What a kerfuffle.

It’s 7.47! The morning! I am awake on a Sunday morning! The birds are twittering away and I am going to skip down to breakfast whistling a little ditty!

whosaprettypolyglot:

Okay so here I’d like to address three issues pertaining to English I’ve seen floating around Tumblr recently which to me seem kind of… overdone. I’m talking about that sentence with four or five “thats” in a row, the same word being able to be pronounced different ways (or different words with the same spelling if you prefer), and “terrible” and “terrific” having opposite meanings. Such posts are usually accompanied by comments along the lines of “English you’re drunk,” “I feel sorry for the people who have to learn this,” “this is what makes English so hard” etc etc. So I thought I’d make a response… not that it’s likely to be spread around anywhere like as far, but still.

• The sentence was something like “I think that that “that” that that student had used is wrong.” Don’t hold me to that one, but you get the idea.

It’s not just an English construction. Let me provide you something similar in German. “Ich dachte, dass das “das”, das das Wörterbuch genannt hatte, nicht richtig war.” Though I’m less certain, I imagine it’s much the same in Dutch with a little tweaking: “Ik dachte dat dat “dat”, dat dat student heeft gezegd, niet juist is.”
Conclusion: not just English.

• It is read or read? Tear or tear? The bandage was wound around the wound.

Things like that float around a lot too. Allow me to present you three sentences in French:

Je suis content qu’ils me content cette histoire.
Je suis fier de pouvoir me fier à toi.
Mon fils a perdu les fils de l’ordinateur.

Content, fier, and fils each have a different pronunciation each time. (The first “content” has the “ent” pronounced, the second doesn’t - the first “fier” is with a closed “errr” sound, the second with an open “ay” - the first “fils” is with a silent l and pronounced s, the second is the opposite).
Conclusion: not just English.

• If “horrible” and “horrific” mean the same how come “terrible” is the opposite of “terrific”?

Simply because people chose to use it like that. How come “cool” is no longer just the opposite of “warm”? And “hot” no longer just the opposite of “cold”? People take words and give them new meanings in casual conversation. And again, it’s not unique to English - if I could direct your attention to the French “formidable” (of which one of the translations is, in fact, “terrific”) - “borrowed from the Latin formīdābilis (“formidable, terrible”), derived from formido (“fear, terror”)”. French has done the exact same thing, the exact same change with the exact same word.
Conclusion: not just English.

I don’t like when people use posts like this to set English up on its pedestal, because it just allows the anglocentric “my language is already all that, I don’t need to learn others” idea to flourish. These are just a couple of examples from a couple of languages I happen to know, there’ll be countless more out there. Consider this a more concrete extension of my “all languages are equal” post. The only reason English is seen as “special” is for historical and geographical reasons (in the same way as Latin once was, or French, or Greek) - linguistically it’s no different or better than any other language.

michaonthemoon:

yaoibutts:

I love how potato in French is pomme de terre, which pretty much means “earth apple.”

like what stupid frenchman saw this:

and said “zis petite légume looks like a, how you say, APPLE! hmmm… but it grows in ze earth… HON HON HON! MAIS OUI! C’EST UNE POMME DE TERRE!”

j’adore comment ananas se dit pineapple en anglais, ce qui veut littéralement dire “pomme de pin”, genre quel type anglais a vu ça:

et s’est dit : “ow cette étrange big fruit ressemble à une, how do you say, POMME! hmmm… mais plutôt une pomme qui pousse dans les pins… HU HU HU! OH YES, IT’S A PINEAPPLE!”

(z’avez vu, on peut le faire aussi… hon hon hon!)