Anonymous: about that post with weird english words: I loved the etymology but don't you hate when people always make it seem like english is extra weird compared to other languages? all languages have quirky bits, english is not special at all
YES. I do hate it. English really isn’t any more weird or quirky than any other language, just differently so.
In my experience, most of the people who say English is “The Weirdest Language” have never studied another language, or, if they did, only conversationally. When you dig into the grammar and etymology of other languages you realize that English is not some epitome of “Weird”. Like, do you know how many silent or unusually vocalized consonants there are in Gaelic? Did you know there are languages that do not mark tense as part of the verb? What about agglutinating languages that just smush words together to make new words? People go on and on about the Latin influences of English, but did you know that modern Hebrew has more in common with modern Slavic languages than it does with Classical/Ancient Hebrew?
English does not have a monopoly on weird. All languages are weird in their own way. Why? Because humans are weird.
There’s a case in Icelandic called “quirky” case because no one can figure out what the fuck is going on with it.
You can tell a coherent story in Mandarin just using the homophone “shi”.
A typical Niger-Congo language has more than 20 genders.
The German word for “turnip” has a feminine gender, but the German word for “young woman girl” has a neuter gender.
Hawai’ian doesn’t have a “t” sound.
There are Caucasian languages with more than 40 consonants and just 2 vowels.
You can construct an entire sentence in Inuktitut with one word, because that’s how strongly agglutinative it is.
Linguists can’t even agree on a coherent definition of what a word is. Or a syllable.
ETA: Minor error about German. Because German is fucking weird.
Honestly it bothers me more when monolingual English speakers pretend every other language is weird like “it’s so dumb that Spanish adds O to English words like bank and banco!”, or when English speakers pronounce cognates like démocratie like the English version as if they’re doing France a favour by showing them how to /actually/ pronounce “democracy”.
