Many people seem to think English is a very easy language, especially those who speak it natively and especially North Americans (read "USA citizens") who have little exposure to other tongues, and even less desire. Famous linguists like Zamenhof who created "Esperanto" studied English and were fond of its regularities.

Here are some:

• no gender
• no case endings on nouns
• no mutations of adjectives or articles
• fairly rigid and predictable word order, even in clauses
• very little verb conjugations

But there are also some surprisingly difficult aspects of this language. The most obvious is the spelling, which even drives native speakers crazy. There are languages with poorer orthography (or so I've heard) but English is so widely spoken and used that it is a shame to have such a horrible spelling system.

Spelling is too big an issue to tackle herein, so I'm going to focus on grammatical peculiarities.

But there are lots and lots of little oddities in English. I want to collect them as they come to mind.

Case 1: Weird Plurals

English plurals are really pretty easy. Just add -s. But wait a minute! Is that s as in "hiss" or as in "dogs"? In other words, sometimes add -s and sometimes add -z, though always write it as -s. Actually, it is quite easy because you vocalize the s (hence pronounce "z") if the consonant in front of it is vocalized. Thus "dogs" is DAWGZ but "hits" is HITSS.

Ok, fine, but what about if the word already ends in 's'? Then add -es or rather "UZZ" as in "kisses" which is pronounced KISSUZZ.

Well, we can withstand one minor exception, but then we meet acronyms like OS, etc. How do we pluralize these? We often add an apostrophe, as in "these OS's are really primitive."

Hmmm. And then we come to the secret inner core of English. We know that English is Germanic deep at its heart because of the little German-like features that exist in the commonest words. And there is a small number of words that form plurals by a change in the root vowel. This is common in German, but exists in English in only 8 words.

      man      men
      woman    women
      child    children
      mouse    mice
      louse    lice
      goose    geese
      foot     feet
      tooth    teeth

What's really sick about this is "women" is not spelled right at all. It is really pronounced WIMMUN. Some feminists even write it this way or as wimmin or wimmyn. That way they expunge even the trace "men" from the word. And the vowel of "children" is short, quite unlike the long i in "child." So much for English spelling! Yuck! I pity the English learner!

Another oddity about plurals is that several other irregular plurals are all animals. Thus:

      ox      oxen
      sheep   sheep
      fish    fish
      moose   moose

The "oxen" form sounds very Germanic since many German plurals add -n or -en. Oh, there is an old word for "cows" which is kine. This would be a root vowel change, like mouse->mice. But kine is pretty far gone from our vocabulary.

In an odd turnabout, the plural of the German word Fisch is not Fisch, but Fische! How fishy!

There is yet another complication. Some plurals add -s but they also change the final -f to -v. This may be related to the fact that English speakers prefer the vocalized s (in other words, "z") and f is unvocalized. Since it is difficult to pronounce a vocalized consonant right after an unvocalized one (try saying "life-z"), we vocalize the -f and it becomes a -v.

      knife   knives                elf        elves
      thief   thieves               dwarf      dwarves
      leaf    leaves                scarf      scarves
      calf    calves                wharf      wharves
      half    halves                life       lives
      hoof    hooves                wife       wives

Somebody from the web communicated to me that the printers of yore had no f so they used v. Actually, in German, "v" is pronounced as "f". I wonder if this has anything to do with it? Anyway, remember that the typographical symbol that looks like "f" stood for little s (which I think is ridiculous, oh well!)

But the push towards regularity in English is enormous, so f->ves is not a hard-bound rule. For instance, the plural of roof is not rooves, but roofs. And roofs is pronounced with all unvocalized consonants, in other words "ROOFSS". Waif is another example, since its plural is waifs. A possible explanation for this is that "waives" would sound like "waves" and we need to keep those two words distinct.

Even noun/verb relatives get in on the fun. Sometimes a noun like "strife" has a verb cousin where the -f- becomes -v- as in "strive." Bath is similarly related to "bathe." Oh, the fun never ends in human language!

