English is so weird. I mean, it really is. Not just in comparison with
other European languages, but in comparison with every
other language in the world. Allow me to explain. Here are 10 ways in which English is weird. Way number 1: Weird noises. To speak English is to make more different
noises than most languages. There are 44 distinct sounds in English -
what linguists call phonemes - things like sh and nn and luh. 44 give or take, depending on your dialect. But researchers reckon that the average number of sounds across the world’s language
is somewhere between 25 and 30. Meaning English has a good 50%
more noises than the average. A good chunk of that can be explained away
by the number of vowel sounds in English. There are loads of them. Again, the precise
number of them depends on your dialect. For example, if I say “hot” I’m using a vowel sound - that “oh” - that a lot
of American viewers will never use. Unless they’re trying to put on a British accent. But that aside, English speakers are
all using around a dozen vowel sounds, whereas other languages - to our best knowledge
- average out at around 5 or 6 - half as many. Latin had fewer than English, that’s why the Roman alphabet has left us with an utterly
insufficient supply of vowel letters. Hence we have to use them in combination. But which are the weirdest sounds in English? Well one of them is that one the “th” in “that” or in “the” or “this” or “breathe”. And the other is the similar - but different
- “th” sound in “three” and “thirsty”. I assure you these are
different sounds. Just try it: the three. The difference is that with “the”
you’re using your vocal chords. But with the “th” in three, you’re not.
Just try it. “The” “Three” Anyway those “th” sounds only occur in
around one in ten languages around the world. making English pretty darn
special for having them. There’s another weird thing
about English noises too and it’s that “ng” we just heard
at the end of the word “thing”. It’s not particularly bizarre to have
that “ng” sound, lots of languages do, But what’s bizarre about English’s use of it is that we allow it at the end of
words like “thing” or “ringing” or “singing” - you can have it in the middle too - but you cannot have it at the start. And that is weird. Mandarin Chinese does it… but
that doesn’t mean it’s not weird. Onto weird thing number 2: Odd questions. “Have you noticed…” the way we swith words
around when we’re formulating a question? For example: “Have you noticed?” is a question,
but “You have noticed.” is a statement. To turn a statement into a question
we flip the subject and the verb. The cat is hungry: statement. Is the cat hungry?: question. A question to which the answer is always “yes”. And this, my friend, is weird. Now, you’re perhaps thinking “no, it isn’t, Rob” because French does it and German does
it and Swedish does it and Czech does it. That is true, but we just need to broaden our horizons a little bit here because outside
of Europe, almost no one else does. Researchers using data from the
World Atlas of Language Structures - a massive database of information about many,
although not all, of the world’s languages - found that only 1.4% of those languages did this word switching thing to
formulate yes/no questions. And almost all of those languages were in Europe. We’ve picked up the habit from each nother. English is also weird for what
it doesn’t do to form questions, because according to that database, the majority of languages use a specific
word to show that something is a question - it’s called a question participle. For example, Japanese turns
a statement into a question by adding ka to the sentence like
a sort of verbal question mark. And that’s something we don’t do, eh? …oh, hold on. The second most common way to formulate a question is to just say the statement
but change your intonation. But again, this is something English speakers also
kind of do. For example: “you’re still hungry?” or “You haven’t clicked subscribe yet??” Please do. Perhaps another weird thing about English is
that you can do just about any of these things. Anyway, onto Weird thing about
English number 3: our meaningless do. We use the word “do” in a lot of weird ways. English has something called the
“meaningless do”, or “dummy do” and it’s the “do” that appears in
questions like “Do you like coffee?”, In negative statements like “I
do not like matcha.” I’m sorry, I’ve tried to but I just don’t. And also for emphasis in sentences like
“I DO prefer Yorkshire Tea to Typhoo, I’m not just saying that to fit in.” In all of these constructions the “do” that
is there isn’t really “do-ing” anything. There’s no reason for the verb to be
there or for that verb to be “do”. It isn’t carrying any meaning at all. But to give a negative statement in
this way, for example, we need it. Other languages do not do this. They’re more likely to go for “Like
you coffee?” or “I like matcha not”. They don’t draft in this dummy do. This meaningless do makes English very weird. No other Germanic languages do it. In fact it’s thought that of all
the languages in the entire world, only English and the Celtic
languages do anything like it. So do you see how special it is? Y Weird thing about English number 4. Phrasal verbs! Ah yes, phrasal verbs - a term that strikes terror
into the heart of many English language learners. I like to think of them as our revenge
for everyone else’s grammatical gender. More on that later. Phrasal verbs are things like
“to look at” or “to shut down”. It’s where to describe an action
you need not only a verb, but also an extra word - a preposition
- like up or off or on or at. And English is just full of them. That’s fine if you’ve been
speaking English your whole life, but if you’re learning it as,
say, an adult, it is a nightmare. It’s easy enough to know what “to
look” is but how are you supposed to remember that to “look up”
something is to research it. Or to “look out” is to watch your back. Or to “look down on” is to patronise? And not always. You could also just be
looking up, looking out, or looking down. And sometimes the components of the phrasal verb
can bear no relation at all to their meaning. How are you supposed to guess what “give up” means when there’s no obvious
giving or ascending taking place? So what do other languages do? Well German and Dutch are
secretly doing the same as us, they’re just working the
preposition into the verb. Their words for “to give up”
basically mean “to upgive”. But you won’t “come across”
many phrasal verbs in French. That’s why we thankfully often have a French
derived alternative if we’re really struggling. We can say “terminate” instead of “end
