thing, is a tool, Spielzeug - play thing, is a toy. We still use plaything ourselves.

I was talking to a PH in South Africa and he wanted to look through my binoculars but couldn't remember the English word so asked for my "far see lookers".


I'm kind of a language nerd if that wasn't obvious...

Jim, I was your PH if I recall? although maybe not for the whole trip? It's been too long you need to come back again!
That word is verkykers, or the Literal Afrikaans/English translation "far lookers"


Simon, I believe in order to go back to the Ukraine, one would have to have been from the Ukraine originally?
That's not applicable to me.

Nerd
Bird
Word
Curd

So do dogs drop Terds, Tirds, Tords, or Turds?????

der, die, das; den, die, das; dem, der, dem"

Der, die, das, die, dem, die das die dem der dem den. I think! LOL

Holy shades of High School german class! Over 40 years!

yes, you were my PH but there was you, Pieter and one other PH in our group, he was blonde, maybe 6' tall and I remember he had recently acquired a .505 Gibbs since he had almost been eaten by a leopard a short time before. I'm pretty sure he was an Afrikaner but may have been German. Anyway, he was the one who asked for the far see lookers, probably trying to come up with the most logical English combination of words. About how I would translate English into German when I didn't know the German word, I'd translate individual English words into one noun - like asking someone if they had a firething (cigarette lighter).

a cousin is head of linguistics at a major yankee university. I called him and asked his opinion about all this.
He laughed and said English is EASY compared to some others, like Hungarian, Basque, Tagalog or Navajo