Speaking of vocalizing final consonants, there are lots of words where the final consonant becomes vocalized when we pluralize the word:

     mouth      mouths             MAWTH         MAW_TH_Z
     house      houses             HAWSS         HAWZEZ

I tried to spell out the pronunciation to the right. The underlined TH stands for a vocalized th as in "the".

Phew, is that all? No! When we borrow words from other languages, especially Latin, we often use their native plurals, at least in erudite circles.

      parenthesis        parentheses
      thesis             theses
      vortex             vortices
      vertex             vertices

However, many speakers nowadays say "vortexes" and "vertexes" because the Latin plurals sound so pretentious.

So, English plurals aren't so easy after all! But almost all new words use the simpler construction of just adding -s (or -z).

Case 2: Separable prefix verbs?

German forms a lot of verbs out of a combination of simpler verbs and prepositions. Some of these prefixes are glued to their verb like "verbringen" and others can separate such as "abgehen". The poor learner of German has to learn which is which, and the bothersome list of rules that go along with the separable verbs, such as when does the prefix go back on and does the "zu" come between it and the verb?

Of course, native English speakers never realize that English does the same thing, i.e. form a ton of new verbs with simpler verbs and prepositions. Oftentimes the meaning is obvious such as "to go away" but at other times it is not obvious at all like "to buzz off" (which also means "go away"), though it is most often used as in the imperative mood as a rude command.

English preposition/verbs are simpler in many ways than German, such as not requiring that in a subordinate clause the preposition gets put back on the verb, and they both go to the end of the sentence.

Yet there are surprisingly complexities. Let's investigate them. First off, many times the preposition can either go at the end of the clause or right after the verb (unlike German where it always goes at the end, except in subordinate clauses).

     She took her wig off.            She took off her wig.
     I picked up the prescription.    I picked the prescription up.

Now here's a fascinating little rule that most English speakers aren't aware of. If you substitute a pronoun for the direct object, you MUST put the preposition after it. Try these pairs:

     She took it off.                 She took off it.
     I picked her up.                 I picked up her.

The second form just "doesn't work" does it? Now why should that be? Who made up that rule and does it have any use?

With some verbs, the preposition always goes after the direct object such as "to keep on".

     Keep your coat on!               Keep on your coat!

Sometimes the reason is obvious. A mother might admonish her son to "Wear your collar out." meaning to make it so that the collar is outside (the sweater maybe?) But she can't say "Wear out your collar." without meaning a quite different verb, namely to use up the article of clothing. (Or do I mean "to use the article of clothing up?")

So I can't see any obvious method to this madness, when the preposition must appear at the end of sentence or not. For example, you can either

     Pull your pants up!              Pull up your pants!

Absolutely no preference, one for the other. But at other times you get very weird little preferences that all native speakers can intuitively "feel" as being right or wrong. Some prepositions might seem to have a prefernce for one word order or the other, but again I can't discern too much rhyme or reason.

     She leafed through the book.                   okay
     She leafed the book through.                   not okay
     The old woman pulled through.                  okay
     The old woman pulled through her illness.      okay
     The old woman pulled her illness through.      not okay
     The old woman pulled the thread through.       okay
     The old woman pulled through the thread.       not okay

It is too bad that English doesn't regularize these verbs. They are messy and confusing, though native speakers can sleepwalk through which preposition goes with which verb and where.

Case 3: The vocalized th sound

Now this one is fascinating! Think of all the words that begin with th. There are thousands! Thin and thick things, thoughts and thunks, this and that... A pleTHora!

But, the combination "th" stands for two sounds and it must be confusing as hell to a foreigner to know when to sound the vocalized th as in "the" and the unvocalized th as in "thought" or "think" or "path".

