It's fairly common for English speakers to look at other languages and think they will be too confusing to learn.
But English - the most commonly spoken language in the world with over 1.5 billion speakers and the official language of 67 countries - takes the cake when it comes to a language's quirks.
Dr Arika Okrent is a linguist and author with a joint PhD in linguistics and cognition and cognitive neuroscience from the University of Chicago.
In her latest book, Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme - and Other Oddities of the English Language, she examines the weirdness of the English language and why it is so hard to master.
Dr Arika Okrent is a linguist and author with a joint PhD in linguistics and cognition and cognitive neuroscience from the University of Chicago. Photo: Supplied/Arika Okrent
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Other languages that use the Roman alphabet have a much more predictable form than English, Okrent tells Jim Mora.
“No one takes as many pages as English to explain all the exceptions, all the irregularities, and it’s really the matching of the spelling to the pronunciation that causes a huge headache for learners of the language.”
English is also very prolific borrower of words from other languages, but that’s not entirely to blame for the inconsistencies, she says.
“The weird things about English got baked in from the very beginning, especially with respect to the printing press … and all languages change over time but printing press caught English at a very bad moment.
“The vowel system was undergoing a big change, and we were just bringing English back into written form again after it had been basically out of written form for a couple hundred years.”
Over a few hundred years around the 1400s, English vowels underwent a massive reorganisation, she says.
“It happened so slowly that it wasn’t until we could look back on it that we could see that that’s what happened.”
For instance, the double o letter in moon and book were elongated in pronunciation, more than we think we do today, she says.
“We were also spelling that oo sound as ou, because that’s how they spell that sound in French, so it made sense that moon had that spelling but then the spelling didn’t make sense anymore after the sound shifted, then it shifted again, but in some places it didn’t.”
Another example of changes from old English is seen in words like enough and through, with gh written but not pronounced, she says.
“At that time, it did make a sound, there was a ‘kh’ sound in old English, and it started to disappear by the time the printing press came around, it was sort of half gone already but not totally gone.
“If the printing press had come in later, maybe after that sound had completely disappeared, we wouldn’t have still been writing it that way.”
When English returned as a written language, the upper echelons of society still drew on Latin and Greek in hopes of “elevating” the language, Okrent says.
“Even in phlegm, we didn’t have that g in phlegm when we borrowed that word or first used that word. But we dressed up medical terms, we dressed up various terms with their classical inspirations.”
As for differences in American and British spelling, Okrent says the various spellings were indeterminate from the start.
“So there was back and forth, it wasn’t completely settled … but at some point, the Americans decided ‘well ‘or’ [spelling] is simpler and we’re going to do it that way’, and [Noah] Webster made a dictionary and he made that decision.
“And sort of in response to that decision, the English said ‘well then we’re going to do it the other way’.”
But changes to the English language in the future won’t be as quick as they were, she says, because of the sheer volume of text produced in the modern world.
You can also listen to Richard Langston talk to Arika Okrent about invented languages, which she lists in her book In the Land of Invented Languages.
