English - not always easy

[TheFallen]

Well, having met up with a Japanese friend of mine yesterday and having got chatting about the issues of learning English as a foreign language, I was reminded of the below-quoted poem for the first time in years. Hey... I figured that linguistics is kind of a science, so therefore the Loresraat would be the most suitable place to post this.

Personal disclosure first. I am by education primarily a linguist, so this sort of thing invariably piques my interest. It also no doubt explains why I am such a compulsive spelling and grammar Nazi.

I'm also going to seize the moral high ground for myself, being a born and bred UK national. If forced, I'll grudgingly admit that you citizens of the US, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand don't make too bad an attempt at using the spoken and written language - but I perhaps should be more charitable. The language itself is called English - as in England - so what real hope do all you ex-rebels and colonials have?

Anyhow, back on point... English is as we know the international language (unlucky, Esperanto ). It's considered - at least by native English speakers - to be particularly easy to master. It's certainly true that English has a single gender (neuter), as compared say to French's two (masculine and feminine) and German's three (masculine, feminine and neuter). It's also true that English has effectively only one case (the nominative). Purists will argue that there is also an accusative, but that only applies to certain pronouns - "I" becomes "me", "he" becomes "him" etc etc - and a genitive form does just about exist when indicating possession - the car's bodywork, the members' topics etc etc. When necessary, all other cases in English are created by the addition of a preposition to precede the noun, which hence remains in nominative form - e.g. I gave it to the cat, you ate a slice of ham, he ran away from the lion. When comparing English to German for example, the latter is monstrously more complex, with four distinct and separate cases (nominative, accusative, dative and genitive) to go with its three genders. Take into account the plural and this gives German sixteen different versions of the word "the", only one of which will be correct dependant upon usage - yes, really.

My Japanese friend politely listened in agreement, but then pointed out the core difficulty with English for foreigners - and that's pronunciation, especially of vowel sounds. Trying to place myself in his shoes and thinking about it for a while, he was absolutely right. Consider the simple English construction "ough" for a second. That can be correctly sounded in at least six different ways, to rhyme with "uff", "ooo", "owe", "off", "ow" and "awe", dependant solely upon the word in which it's appearing. That's not simple at all - there's no logic or rule and hence this can only be learned by memory.

All of which brings me to the following small poem by Bennett Cerf, a mid-20th century English humourist (yes, "humourist" does have a bloody "u" in it!), which I thought I'd share:-

The wind was rough
And cold and blough.
She kept her hands inside her mough.

It chilled her through,
Her nose turned blough,
And still the squall the faster flough.

And yet although
There was no snough,
The weather was the cruellest fough.

It made her cough,
(Please do not scough).
She coughed until her hat blew ough.

It shook the bough.
I don't know hough
She got warm again - the silly cough.

[Damelon]

I'm not by any stretch a linguist but this brings to mind a recent post from the Economist on the difficulty of English to learn.

Would it be possible, though, to describe a language's “difficulty” in the abstract? If so, what would it look like? English-speakers often point to a language like Latin or Ancient Greek. Next to them, in one important respect, English is easy. The distinction involves a language's “inflectional morphology”, or the bits and pieces added to a noun or adjective or verb to make it match up with other pieces in a sentence. An English verb has a maximum of five forms (speak, speaks, speaking, spoke, spoken), whereas verbs in Spanish or Latin can take dozens of forms. An English noun usually has only two forms (singular and plural), whereas the Greek or Russian noun takes numerous forms showing grammatical gender, number and case.

This kind of inflection is not a terrible proxy for that slippery idea of "difficulty". Where are the world’s hardest languages, then? Is English one of them? One study, by Gary Lupyan and Rick Dale in 2010, looked closely at inflection. It found that highly inflected languages tend to be spoken by a small number of speakers, and have few neighbours. But languages with big groups of speakers, or many neighbouring languages, systematically tend to have fewer inflections. Why is that? The hypothesis is that as a language spreads over centuries, it is learned by many non-natives (trading partners, conquered subjects and the like). Adults, learning a foreign language imperfectly, avoid using non-necessary endings. And many endings in any language are non-necessary, if other clues (like word order in a sentence) can be recruited to do the same things that word endings do—say, distinguishing the subject of a sentence from its direct object. As languages spread and grow, they are more likely to rely on clues like word order than on word-endings. So “big” languages are “simple”. Under this schema, English fits both criteria: relatively big and relatively simple.