I stumbled across a fascinating regularity. Namely, the vocalized th (as in "the") is much rarer than the unvocalized th (as in "thin"). Just thinking of th at the beginning of words, I noticed that virtually all th- words use the unvocalized th sound. Such as:

    think, thin, thought, thank, thorn, thumb, thick, thistle, thing,
    thimble, thigh, thermal, thesaurus, thermometer, thief, theater,
    therapeutic, therapy, theocratic, thermos, thesis, thrill, thirst,
    third, three, thirty, thither, thorough, thread, thrash, thrift,
    thresher, thrive, throat, throng, throw, thunder, thwart, thud,
    thug, thrust, thrush, thyroid

But now make a list of those words that begin with vocalized th:

    the, this, that, these, those, than, there, thence, thy, thine, thou

Do you see any pattern? The words with unvocalized th are almost always nouns or verbs, while the vocalized ones are articles, demonstratives and pronouns. The only weird one is "thither" which should be in the second category, since it is akin to "there" and "thence." Actually, Webster's 10th Collegiate lists "_th_ither" as an alternate pronunciation for thither. (They underline the th to show that it is vocalized.) In other words, thither used to be pronounced with a vocalized th, much like thence and there.

Now why should this little correspondence between the grammatical function of a th- word and its phonology exist? I don't know, but it is fascinating.

Case 4: Language Experiments, NOT?

Almost ten years one of the late night comedy shows popularized a peculiar way of negating a sentence. Just speak out the whole sentence in a normal tone, and then surprise your listener with an emphatic NOT! at the end. For example:

     I would really like to take on that extra task NOT!

What is cute about this is that it is a particular simple and regular way of negating a sentence, and in fact many languages around the world do precisely this. Japanese is one. Questions can be formed likewise by affixing a question particle at the end of an otherwise normal sentence.

English follows a particular convoluted way of negating a sentence. Unlike the Romance languages or even German where "not" is inserted either before or after the verb, we have to change the verb's form first. Our Pilgrim ancestors could have said,

     I have not your book.

     I have your book not.
     I not have your book.
     Not I have your book.

In English, we have to change the verb to the emphatic "do" form and then interpose the not between do and the verb infinitive.

   I have your book. --> I do have your book. --> I do not have your book.

Then it works, and of course being lazy we often smush together "do not" or "does not" into "don't" and "doesn't". More and more we see people leaving off apopstrophes, so someday "dont" and "doesnt" will be legal English words. With all due apologies to English teachers, apostrophes face an uphill battle.

One final note about English's weird negative formation is that it might have been influenced by French which makes things tougher. They do the usual Romance trick of putting a form of not (Latin "non") in front of the verb, but then they stick "pas" after the verb in addition.

      Je n'ai pas ton livre.

So, those of you who laud English unnecessarily, study it more closely, and you too will ultimately conclude that

     English is simple not!

Case 5: Are we becoming aggultinative?

"Curiouser and curiouser... so said Alice." An agglutinative language forms meaning clusters by pasting word particles together. Finnish and Hungarian are agglutinative, as are some other world languages, but none in the Indo-European family. Or at least, that's what linguists say. But sometimes we see trends toward agglutination. The most striking to me is using adjectival comparisons on gerunds (present participles.) Here are the two I hear most often:

     Buffalo is the second drinkingest town after Milwaukee.
     The Bills are the winningest team in NFL history.

Now we use the gerund as an ajective all the time: the meowing cat, the boring TV show, the horrifying assignment, the tantalzing book. But up to now we haven't allowed these to be first-class adjectives by pasting on -er and -est:

     Lizzy Borden was a killinger woman than others in the 19th century.

But the -ingest form is gaining some currency, especially among newscasters and sportswriters who can't take time to use more accepted English. Yet what a neat way to say something without lots of words. What would be the alternatives?

     Buffalo is the second drinkingest town after Milwaukee.
         Buffalo is the town with the second largest number of drinkers
         after Milwaukee.

     The Bills are the winningest team in NFL history.
         The Bills have won the most games of any team in NFL history.

Case 6: Plural "you" gets resurrected.

Think of what words you have to come up with if you address a bunch of people and mean "you plural."

     You all
     yall
     All of you
     Every one of you
     You and you and you 

Yet sometimes we hear, especially in the Northeast, "yous" either pronounced YOOZ or YOOSS. This actually makes a lot of sense to me, since making something plural usually involves adding -s. But "yous all" would be redundant. Unfortunately, "yall" is so deeply enthrenced in the South that it would be hard to dislodge it, and I'm sure many Southeners would not feel happy about saying "yous." Nevertheless, this is a wonderful example of organic language, language being modified by the people who use it every day so that it better fits their needs.

