Week 8 - Going Through the List

 

This week I have decided to look at some online resources and see what ideas people think that make English difficult to learn or teach and then look at how these ideas relate to what we have studied and learned. Some of the issues may have even been explained already. First I’m going to look a list from Insider titles 11 reasons the English languageis impossible to learn 

original picture from here

Contranyms (find a big list here) are words that are their own opposites, like clip. You can clip things together, or you can use scissors to clip things apart. The word means both to separate and hold together. Or bolt, to secure or to flee. Or fast which is quick or stuck in one place. Some of these contranyms spring from the same origin as the second item on this list: homographs. These are words that are spelled the same, even said the same sometimes, but have different meanings. Like bat, or bow. This duality in the English language comes from… you guessed it… the fact that English is essentially 4 or 5 languages smashed into one, churned about and spat out into some cohesive singularity. Sometime one work from one language sounds like another in a different language, but has a different, sometimes opposite meaning. This leads to a plethora of homonyms, homographs, contranyms, and many other dualities in the language that make English difficult to learn. In some cases, these words were created from the great vowel shift (GVS) when two words that once sounded different, one of them shifts to sound like the other. For example, cleave "separate" is from Old English clēofan, while cleave "adhere" is from Old English clifian, which was pronounced differently. Yet others come from the ability of English to turn a noun into a verb. As English is lacking in most inflective forms, changing a noun into a verb in the present tense is often just a matter of using the noun as a verb exactly the way it is. officially this is called denominalization. This is most often the case with verbs for adding/taking away “noun.” For example, dust. You can dust bread with flour, which is to add flour, or you can dust the furniture, which is to take away the dust. Both verbs coming from the noun “dust”. In this way dust is a contranym.

Next, idioms make no sense. Idioms make any language difficult to learn. Every language has them and they are notoriously difficult to understand unless you are a native to the language or had the idiom explained to you a number of times. This is simply an issue of history. Idioms come from historical situations. This would be something like “fly by the seat of you pants”. We understand it but who really knows the history of it. It actually comes from the early days of avionics when a pilot flew with few navigational aids other than his eyes. He controlled the plane with the sick that came up from between his legs at “the seat of his pants”. So, it was to fly without direction or assistance. Every language has these phrases. There was a phase I heard when learning Portuguese that goes “tira a cavalinho da chuva.” That is “take your little horse out of the rain.” Take a moment and try to figure out what it means. If you asked to do something and I said, “take your little horse out of the rain,” what would you think I was telling you. It’s difficult to figure out, isn’t it? Until you know the history. In brazil, when the horse was the main mode of transportation, when someone was visiting someone else, they would saddle up their horse, and, assuming they were planning on a short visit, they would leave their horse tied up outside and saddled. If it began to rain, they might wish to wait out the rain for a dry ride home later. they want to go home but can’t. they have hope. The host may say, “give up on this idea of going home, the rain won’t stop. Take your poor little horse out of the rain and stay here for the night.” Now try to guess what I’m saying. It is often used by parents when a child is bugging them for something in that “PleasePleasePleasePleasePlease” way that kids do. A parent may say “take your little horse out of the rain, stop asking, give up hope, its not going to happen.” This all goes to show that language has a history and understanding that history is key to learning it. Check out this cool site that helps find the meaning and history of parses. English is even more prone to using idioms due to the periphrastic structures we incorporate into our language. Where inflected languages generate meaning by manipulating a word, English has a habit of using entire phrases to give meaning. For example, in Portuguese sera is the future form of be. In English, we say a whole phrase “Is going to be.” This familiarity with using phrases for single meaning makes English very suitable to incorporation of idioms.

original picture found here

               The article mentions the I before E except after C… rule. Merriam webster made a fun jingle to show just how good of a rule this is.

I before e, except after c

Or when sounded as 'a' as in 'neighbor' and 'weigh'

Unless the 'c' is part of a 'sh' sound as in 'glacier'

Or it appears in comparatives and superlatives like 'fancier'

And also except when the vowels are sounded as 'e' as in 'seize'

Or 'i' as in 'height'

Or also in '-ing' inflections ending in '-e' as in 'cueing'

Or in compound words as in 'albeit'

Or occasionally in technical words with strong etymological links to their parent languages as in 'cuneiform'

Or in other numerous and random exceptions such as 'science', 'forfeit', and 'weird.'"

 

               You can see in this jingle, just how many of these exception words are loan words like glacier and seize from French, and Latin or French based words (cue) that have had the Germanic -er, comparative form added. Loan words and mixed forms from so many languages has muddied this rule to point where it can hardly be considered a rule.  

 

               Straight from the article, “"Though," "through," "thorough," "thought," "tough," and "trough" all mean different things and are pronounced differently. Six letters, apparently infinite combinations.” This one I am not going to disassemble as thoroughly… see what I did there? All these words are Germanic but remember, OU was one of the sounds greatly affected by the GVS and very unevenly. Let’s look at the old English version of these and you may see how different words became more similar through the effects of the GSV. Ha, did it again. In the same order as presented above

 

thēah, thurh, thuruh, thōht, tōh, trog.

 

You can see that while similar they are distinctly different. that would be the GVS hard at work coupled with a bit of laziness in English speakers leading to dropped consonant sounds at the ends of words.

 

               The article mentions that words can change meaning depending on which syllable is stressed. You see this with items like ADDress and addRESS. Putting the emphasis on the second syllable makes it a verb instead of a noun. This is actually very similar to a lot of other languages. However, in many other languages, there are indicators within the language that help with this pronunciation. For example, in Portuguese, the word medico means to medicate and médico means doctor. In this case they are pronounced the same, but the emphasis is placed on a different syllable, indicated by the accent (meDIco and MEdico).       

