Ask Lemmy

(American) English: Inflammable vs flammable vs non-flammable.

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.

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

That second example is..... Wow.

In French they fucking have the same word for "no more" and "more", and only differs in pronounciation of the last letter:

"J'ai plus de pommes" pronounced as "j'ai plu de pommes" means "I have no more apples" (nobody says the "ne" particle)

"J'ai plus de pommes (que toi)" pronounced as "j'ai plus de pommes (que toi)" means "I have more apples (than you)"

Which is even worse because usually last letter is not pronounced, so that makes it an exception to the rule

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.

Not my native language, but the one I speak the most is (American) English.

So many homophones-words that sound the same but are different in meaning or spelling such as knight/night, altar/alter, ail/ale, isle/aisle/I’ll.

Also homographs-words with same spelling but different meaning and/or pronunciation like minute, bass, capital, wind, moped.

So confusing for people trying to learn English and also for people that actually speak it

"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.

The word "colonel"

English having no consistent spelling, grammar or pronunciation.

Inconsistent sounds for the same spelling, as in: tough, cough, through, thorough, bough, dough.

All those stupid English place names: Cholmondeley, Leicester, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire.

The past tense of lead is led, which is pronounced like lead but is not pronounced like lead.

In Dutch, the proper way to say it's e.g., 8h30 is "half nine".

Makes it extra confusing when they say the same in (British) English for 9h30. So short for half past nine.

You wouldn't pronounce €8.50 as "half nine Euro".

Even worse: the correct way of saying 8h40 is "10 past half nine".

German here, we have the exact same issue. It's driving me crazy.

"-sts" and "sps" et al

e.g. ghosts, frosts, wasps, clasps, flasks, basks.

Just a stupid sound.

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.

(English)

So many people treat the letter S like it's special, regardless of why it's there.

Instead of Gus's, they'll say Gus' when they are talking about a possession of the singular Gus.

If the S is part of a name, it doesn't activate the plural-possessive rule for dropping the S after the apostrophe.

Burns's poems
Samus's starship
Kass's theme

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.

Kids split words in American, too; or they join the words. We see examples like:

• Incase
• aswell
• shutdown (wrong as verb)
• backup(wrong as verb)

Or wrong splits:

• back up (wrong as noun)
• under stand

Or just plain dumb:

• emails
• till (instead of 'til)

I wish I could say it was better in English, but we're being dragged down with them.

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.

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.

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.