BBRoundtable

Actually it was brought to my attention by a 5th grader, so I thought I would ask it here.

Why do we make extra work for ourselves when it comes to writing?

for example: Pet Depot

It says Pet Depo (t) yet the T is silent. If the letter is silent why use it?

Why do we need to put extra letters into words that don't use them? It just makes extra work for us.

I give that kid kudo's for even thinking about this.

Because it gives spelling police reason to be jerks. lol

Seriously though, good question. I'm not sure, but this is as good an answer as any...

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_are_silen ... nunciation
or if you happen to feel like reading... this is a good answer too

http://www.sbsun.com/angels/ci_8399854

That's humanity for ya... simplifies the complex and complicates the simplistic

I've been arguing that point for ages. >_>;;

One of the reasons is likely that it's simply too hard to get every English speaker in one country (no less the world) to change. America tried it actually, ages ago; that's why Americans spell many words differently from Canadians. The US government was provided a list of many recommendations which would supposedly make the language more phonetic and easier to learn. Can't remember off the top of my head who provided the list. The US government adopted only some of those changes, which in some minds just ended up confusing things even more.

Linguistics! Yay. I'm sure the wiki article touches on this (I didn't click the link), but most of the reason is because of either Old English, which actually pronounced the silent letters such as the "e" at the end of "come", or Latin, which I think pronounced most of the silent consonants. Not only are these linguistic relics from the older forms of the languages, but I also remember learning somewhere that the "e" at the end of words in English helps signal to us how to pronounce the preceding vowel. Like "come", we know, is not pronounced the same as "com." Only the "e" tells us that.

I feel smrat.

Why? That's easy.

Because the english language is stupid. Period.

All languages are stupid, really, not just English. Look at Chinese. What genius came up with THAT idea? "Hey, I know what we should do! Let's make a language where you have to memorize 10,000 different characters just to be able to read! Then we can also make it so that every character can be pronounced four different ways, and totally change the meaning depending upon how you pronounce it! That sounds like a GREAT idea!" Even with its wonky spelling and bazillion homophones, English is a cakewalk in comparison.

You do find occasional simplifications of English spelling due to things like advertising, btw. See: donut.

Also, Fuzz is the resident linguistics geek around here with the college-level education in it. You should just take her word for it when it comes to questions like this. I learned to do that already.

I don't understand things like that either. Whoever invented those annoying little exceptions needs to have his/her head examined.

It all boils down to the fact that people are stupid. People invented language; ergo, language is stupid. English is a language; ergo, English is stupid. See? ^_^

Keep in mind that the language
that is commonly referred
to as English is a deri-
vative of numero-
us other langu-
ages. Tis w-
hy some
laws
of the
language
makes little
sense... espe-
cially since those
laws trace back to t-
he founding age of this
planet even during what c-
an be considered biblical tim-
es (actually... even before this).

Frong wrote:All languages are stupid, really, not just English. Look at Chinese. What genius came up with THAT idea? "Hey, I know what we should do! Let's make a language where you have to memorize 10,000 different characters just to be able to read! Then we can also make it so that every character can be pronounced four different ways, and totally change the meaning depending upon how you pronounce it! That sounds like a GREAT idea!" Even with its wonky spelling and bazillion homophones, English is a cakewalk in comparison.

Actually Frog, I have to disagree. While Chinese/Mandarin may be stupidly HARD, it's not necessarily stupid.

English, however, is stupid. It's the only laguage in the world that has a rule for everything, and then multiple exceptions for every rule.

Case in point. It should not be 'good,' 'better,' 'best.' If you follow the rules laid down by the english language and ignore it's stupidly large amount of exception, it should be 'good,' 'gooder,' 'gooderest.'

No, English really isn't any smarter or stupider than any other language in the world. If you think other languages don't have a rule for everything and multiple exceptions for every rule, then you haven't studied any foreign languages. They're ALL like that, 5p00n3j. Also, it'd be good, gooder, goodest. You don't tack an additional suffix onto the end of the previous one, you swap in a different one entirely.

Now, that's not to say English has no stupid parts. It very much does, the worst of them being the absurd number of homophones and the wonktacular spelling. On the other hand:

1) English has no word genders. Now THAT'S a moronic language device if there ever was one, the purpose of which I will never understand.
2) Its verb system is relatively simple in most cases. I don't think any verb has more than three forms in any given tense (e.g. to be = am, is, are), whereas French usually has four or five. I'm sure other languages are similar. That said, Japanese has us beaten hands down - every verb in the language only has one form per tense. Period.
3) Every noun in English remains the same regardless of the rest of the sentence around it. Russian and Finnish, on the other hand, have a ton of different noun forms; don't ask me why.
4) English is not tonal. Putting the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble in English may make you sound like an idiot, but it doesn't change the fundamental meaning of the words. In tonal languages like Chinese and Vietnamese, it does, and quite drastically, I might add. If I recall correctly, "ma" can mean "mother," "horse," and two other unrelated things in Chinese depending upon the tone you put on it. That was told to me by a Chinese exchange student when I was at college. Crazy-arse language.

