The Oddities of English

I'm here, I'm just getting re-adjusted to academic life.

I've said for a while that one of the best things about learning Latin in college was how much it strengthened my grasp of English grammar. I'm experiencing a similar phenomenon as I plunge into the considerably murkier waters of Hebrew. It's not helping me understand how better to use English, as Latin did, at least not yet. Rather, it is making me more aware of just how odd and difficult a language English is, even preposterously so.

Let's just consider spelling. Do you realize how absurdly we native English-speakers spell things? We don't spell them the way we pronounce them, for starters. We spell them, in many cases, the way they used to be pronounced hundreds of years ago. Knife is one example: the initial K is silent, though it was once pronounced in the word's Old and Middle English ancestors.

Then there are all the useless letters in the alphabet. Letters whose functions are performed perfectly well by other letters, and whose presence in the alphabet just leads to confusion. C is a great example; its hard sound is also produced by K, and S does a great job all by itself with the soft sound. X and Q don't even have sounds--they have combinations of other letters' sounds, ks and kw. It is all eckstremely kweer.

And vowels! English has the most confused system for reproducing vowel sounds. Just think how many different ways you can represent the vowel sound from the word shoe. Oe as in shoe, ew as in threw, ough as in through, oo as in spoon, eu as in eucharist, ue as in flue, and ou as in you. Need I go on? Yoo and I need one consistent way to spell a given sound, so it's not so confyoosing.

In closing, I will leave you with this phonetic gem from Douglas Wilson's The Paideia of God, which illustrates some of the difficulty. "A rough, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed."

Phonetic transliteration for the understandably confused: "A ruff, doe-faced, thawtful plowman strode throo the streets of Scarboruh; after falling into a sloo, he coffed and hiccupped."

Sigh.