Now what is crazy is that English used to have several forms of you, just like German and French and Spanish and Italian.... In fact, we had a plural you; it was ye. Remember in King James' translations of the Bible, Jesus saying to his disciplies, "Ye have heard it said..."? Ye is listed as an archive you plural in Websters 10th Collegiate.

One of the crazier things I didn't know until I poked around in the dictionary further is that "ye" is also a definite article in English, simply because typesetters in the 1400s and 1500s didn't have typeset for the "thorn" letter, which is þ and stands for "th". This is still a valid letter in Icelandic. So the typesetters substituted a "y" and people began to think that "ye" was actually a definite article. So you still see signs like "Ye Olde Gifte Shoppe."

While we are on the subject of "you," let us remember that we once had an informal you, in the form of "thou." This is akin to the German "du" and the "tu" of French, Latin and Spanish. There were even verb conjugations to go with it, such as

     Thou dost not know.
     Whither goest thou?
     Thou hast not known the glory of God till thou seest His splendor.

"You" would have been used in formal situations, just as "Sie" is in German, "Usted" in Spanish, and "Vous" in French. One story goes that the Quakers used "thou" and its forms when addressing everyone, even the King, because they believed all were equal. That didn't fly at all, which is why they fled to the New World, where many of them still use thou and thee in every situation. Oddly enough, nowadays we tend to think of "thou" and "thee" as being excessively formal speech, but it was just the opposite! It was informal speech, used in the same situations as "du" and "tu." Namely, you would use it with your nearest and dearest, with pets and small children, but never with complete strangers and certainly never with the King!!!!

Case 6: Terrible pronunciation

I am convinced that native speakers go out of their way to disguise what they say by making it barely understandable. In fact I've done it in public with friends, speaking both sotto voce (softly) and garbling it up so that others couldn't make out what I'm saying. But let's poke fun further.

I had a Spanish teacher in college almost a quarter century ago, named Trautrimas, who was actually a native of Lithuania!!!!! He lived in the USA since childhood and spoke native English, but taught Spanish. Dr. Trautrimas was fond of a 2 utterance conversation in English. I'll write it phonetically. Try to guess what it is. The capital letters indicate emphasis, or a higher tone of voice.

    Joo-EET?  Noh. joo?

Speak it aloud and you'll figure it out quickly. I have heard that German speakers are some of the best when it comes to articulation. English and Spanish must be some of the worst. I am always amazed when I go into a local grocery story and hear people habla-ing Espanol, which I can read somewhat, and not picking up a single word. It's just mush. Kind of like the "ba ba ba" that the Greeks said the uncivilized tribes uttered. That's why they called them "barbarians"!

But then I think about how we butcher our own language and I quail. For instance, when you speak "isn't it so" or "isn't it true" sometimes you change the "s" to a "d". Idnit chroo? Sure! But why? Probably for the same reason we say "I 'n no" It is very hard to write that phonetically especially since the contour of the vocal melody is very important. Just try saying "I don't know" quickly and offhandedly, almost in an indifferent tone of voice. The "I don't" becomes something like "Idn."

The reason for all this is that we are LAZY!!!! Lazy lazy lazy people. Too much in a hurry to write or talk well.

Another one that bugs me is chaning the final -ing to -en or -un. I would estimate that about 90% of the time, we slur the -ing to a final -un. So the question is when do we NOT do this and why? Some words seem to require a true -ing, like "ringing." (or is it "wringing?") Thinking, winging, bringing. There may be a pattern here.

Oh, the 2 utterance conversation above is "Did you eat? No, did you?"

Here's a couple strange consonant changes. One that I noticed as a little kid is that initial "tr" has always mutated into "chr" like train, true, truck, trust. If you would use a real t there, people would be sure you were a native of some eastern European country. Another that is often talked about is how medial -t- (that is, a t in the middle of a word) is now pronounced as a -d-. This gives rise to confusion in such word pairs that now sound alike as:

      latter         ladder
      bitter         bidder
      matter         madder

In all cases, we can quickly find the right word by context.

