What irritates you the most with your own language?
Mine is people who separate words when they write. I'm Norwegian, and we can string together words indefinetly to make a new word. The never ending word may not make any sense, but it is gramatically correct
Still, people write words the wrong way by separating them.
Examples:
"Ananas ringer" means "the pineapple is calling" when written the wrong way. The correct way is "ananasringer" and it means "pineapple rings" (from a tin).
"Prinsesse pult i vinkel" means "a princess fucked at an angle". The correct way to write it is "prinsessepult i vinkel", and it means "an angeled princess desk" (a desk for children, obviously)
"Koke bøker" means "to cook books". The correct way is "kokebøker" and means "cookbooks"
I've known the difference ever since I decided to look it up one day, but I've always felt the 'in-' prefix was the wrong choice (especially when labeling potentially dangerous substances). "In-" is more often used to qualify a word as "not".
Ambiguously used words like "biweekly". Does it mean twice per week? Every other week? Business meeting calendar scheduling terminology is especially bad with this.
Odd phrases like you can chop the tree down. Then but then you proceed to chop that same tree up.
How numbers are pronounced.
In German the number 185 is pronounced as "hundred-five-and-eighty" (hundertfünfundachtzig), the digits are not spoken in order of their magnitude.
Not terrible, not great.
This is the same in Danish, but weirdly not in Swedish.
We say four-seventy for 74, and hundred-four-seventy for 174.
But the swedes does it like the English.
Don’t know about Norwegian though. Maybe OP can provide me with some new knowledge.
It's not so much a feature of English as it is a recurring bug in the way people use the language...
If you write "of" instead of "have" or "'ve" you need to be taken out back and beaten with a dictionary, preferably until you can apologize to your ancestors in person for the effort they wasted in passing down the English language to you.
Incidentally, when did people start saying "on accident"? It's by accident! Has been for ages! Why this? Why now? I hate it.
With that out of the way... English isn't a language, it's five dialects in a trenchcoat mugging other languages in a dark alley for their loose grammar.
Edit: With regards to OP, "a cookbook" and "to cook the books" are similar phrases in English, too, but have, eh, wildly different meanings. XD
"of" in place of "have" certainly had to come from people mishearing/misunderstanding "ve." There's no other explanation.
The accident one is funny. I had to really think about when I'd use "on", and it's when I say something like: "he did it on accident." Which is wrong when I think about it, but I know I've said this countless times. I can only guess it grew from "an accident" like "it was an accident."
Even though "on"and "by" are the same length, "by" sounds like it takes too much effort to say. How weird.
The four cases. Nominative, Genitive, Dative, and Akkusative with their accompanying articles. It makes learning German as a second language a nightmare and even native speakers struggle with it a lot.
Ah man, I think cases are great! I learned Russian in college, which has six cases, and they can be used to express so much with so little. English used to have them, you can see remnants in the apostrophe ‘s’ when denoting possession, and I’m bummed they went away.
I’ll give it to you that they’re a pain in the ass to learn, but once you get the hang of them I think they’re super neat!
Edit: they also allow for variable sentence structure which can be super fun and, again, express a lot of meaning just through text (at least in Russian, not sure if that’s the case in German).
I can't speak for all native English speakers, but in my experience we're very accepting of imperfect grammar from non-native speakers because we know how crazy this language is.
It can be pretty confounding, the words that look the same but are pronounced differently. Through, though, thorough, tough, trough.
There are no rules, you just have to learn it. And it could be confusing if you mix them up. Through and throw, for example.
English has never had a spelling reform, but you can see the "real" spelling in informal language sometimes. Through = thru (in texts and chats). Tough = tuff (in slang and brand names).
What I hate about English is what I love about English. The spelling.
I hate that it's an impossible system to teach in any logical way. No child can sound out common words like "once".
But I love that the ridiculous spelling of our words gives you a look into the history of the language. That it's not just transliterations of the sounds, but letters in a pattern that holds more information than that.
"Do you mind ..." has been mis-answered for so long that yes means no. It's hard to explain because written down, yes/no have different meanings, but when speaking to someone it depends on tone, context, and body language.
"Do you mind if I take that seat"
"No" "Yeah" depending on tone can both mean, "I'm fine with you taking that seat". Most people will add on to make the intention clearer like, "Yeah, go ahead" but not always. Absolutely crazy.