               The article mentioned irregular plurals such as oxen and children, which I addressed in my post about Scandinavian influences. It also mentioned silent letter like silent K (knight) and silent P(pterodactyl). This I addressed in my last post. In Germanic and Latin languages these sounds are still pronounced. If you can recognize the language, they come from you can start to understand why they are there. Last the list mentions the case of pronunciation such as "mischievous" is often pronounced "miss-chee-vee-us," but the correct way is "miss-chiv-us." This is not totally accurate and is simply a case of different accents. When learning English if you pronounce it either of the ways, people will understand and likely wont think anything of it.

 

That concludes this list. I really wanted to go through more lists, but I spent far too long on this one already and my schedule right now does not afford me much allowance. To be honest, a quick scan of other lists shoes that most of them talk about the same issues. The majority of big issues I have addressed here and in some other posts. I look forward to pulling all of this together into one nice a succinct piece of work in the weeks to come. I hope you enjoy the conclusion!

Week 7 - The Great Vowel Shift

 

This week I looked at something that wasn’t in my original plan. The great Vowel Shift (GVS). A couple times in my research I came across this phrase and I began to wonder what it was. The GVS, simply put was a phenomenon that occurred between the 15^th and 18^th century. Many other languages have undergone vowel shifts, but what made the GVS so unique was the scale that it affected the language and the apparent lack of reason. Where other languages shift one or two vowels over time to change the language, the GVS comprised a shift in almost every single long vowel sound to a more forward on the palate. To get an idea of what that means, you can take a look at this video. Its rather dry in terms of cinematic value but what it lacks in excitement and action, it makes up for in education and understanding.

You can see that the diagram indicates where sounds are made, being high or low in the mouth and forward (left) and in the back (right), with diphthongs being shown in the middle as they slide between different sounds. The GVS shifted the entire set up and forward. It started with the highest vowels shifting to be diphthongs. This opened up space for the rest to shift. Its unclear whether this was a push shift or a pull shift. Pull shift being that the diphthongization (I don’t think that’s actually a word but I’m going to use it) of the upper two monophthong vowels left a vacuum that the other vowels shifted up to take. A push being that the other vowels shifting up happened simultaneously and pushed the upper vowels out to be diphthongs. This shift changes entirely the way English was pronounced such that Chaucer, being from just before the GVS and Shakespeare, being from after, while speaking the same language with almost the same syntax, would have been neigh unintelligible to each other.

You can see here a nice concise summary of the effects of the GVS. Describing the sounds of a vowel through writing is a difficult thing to do. Inherently, the sounds a vowel makes are a personal interpretation affected by your own experiences, dialect, mother language, etc. It is, therefore, neigh impossible to explain in writing the effects of how the GVS affected the language. It easiest for you to hear. Check out the video below as Simon Roper goes through a few phrases and demonstrates the way a shift can happen over generations.    

               The reasons for the GVS is not known but primary ideas on the subject indicate that it may have been caused by a number of factors. First would be that, when the Norman ruling class (which speak French remember) lost their holding in France, the noble men had to rely on their English holdings more. This caused them to incorporate English more into their language repertoire. As the affluent upper class began speaking accented English, the lower class emulated them for prestige cause a vowel shift. Another idea is that the plague, black death, which was rampant during this time, caused the mass migration from rural areas to urban centers. This was a time when most people worlds consisted of the area they could walk to in a day, or ride to if they were fortunate enough to have a horse. This means that regional dialects often formed. When all these dialects collected into urban centers there was mass melding of languages causing the vowel shift and a plethora of accents in cities like London. Last, is the idea that the hundred years war which was actually more than 100 years, caused a great deal of resentment towards the French. As tensions and resentment grew, a distancing from France, French and all things related occurred. In this case the vowel shift occurred as a conscious or partially subconscious need to separate. The history guy explains this part of the GVS very well in this video.

    Now, I know you may be asking, “How does this make English difficult to learn? It’s just pronunciation.” Well, it wouldn’t be a problem, except that the shift happened over such a long time and in a variety of different locations separately, that shifts were not adopted uniformly leading to pronunciation not being uniform with spelling. English is unlike some other languages for that. Take Spanish and Portuguese for example. The languages are really easy to read because spelling and pronunciation coincide with each other (I’m only going off what I have heard about Spanish here because I don’t actually speak the language, but Portuguese I can say this with some certainty.) English is not so. Look at the diphthong “EA” for example.

EA was pronounced “e” like in met. (meat was said like met). A small shift makes it become eh as in “Canadian eh?” now meat would be said like Mate. Another shift and it became the long vowel sound meat as it is today. However, some words got stuck along the way so words like steak, while maintaining the same diphthong remained with the eh sound. This is just one of many examples. Read (the past form) is an example of a word where the vowel sound didn’t shift. This fills English with a whole host of words that have similar spelling with different pronunciation.

We know shifts have happened in other languages so you may wonder why English has so many inconsistencies and other languages don’t. when other languages have had these vowel shifts, they are often accompanied by an updated standardization of writing. So, as a very astute observer noted in a conversation forum on English Language & Usage “what made the pronunciation stray so far from spelling in English was not the Great Vowel Shift; it was the absence of the accompanying Great Spelling Update.” This creates a very confusing disparity for many English language learners. Sadly, there is no easy way to overcome this but to practice. In some cases, recognizing if a word is a loanword from another language will help with recognizing the pronunciation but not always, as loan words acquired before the vowel shift will often have shifted vowels and loan words picked up after will not.