      Let's put the latter up against the house.   (ladder)
      The bidder beer tasted quite good.           (bitter)
      I got matter by the minute.                  (madder)

Finally, one thing that truly bugs me above all else, and this is because I am from the great plains (namely Nebraska), is the erosion of "r". I LIKE Rs!!!!! I think its GRRREeat that we FRRReely PRRRonounce ouRRR RRR's. Nothing makes me maddERRR than when languages weaken the Rs so much that they shouldn't even be written. Nobody should accuse the English language of pooRRR spelling when they themselves practically do away with all Rs and just leave a wimpy trace of something in the word. I am accusing lots of people, the British, the Bostonians, even some Germans. (pronounce that JUH-munz). Those people have plenty of Rs in their language and they don't even use them! The British don't either, but then they're just weird and we've known that for a long time. But for heaven sakes! Don't say German is phonetic if all the Rs become nothing! What's more ridiculous? French, where Versailles is ve-SAI, or German where something like fru"her sounds kind of like FWEE-uh? Let's face it, all languages are weird, because people are weird.

Case 7: Topicalization I find interesting

Once I was away at a conference in Phoenix, Arizona and I brought with me a book on Computational Linguistics, which purports to have the computer understand and process human language. Computational linguistics almost always uses English so a great deal of attention has been focused on English syntax and word order. In subsequent years I did some work in this area and found out how beastly complicated English is, just by the sheer weight of options. You can say something in at least 5 different ways, it seems.

One of the syntactical constructions the authors (Gazdar and Mellish) talked about was Topicalization. Here are a few topicalized sentences:

     This cat I really love.
     Some food the relief work doled out quickly.
     That baseball team, the Cubs, we just despise!
     The old beggar on the street corner we'll really miss.

The "topic" or direct object of the sentence, is moved to the first place, followed the original sentence in normal order. Linguists also call this OSV word order (Object Subject Verb). The normal English order is SVO (Subject Verb Object.)

Admittedly, a topicalized sentence sounds kind of funky, like it is not quite right. Our comfort level with topicalized sentences is definitely much lower than with other word orders, but it is surprising how often they pop up in everyday conversation, even among less educated persons. It seems as though topicalized sentences are used for strong emphasis. Sometimes people might put a pronoun in its place:

     The old beggar on the street corner we'll really miss him.

In this case then, the noun phrase (NP) at the beginning, is just a kind of sentence fragment that embellishes the sentence that follows. We might write it thus:

     The old beggar on the street corner, we'll really miss him.

A commoner construction is one where the subject of the sentence is both given along with a matching pronoun. This kind of sentence is definitely frowned upon by learned types:

     My cousin she threw up all over the car last night.

But back to topicalization, let's investigate when we can use it. That is, what sort of restrictions are placed upon it to keep the ambiguity low. We can start by noting that some sentences are never topicalized. These are predicative sentences with linking verbs (to be, to become, to feel, etc.) If we topicalize them, we sound like "Yoda" from "Star Wars."

     Old I have become.
     A great warrior he is.
     Foolish this plan seems.

So only those sentences with direct objects and some type of "action" verb can be topicalized. But other restrictions apply to the types of NPs that may appear together at the beginning, as object and subject. I've noticed a preferred subject is a pronoun and a preferred object is a true noun but with a demonstrative pronoun (this, that, these, those). For example,

     These types of movies I prefer.

Notice that it is possible but more difficult to have a pronoun for the object, though the case forms of our pronouns become useful.

     Him I know.

The word "Him" can only be a direct object, so it can't be the subject of the sentence. Unfortunately, our pronoun system isn't consistent because "it" and "you" are identical in both subject and object forms. Also, it would sound really strange to put certain pronouns at the beginning, such as "Me" and "Us".

     Us he hates.
     Me the boy helps.

I'm not sure why certain pronouns can't work in a topicalized sentence, except that these are first person pronouns, and first person is very very often the subject of the sentence. Thus, it sounds like a pidgin English is being spoken, where the incorrect case of the pronoun is being used:

     Me help the boy.
     Us love to go to movies.