Norwegian is easier. If you see a vacant seat, you don't use it because sitting next to some one is what psychopaths do. You're not a psychopath, are you?
In these situations, when people say "take that seat", they usually mean it literally. As in take the seat with them and use it at the table they actually want to sit at.
The problem is that "do you mind if" is really just an indirect way of saying "may I." People often tend to reply to the actual meaning rather than the literal meaning.
My language is diglossic - it has a written form and a spoken form that are very different to each other. It's quite difficult to understand the written form if you've only grown up speaking and listening to the language, as the written form is essentially the language as spoken in the 1600s.
To compare it to English, it would be like saying "Where are you?" to someone over the phone, but then having to send them "Wherefore art thou?" as a text.
Hebrew. I hate how everything is gendered. You cant communicate with a person without assuming his/her gender. You cant ask "how are you?" or "what is your name?" without using the other person's gender. Its worse than spanish/italian. We have genders for verbs, our "you" is gendered, heck, NUMBERS have genders (two girls, two boys - you use a different word for two).
Have you ever spoken to a person and werent sure about their gender? In hebrew you would be screwed.
Spelling and pronunciation were actually standardized and spelling technically still is. The problem is that the standardization is from a previous version of English with different pronunciation.
The thing I hate about English is that it pretends to have formal rules for sentence structure and grammar, and they are all basically optional to some degree, but plenty of English speakers get really grumpy when people break them. English isn't like French where there is a literal governing body who is in charge of setting the formal rules for the language - English is a cluster fuck of borrowed words and structures mashed together in a barely coherent mess, stop acting like "should'a" is a violation of section 16.4 subsection 4
We got a governing body that decides what is correct or not when it comes to our two written languages, bokmål and nynorsk. They do not control speach and what is "correct" to say. I recent years the younger generations (I'm millenial, so not young any more 😢) have began merging two sounds, the sj- /∫/ og kj-sounds /ç/ with only the sj-sound. They can't even hear the diference. This results in funny situations for us who can hear and pronounce the different sounds when used in words.
Kjede, pronounced with /ç/ at the start, means chain (can be used to describe various types of chains).
Sjede, pronounced with /∫/ at the start, means vagina.
The younger generation pronounced both words with /∫/ at the start. This makes the word "kjedekollisjon" not mean "chain collision" any more, but "vagina collision". "Halskjede" with a /∫/, suddenly means "neck vagina", not "necklace". And so on. Language is fun.
I think it's precisely because there is no governing body for English and all the rules are colloquial, developed through usage, that people do get grumpy! They are the only ones who can create and enforce the rules! Each English speaker feels personally responsible and compelled to correct use they perceive is in violation of the rules the way they want them to be. If they don't do it right then and there, no one else can.
We are English speaking and as someone raising a kid it's really difficult at their age to teach and explain all the words that are spelled the same but can sound different. She loves to learn so I try my best. I wrote a sentence down that she likes to show people and read to them just to start but always asks why it is the way it is.
"My daughter liked when I read her a book the other day so I make it a habit to read 1 book a day with her"
That's the sentence she's practicing. There is a lot more to get through though.
I actually have a list somewhere of all these that I have come across and remembered to write down, sort of a game I play I guess. I haven’t tried to sit down and find all the possible examples of this (that’d be no fun), just stumble across them over time. Anyway the list is longer than you would expect, and now I have to add Invalid!
German: I hate that we use comma as a decimal separator. Makes working with international documents a hassle, my numpad on pc makes a comma so I cannot even type a date.....we like to complain about us imperial units as much as anyone but our comma is almost as stupid!
The funny thing is, that most of the world uses commas as decimal separator and comma is the preferred decimal separator by ISO. But instead, in English speaking countries, the period is used as the decimal separator. Actually it comes from the original decimal separator, that was used in the British Empire called ⟨·⟩. When they were changing units to metric, ISO didn't recognize interpunct as a decimal separator, because it was too similar to the multiplication sign used in other countries. So after some debate in the UK, they've adopted the period, because the US was already using it. From the British Empire, South Africa instead adopted the comma.
I did not know that. Very interesting, thanks. Not so fun fact: Switzerland, although German speaking, does not use the comma. Also their keyboard Layout is all over the place with German French and Italian influences.