Those four examples above are instances where English is simple and other languages are unnecessarily difficult, i.e. stupid. Anyway, if you can get used to the spelling, the homophones, and the massive vocabulary (FAR huger than any other language on Earth, due to all our word borrowing), English is by all means doable. Plus it's easier to make up words in English out of other words than in any other language, I bet. Just squish some halves of words together or stick some prefixes and suffixes on stuff and you get some giganteriffically awesome wordination.

Frong wrote:No, English really isn't any smarter or stupider than any other language in the world. If you think other languages don't have a rule for everything and multiple exceptions for every rule, then you haven't studied any foreign languages. They're ALL like that, 5p00n3j.

Oh sure, but it's still the worst case. I've studied, as you know, Japanese and German. Japanese has exceptions here and there, but for the most part every other word follows the rules implicitly. German, too, has well laid out rules, which tend to only get stretched for loan-words, and (like Japanese) a few odd verbs (sein = bin, bist, ist, seid for example). (In fact, German is also a surprisingly phonetic language, in that any given combination of letters will almost always be pronounced the same way, and there tends to be only one way to spell any given syllable.) Both are far, far better languages than English when it comes to obeying their own rules. Word gender is the only true weirdness to it, and even then it's actually easier than most because gender is always determined by the last syllable of the word.

Frong wrote:4) English is not tonal. Putting the emPHAsis on the wrong sylLAble in English may make you sound like an idiot, but it doesn't change the fundamental meaning of the words. In tonal languages like Chinese and Vietnamese, it does, and quite drastically, I might add. If I recall correctly, "ma" can mean "mother," "horse," and two other unrelated things in Chinese depending upon the tone you put on it. That was told to me by a Chinese exchange student when I was at college. Crazy-arse language.

By all technical means, Japanese is tonal too, an example word being "hashi". Somewhere around here I have a dictionary that actually has markings on the characters to indicate high versus low tone (and some words will actually change the tone of the next syllable to be pronounced after them, usually a particle, indicated with a dropping tonal mark at the end of the word). Despite this, it's pretty easy for the average person to tell from context whether you're talking about a bridge or chopsticks, and they don't even bother teaching the tones of words and such; I imagine that context comes into play significantly in Chinese too.

Word gender may be the only "true weirdness" in German, as you put it, but that's a hell of a weirdness to have to put up with. From what I saw of it in French when I studied it for 4+ years in high school, it has no useful function whatsoever, and you can't even always utilize the same word endings to determine word gender. There are a million annoying exceptions that force you to resort to rote memorization. Then there's the fact that in German, it's not even just male and female like in French or Spanish. Who in the crap came up with the idea of the "neuter" gender? Linguistic nutjob.

I'm sure context matters greatly in Chinese, the same way that context matters in dealing with all the homophones in English. It's just that the tones being an official linguistic component of every word is what I find excessive. That said, I wonder if Chinese has a dearth of vowel sounds like Japanese does. Japanese may not be blatantly tonal like Chinese, but yeah, it does have its finer points as far as that goes, and having multiple tones dictate meaning would indeed serve as one way of compensating for a lack of vowel sound diversity (and therefore word diversity). There are only three options as far as coming up with unique word sounds goes: either make new, even longer words (see: German), pronounce the same words differently to change the meaning (see: Chinese), or do nothing, have a bazillion homophones, and use context to differentiate between them (see: English).

On a related note, I'm almost positive there are words in English where if you put the emphasis on a different syllable, it means something else, but I can't remember for the life of me what any of them are. Blargfa.

The word endings thing was German specific (and the only time it was ever broken was when a word actually referred to something with a gender - example, the word "woman" was indeed female). I don't know whether or not French follows that rule in the slightest.

And you're right, I think English has one or two like that, it struck me that way when you said it first . . . but I couldn't remember a one of them. If it's true though, that puts English right back up there with the worst of 'em.

Studies I've read about in the (distant) past said that Mandarin Chinese is the #1 most difficult language to learn to the point of literacy, among people who had anything else as their first language. English was #2. (Notably, Engrish is much, much easier to learn. Almost the entire nation of Japan speaks it fluently! )