That’s one way of determining relative “hardness”, apart from the starting point of a given speaker’s native language. The problem is that this is far from a perfect measure. Sure, lots of verb-endings are hard for a learner, especially a learner who is not used to them. But where the English verb lacks endings, it makes up for this simplicity in other ways. When to use the various auxiliary verbs is far from obvious: How would you explain to a learner the use of do in the following? “I don’t normally drink, but I do like a crispy lager on a hot summer’s day.” The first use is simply standard with negative statements: we say “I don’t drink” rather than “I drink not.” But the second do, just a few words later, is quite different. It is emphatic, stressing the unusual behaviour on a hot summer’s day. These and other wrinkles can be mind-bending for learners of English.

Here's a list of 10 common problems for Spanish speakers in learning English.

[Vraith]

Heh...there are quite a number of poems like that around. Somewhere there's a thread where a couple were posted/talked about.
The problem your friend pointed at isn't unique to foreign learners. It's one of the most challenging aspects of teaching children.
In part, just because the lack of pattern/consistency makes things difficult.
But many times we make it even harder: Starting in the 50's [well, at least the first book about it I'm aware of] people got really interested in "rules" for spelling/speaking. They went to work with a vengeance. The end result was 2 hundred and something rules. Yet every one of the rules is false at least sometimes. Several of the most taught/used rules are actually true less than 1/2 the time. [like the one about two vowels together, you pronounce the first one..."Read" is pronounced like "reed"...except when it isn't.] How can you even call that a rule??? And IIRC, if you somehow knew all the rules, you'd STILL only correctly spell a newly heard word, or pronounce a newly seen word about 85% of the time.
Yet almost every school in the country uses them to teach spelling/pronunciation.
Heh...sorry for the little rant. Here's a poem of sorts [not exactly art] on that issue by a woman who is trying to change the way we teach reading and writing:
“Phonics Fun”
Let’s see now: Where, oh where, to start?
Heart, as a maverick, rhymes with hart.

Head rhymes with bed, but not with bead-
And lead with either dead or deed.
How spelling doth mislead: indeed!

We see the rule of silent e
In plate and scene and bite and cove,
But come rhymes not with home and tome,
Nor move with love and shove, or stove,
While dove, a word more versatile,
Can rhyme with either love OR rove.

A’s not the same in bat and bank,
No matter what the books may say.
And fat’s not fat at all in father,
Nor moth in mother, broth in brother
Indeed, what rhymes with father? Bother!

A cough is not a cough in hiccough
Nor –ough the same in tough and though.
Though rhymes, in fact with slow and grow,
And also rhymes with no and know.
Know rhymes with hoe, but not with chow;
But bow can rhyme with no OR now.

And then there’s route, which rhymes with snoot-
But also rhymes with snout and shout!

A hundred rules or so will do
To account for sue, and shoe, and shoo
For flew and flue and others too.
Dear me, ‘tis enough to make me blue.

[I'm Murrin]

...But the "a" in "bat" and "bank" is exactly the same?

[Hashi Lebwohl]

A clip from Gallagher.

[Vraith]

...But the "a" in "bat" and "bank" is exactly the same?

No it isn't. In "bat" it's a single sound. In "bank" it is a diphthong that BEGINS with the short "a" sound and glides through long "e."

[peter]

re the difficulty of a non speaker learning English, can I cite the following:-

Are you saying I took it.

Are you saying I took it.

Are you saying I took it.

Are you saying I took it.

Are you saying I took it.

Are you saying I took it.

q.e.d.