I speak Spanish and being 100% honest about it i love it, the only shitty thing is the fact that the dialects vary a lot (also i kinda hate the tilde).
In English, lack of second-person plural, aside from a dozen regionalisms: y'all, yinz, youse, etc.
No distinction between inclusive & exclusive 'we': if I say "we've got to go now", do I expect you to come?
Unnecessarily generated pronouns. I know 'they/them' has been used for individuals for ages, but I still find it awkward. I wish we just used one set of ungendered pronouns for every specific person.
Traditionally, mail is uncountable. One can count letters and packages, but not mail. Thus "I received three mails" is currently grammatically incorrect, while "I received three pieces of mail" or "I received three letters" or "I received three packages" would all currently be grammatically correct.
It seems logical that email should follow the same rules of grammar. Thus "I received three emails" should be incorrect, while "I received three pieces of email" or "I received three messages" would all be grammatically correct.
But English grammar is not consistent. Email is a new word and the folks that use it have decided that it is countable.
Many assume that till is an abbreviated form of until. Actually, it is a distinctive word that existed in English at least a century before until, both as a preposition meaning “to” and a conjunction meaning “until.” It has seen continuous use in English since the 12th century and is a perfectly legitimate synonym of until.
In general I think Spanish is a well formed language without (or at least not much) crazy shit.
But I still don't know why we have the same fucking word for weather and time. While using the same word for different meanings is ok, these two are ridiculously common concepts used a lot and it's not hard to get into situations where it's hard to know which is which. Absolutely stupid.
As a Spaniard with kids living in UK, it's very hard to teach them the gender of words that should not really need to have a gender. Why does "car" need to be masculine?!
It's easier if you don't think it as actual gender, and just as grammar. You have "el televisor" (masculine) and "la tele" o "la tv" (femenine), both meaning "the tv". It's more about how the word ends than anything.
Still, it's something that if someone gets it wrong, it sounds off but everyone still understands. No one is going to care for a foreigner saying that wrong. There's no really a confusion to be had there.
But time/weather can lead to actual misunderstandings.
OP, I appreciate the examples. Thanks to them, I see what you mean, and agree.
Briefly, I was thinking “I don’t want to read a word that’s as long as a sentence, no wonder people break things up”, but that wasn’t what you meant at all.
For English, what irritates me is not knowing what to do with possessive apostrophes, especially if the word already ends in “s”. I know I’ve gotten it wrong many times, but oh well.
Rule of thumb is to add an apostrophe at the end of a word ending in S, otherwise add 's. I imagine this is only because the extra S sound gets cut off when you sleak
My biggest apostrophe pet peeve isn't a fault of the language but with the misuse when pluralizing acronyms and years.
It's not the ABC's, it's the ABCs. It's not the 1970's, it's the 1970s. You don't need apostrophes to pluralize.
Something I do kinda like though is that we often don't translate English things or names. Ask a Dutch child who Spiderman is and they'll know it because we don't call him Spinman or something like that.
When Swedish translators try to create a Swedish name for an English character it always ends up sounding silly. Batman was named "läderlappen" (the leather patch) for example.
Yesterday I heard that they translated Pennywise the clown as "clownen Snåljåpen", which I guess gets the literal meaning across but also makes him feel like more of a stingy old man than an actual villain.
The main problem I have with English is that spoken English and written English are two different languages. Inflection and emphasis and even volume aren't carried by the Latin alphabet. We can do things like this sometimes but even that is limited.
I mean, how many of us have had English teachers tell us we can't write essays the way we speak.
Problem: ambiguity of date terms like saying "this Wednesday" on a Thursday. Is the speaker referring to yesterday or the coming Wednesday six days from now? Not always clear.
Solution: I propose standardising our understanding of the week as beginning Monday, ending Sunday. At any point in the current week, "this whateverday" refers to that day in the current week, no matter if it's past or future. "Next whateverday" refers to that day in the upcoming Monday through Sunday week.
"This Wednesday", on a Thursday, is referring to yesterday.
"Next Wednesday", on a Thursday, is referring to a day six days from now.
(I also suggest adopting ISO 8601, writing dates in year-month-day order to avoid that ugly ambiguity.)