One big problem with English is that we do too much with juxtaposition. In other words, just put the words next to each other and hope for the best. Whereas Latin would use different case endings, and Spanish or French would use prepositions, or German commas and subordinators, English just slaps things side by side. There are two places this causes great trouble:

1. Subordinate clauses

             The man the dog bit was dead.
             I saw the car the boys stole.
       

2. Noun adjuncts

             The Venus space probe circled Earth twelve times.
             He came to the party dressed as a wolf man.
       

German does two nice things in writing, though I don't know that there is any aural help in this area. One is that noun adjuncts are pasted together into one very long word. Thus they have Zahnarzt (tooth doctor) and Weltanschauung (world outlook). And they set off subordinate clauses with commas, which is especially useful when there is no subordinator. Thus, proper German writing would say:

     I believe, she is dead.
     Ich glaube, sie ist tod.

In general Europe's languages seldom leave off subordinators so English is weird in this respect. Romance languages almost never do. The French qui and que are used all the time, as also the Spanish que.

Both noun adjuncts and "minimal" subordinate clauses (by this I mean those with no subordinator word), compete with topicalization. In fact, some topicalized sentences sound like a subordinate clause that is trying to make a brave attempt to stand on its own. Only when we fail to hear anything further do we assume that we are listening to a topicalized sentence.

     The boat she wrecked ...

     POSSIBLE MEANINGS
          She wrecked the boat.
          The boat that she wrecked .... (fill in the rest)

So if we used subordinators all the time like we should then topicalization might be more common. There would be no ambiguity with subordinate clauses:

     The boat that she wrecked ...   (cannot be a topicalized sentence)

     The boat she wrecked.  (cannot be an orphan subordinate clause)

But I highly doubt that we will convince people to use longer speech patterns. Just imagine Colombo muttering to the chief of police,

     I know that he did it.

instead of

     I know he did it.

Which is more natural? The shorter one of course. But perhaps we can take a lesson here that grammatical constructions appropriate to informal speech should not be used in longer, more complex utterances, especially technical writing. Besides confusing the heck out of foreigners, such long sentences with unclear subordinate clauses even cause trouble for native speakers. I wish I had some examples at my fingertips now, but there have been times when I was reading a 15 or 20 word sentence, and seeing the period and saying mentally, "Huh?" So I would go back and reparse the sentence, searching for the main verb, which has no marks or signifiers to help us spot it at all.

One other gripe here about English.... Why do we overload the "s"? It serves three main purposes:

1. plural of nouns
2. 3rd person singular of present tense verbs
3. possessive

This is way too much work to place on one little phoneme! These three uses aren't even consistent: if we put an -s on the 3rd person plural it might make a tiny bit of sense, but on the 3rd personal SINGULAR? Come on!

Thus, when hunting for a main verb in a long sentence, we can't even look for a word ending in -s because it might be a noun plural. (A word ending in 's would not be a candidate because we seldom use 's for plurals and only the most uneducated write 's for 3rd person singular verbs. This is a lesson in why the apostrophe is still so important!)

I hope I've made it clear ... oops! I hope that I have made it clear to native English speakers that the language that they so thoughtlessly use and misuse every day is hugely complex and also not very well structured. It may seem to be superior to languages that have lots more verb endings and noun declensions but there are so many ambiguities in English that even native speakers have difficulty with it.

Thus, the purpose of these notes is to both impress you with the size and structural complexity of English, and to knock English down from any pedestal upon which others might set it. It is a great language for lots of reasons, but it is by no means perfect. If I were designing a new language, there would be lots of changes I'd make... oops! changes that I would make! What do you think?

The world auxiliary movement is a fairly old and uncoordinated attempt to come up with a common language. It began when Latin fell out of use in the 18th century. The most famous world auxiliary is Esperanto, but it has lots of problems. Some newer ones are Interlingua and Ido. There are some interesting web sites devoted to these languages. Here are a few links:

http://www.quetzal.com/conlang.html

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/7853/index.html

http://www.spacelab.net/~dbell/conlangs.htm

http://www.sys.uea.ac.uk/~jrk/conlang.html