There are some words that have fallen out of use that may be helpful. Overmorrow and score ( as in "...fourscore and seven...") come to mind. There may be others and I think it would be interesting to research.
Point being that English may have already solved this problem and forgotten the solutions.
Fellow Norwegian here. Seems like you've encountered a classic "sær skrivingsfeil". (For non-norwegians: The type of mistake described in the main post is called "særskrivingfeil", "sær skrivingsfeil" means "odd/weird writing error" and is itself a mistake of the "særskrivingsfeil" type.)
Personally I would probably answer the sj/kj issue, but I saw that you've mentioned it in a comment, and after thinking a little about it there is a bigger issue I have: People don't love the langauge. What I mean is that Norwegian is a beautiful language with many amazing words, but because people don't love it there is a perception that the langauge is "limited" or "boring". I'd love to read books in Norwegian, but the fact is that most authours/translators I've come across aren't very good at Norwegian, and it makes the book worse to read. Part of this issue is with machine translation. I was talking to a family member about this, and he mentioned that he had noticed a trend in the Donald Duck comics (which are/were hugely popular in Norway) from when he was young, and the lead translator of the comics was a teacher of Norwegian who loved the language, and the newer ones, after machine translation has taken over, and the difference was night and day. However, just to not be entierly negative I'll give you an example of someone who did this well: the people who translated the Spook's series (Den Siste Lærling) did a stellar job in my estimation with giving the names of things good Norwegian names and generally translating it well.
English, on the other hand, I feel like has not suffered as much from this, because they have benefited greatly from prominent writers who loved the language. I'm talking particularly within the sphere of fantasy, as that is where I am most familiar, where people like Tolkien and Gary Gygax are both extremely prominent writers who loved English and would use all those words that would (I think) have fallen out of the language if they hadn't put them in the public eye. I also think that while others who aren't as invested in the language would go on and write later, they would borrow some of the style from these earlier writers, because that's what the genre "sounds like". I think Norway needs a movement like this. People who dig up obscure Norwegian words that they can use as lables for things, and by doing that thrusts those words into the minds of readers, who will look up the definitions of those words and have richer lexicons as a result.
I've hear the argument "Norwegian is a poor language" before, and people usually argue that the English language has many more words to choose from. When pressed, people like that are borderline illiterate and haven't written anything meaningful in years. And they're fucking horrible at english too
English isn't really a language, it's a shambling amalgamation of a bunch of different languages so it's got all sorts of insane, nonsensical rules and exceptions. I can totally understand why it's a frustrating language to pick up, and IDK that I would've bothered to learn if it wasn't my native language.
eh i don't really understand why people are so obsessed with rules in language, like that's not how humans inherently learn language anyways and just memorizing rules seems like a great way to make yourself use the language wrong for a long time.
The ideal way to learn languages is immersion, expose yourself to the language as much as possible and your brain will just automatically start making sense of it, and when you do it this way the regularity of the language is basically irrelevant.
In Russian to say "I saw a video" sounds like "Ia VIDel VIDeo" which just sounds stupid too. Everytime I say it I have to rollback, find a synonym, and repeat the sentence in less stupid way
The English words "video", "visual", and "view" are all from the same Latin root, but imported into English from Latin and French at different points in history. The letters "vi" are not pronounced the same in any two of them.
This kind of shit just happens with language. It's normal.
Thresh + hold = threshold. Why did they drop the middle 'H'? You still have to pronounce both 'H's, and they don't even have the same sound. They're the worst kind of portmanteau, but they're in the dictionary.
Good point, my mistake on hitchhiker. My brain just merged it in with my hatred of threshold.
It doesn't matter how old threshold is. They merged the h of hold with the h in the sh sound of thresh. There is an H missing from how it should be spelt.
The fact that it can be read so many different ways depending on the accent. I have a different accent than those around me, and it's inevitable to feel expectations violated.
Apparently people also find it funny when I say the word "envelope". "Hey it's Leni, say envelope" they might say, maybe with me responding "guys, I'm not a freaking circus seal" like Jango Fett has a secret pet in denial.
Yeah, it really is. "I'll have the pig, please" sounds kind of humorous. "I'll have the pork chop" sounds totally normal and way more elegant.
What really fascinates me is how English lost its cases and endings. Old English could outdo modern German, but then the Vikings came along, and later the French.
I think most of the declinations were already gone by the time the Normans invaded though. Supposedly Old Norse and English were pretty mutually intelligible, so if you drop the pesky endings, you end up with something that everyone understands pretty well.
So in German we have these weird symbols: äßöü one of them is even in my name.
In my opinion they are not necessary and cause more trouble that they are worth.
UTF 8 has alleviated some of the pain. However I still regularly find documents encoded in old character encodings and I have to manually fix all these accents.
I also have one of them in my name. In the past in school a SYS-Admin entered my name with an ö instead of the alternate form oe. All was fine. I was about 13yo, so I had no idea about backups and didn't care.
I stored all my files on their NAS. One day they had drive failures and could recover all data except from students with accents in their name. I don't know what shitty software they used but I am still annoyed at this.
We also have das,dass which I always get wrong while writing texts.
There are some good things.
The time forms can be pretty fun to use.
All in all German is a 6/10 for me could be better could be worse.
It's becoming more common in English for people to say "whenever" when it should just be "when." It's like nails on a chalkboard when I hear it used wrong like that
When we use a new loan word that we already have a word for.
When companies refuse to regionalize products for American English despite our having far more native English speakers than the next three countries, two of which gave English as a secondary language. None of them is England - they're in 6th place.
The absurd number of accents and dialects. Fortunately the Internet is helping grind away at this part. Standardization helps prevent misunderstandings.
I would say English has the least variety in terms of accent, though stardardization can definitely be important (regional British English from old people can be super annoying if English isn't your native language)
I love that English has a way of marking nouns/verbs in a sentence but I hate that when written it's completely erased (although sometimes a comma can help)
"The old man the ship" threw me for like 5 minutes before I realised that man can be a verb.
Honestly English has a lot of little things that I don't like about English but I can only imagine how you make the distinction between "Prinsesse pult i vinkel" and "prinsessepult i vinkel" when speaking and does that phenomenon effect other speaking situations at least with my home state our accent involves giving up on pronunciation halfway through the word so you can just listen for when centince has definition and transitions to mumbling to hear when one word ends and the other starts
Another Norwegian here. The sidene between the two is that words have stress, and compound words thus (generally) only has one (primary) stress. So "prinsesse pult" has stress on both words while "prinsessepult" only had one stress. (Also, in my dialect "pult" meaning desk is pronounced /pult/ while "pult" meaning fuck is pronounced /pu:T/ (capital T standing in for retrofleks t in this case) so pronounced that way "prinsessepult" becomes "fucked like a princess")
English is not my native but I hate how they just assemble bunch of words together to make a single adjective out of it, and you can't know that until the very end. It gets obvious how stupid this is if I replace all whitespace with commas.
A desktop, computer, environment.
Air, missile.
Air, plane.
Pocket, record, player.
Water, beer, pong, table, thong. Okey I made this one up
(That is: "The chief editor of the Times has responded in the matter of the firing of headline writer Joe Jones. Jones alleged that his firing from the Times was due to racial bias. However, the chief editor claims in response, that Jones was fired for writing a headline composed of nothing but thirteen nouns.")
Beer pong is a party game played on a table. If you put the table in the pool, you can play water beer pong. Attach some floats so it doesn't sink, and it is a water beer pong table. If you then strap a skimpy swimsuit to that table, the swimsuit is a water beer pong table thong.
And when beetles battle beetles
In a puddle paddle battle
And the beetle battle puddle
Is a puddle in a bottle
And the bottle is upon
A water beer pong table thong
...they call this
A tweetle beetle
Bottle puddle
Paddle battle muddle
Water beer pong table thong
“Koke bøker” means “to cook books”. The correct way is “kokebøker” and means “cookbooks”
Interesting idiom in English: To cook the books
This means to do dishonest accounting and make it look good for auditing. Might be two sets of books or similar fuckery.
I assume that "Koke boker" means to cook books physically on a stove or in an oven. But the way you stated it I might mis-interpret it to be dishonest accounting.
Yes, it means to cook books physically on a stove. I don't think we have the same expression for "cooking the books" here in Norway except for "accounting fraud"
Hieroglyphs were used for different things! They weren't always used to denote sounds, but sometimes whole words or parts of words. Some of the ways they were interpreted could seem like puns or puzzles today.
To make a very loose analogy, with emoji as hieroglyphs:
🦆 — can stand for a duck, the actual waterbird
🦆u — here, the sound duck is modified by another sign. This is the word duke.
🦆o — similarly, this is dock.
📐🦆 — by combining the signs for triangle and duck, we spell out the pronunciation of the word truck.
(🦒🦆🦒🦉📰) — the name Jack Jones, spelled as giraffe duck giraffe owl news.
This is an analogy; the point is that the same sign could be used for different things, especially at different times in history.
You're talking about the way some signs ARE words, but that's much more like "I ❤️NY!" Than "the crocodile symbol means evil, and the fire symbol is the hell... They're warning us about an evil from hell!"
English's acceptance of old world spellings and superfluous letters. Everything should be spelled phonetically and consistently, and we should change the alphabet to get rid of confusion. Here's my suggestions:
Everything is spelled phonetically. No exceptional letter rules, and names are included.
Vowels change sound with an accent, not a silent e or modifier. So Kate is now Kāt. Vote is Vōt.
C can always be replaced with an S or K, so now it makes the CH sound. So cat is kat, chase is cās.
X is bullshit and doesn't mean anything, so we'll use the Mayan version and now it makes the SH sound.
Y can always be replaced with an i or e, so we'll go old English and now it makes the TH sound.
The -ed and -er sounds don't need the E. It doesn't do anything.
Double letters are unnecessary , so now the vowel sound of U,(ū) makes the oo sound. The original sound is now ēū, as in kēūkumbr.
G is now a vowel. Put a line on top for the J sound.
Since j is now unnecessary, it makes the French J sound, or DZh. We don't us it much but it's nice to have.
Since ū has changed, it can now replace W, ūic kan bē asīnd ā nū soūnd låtr az nēd bē.
Z is on thin fucking ice, but for now it'll replace soft s' where it's used. Or ēūzd, if ū ūil. It will be the difference between prōnoūns and prōnoūnz.
So naū anē budē kan prōnoūns anē ūrd imēdēetlē, and nō ūun ūil sā unuyr nām rong. Yis haz Ben mī Ted Tok.
Hmm, could probably use a long a letter. Tok doesn't feel right. Maybe the French ê?
I'm not sure about the NG sound. Maybe J is also a vowel, and G accented is NG? I'm open to suggestions. Sugjestxunz.
Edit: also dates. It should be YYYY/MM/DD. Categories should always go from least to most specific.
On that subject, even though it's not language specific, we should have thirteen four week months with names that make sense. Every date of every year is the same day, planning ahead and due dates are simple. It makes 364 days, so new years day and leap year are extra special holiday days, nobody works or buys anything. If you have an emergency on one of those days, and can't make it til Sunday the first, yo either call an acquaintance who can help, or lose and die. Sorry mate. Buy three days worth of food on Saturday the 28th of Thirtember. Hope the power doesn't go out. Or move the free day to July, which is now called September.
There actually already exists an international phonetic alphabet, which can be applied to English as well and is used in teaching English. Here. It would actually be pretty cool to see this used more in writing.
Every single one of these is straight cancer with no redeeming qualities.
The complexity of English is a beautiful thing, driven by its rich heritage of influences. The language is complex because the culture and etymology are complex. It's supposed to be.
I kind of wish we didn't have gendered pronouns in English. So much fuss when we could just be using the same words for everyone like some other languages.
The words "funnily" "reasonableness" and "impactful".
Even though they're apparently all real words, they are clunky and make one sound unintelligent when there are more elegant synonyms available like "comically/humorously" "reason" (no idea why it needs the "-ness" to be a noun when it already is) and "significant".
What irritates me most is the whole thing. The language is so incredibly contextual that it is a pain in the ass once you learn something less contextual. It seems deeply infected with all the parts of English/American culture that I hate. It feels like you cannot just say what you mean, you have to dance in circles and obscure the point. Theres no need for it to be so complicated.
You're describing culture, not language. You can absolutely say what you mean in English without beating around the bush. Start being more direct with people and watch your life improve.
Spanish has genderneutral terms and they are not the default, people are trying to move away from defaulting to masc pronouns but it's been hard to get everyone on board