up” or “recline” instead of “lie back”. Or lie all the way down if you like. Anyway, English’s overreliance
on phrasal verbs… trust me. It’s weird. Now, one of the ways you can
really get to appreciate the weirdness of English is by
learning another language. And if you want to embark on your
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Lifetime subscription for Memorial Day. Tack så mycket! Thank you very much. Okay, our next weird thing about
English… Where are the genders? In Spanish a book is masculine. But the table it sits on is feminine. Here in Germany the locals
would say my hand is feminine. Doesn’t look it. But my finger is masculine. And my face is neuter. And you need to know this to speak Spanish
or German properly, because if you don’t, you won’t know which of their
versions of the word “the” to use. Or which version of the
word… I dunno… green to use. This is grammatical gender and
English just doesn’t bother with it. Which is weird. Because almost every other Indo-European language does - so every Romance, every
Germanic, every Slavic, every Celtic language. As does Sanskrit and Ancient Greek did. They all apportion a gender - either one
of two or one of three - to every noun. But English does not. We have gendered
pronouns, sure, but that’s it. Now, if I was making this video
around 15-hundred years ago, I’d have to leave this section out. I’d
have to come up with another weird thing because Old English did have apportion
genders to nouns like its germanic siblings. It had three, just like modern German
does: masculine, feminine and neuter, And also three version of “the” to
use - a different one for each gender, and none of which by the way was “the”. It was a mess, to be honest. Mann
was masculine, but so was woman. And wife was neuter. And the fact it was such a nightmare
may well be part of the reason we no longer have this grammatical gender system. We don’t know for certain why it went away, but it seems to have happened around
the time the Vikings arrived in Britain. The Danish invaders, when
they’d finished pillaging, married themselves off with the local women and the simpler gender system
of their language Old Norse seems to have had an influence on
the Old English of their spouses. Another probable factor in grammatical gender’s
disappearance is the fact that in Middle English the different word endings that you need to make
grammatical gender work started to get messed up. For example Middle English speakers
developed a habit of making every vowel at the end of a word just sound like an “uh” which was a problem when you
sometimes needed to be able to differentiate between a word ending
with an “a” or a word ending with an “e”. So this might also have made the
grammatical gender system unsustainable. And good riddance! I cannot think
of a single situation where we’d be better off with grammatical
gender than we are without it. If you can, stick it in the comments. But to my mind, having no
grammatical gender is good… but also weird. Afrikaans, Armenian, Persian and a handful of
other Indo-European languages are also weird too. Okay, weird thing about English
number 6: peculiar pronouns. Pronouns got an honourable
mention in the last section, but let’s take a closer look
at them, because in English, they’re weirder than you might think. First of all, the way we use them is, in comparison with the rest of
the world’s languages, strange. We are peculiarly reliant on them. In fact, we can’t do without them. If I just write “like chocolate” you
have no idea what I‘m getting at. Do I mean “I like chocolate”, “you like chocolat”, “they like chocolate”, “we like chocolate”? You don’t know, because I didn’t
use a pronoun: I, you or whatever. In sentences like this, the pronoun is
obligatory in English and that is weird. Believe it or not, it’s thought
that obligatory pronouns like this are only found in around a
tenth of the world’s languages. This might surprise you because
it just so happens that many of the other ones that have them
are fellow European languages. But also on our doorstep are languages that don’t. In Spanish or Italian, the
pronouns aren’t obligatory. There’s enough information in the
form of the verb that you’ve chosen to tell the listener or reader
who or what is doing the action. But because English doesn't have
a different version of a verb for every pronoun - you say “swim” whether
it’s I swim, you swim, or they swim - we need the pronouns. And given there’s only around a one
in ten chance of any other language having these obligatory pronouns, that makes it… weird. Oh, and also: the fact we only
have one version of you is odd too. We don’t have a formal and informal
one, or an extra plural one. Y’all doesn’t count, it’s a contraction. And
also, most English speakers don’t use it. We used to have all of those versions of
you, though, but not anymore. And that... Yeah, it’s a bit odd. Okay, weird thingy number 7: silly spelling. Why did I wait all the way to
number 7 to get to this one? English spelling is a monstrosity. Different letters make different sounds in
different places., we have silent letters and letters have to be used in combinations
that don’t appear to make a lot of sense. English spelling is particularly - weirdly - bad. I don’t know of another language
that has tried to create a written form that represents the sounds of that language and failed so spectacularly. I touched on one of the reasons why already: we are using an alphabet that was
designed for a different language. And English has many more sounds than the Latin
that the Roman alphabet was originally used for. I also recently did a video about English’s Great
Vowel Shift, which caused the pronunciation of English words to change significantly just as
we were trying to nail down their spellings, meaning the spellings were soon, for
want of a better term, oot of date. English spelling has also suffered from
deliberate interference, with silly scholars adding in silent letters to try to better
reflect a word’s - usually Latin - roots. And a descending laziness has meant we’ve
stopped pronouncing some letters that we used to. Plus there’s also the fact
that we’ve borrowed a lot of words that were designed for different languages, meaning they don’t quite match
up with how we’d have spelt them. Anyway, all of this adds up to
a pell mell of bad spell-ings. Another thing that makes English weird. And here comes another! At
number 8 it’s getting tense. Okay, let’s talk tenses. And here I can
mention something for which English is unique. So far as linguists have researched it,
English’s present tense is like no other. Because English is the only language
in the whole world where the present tense only requires you to alter the third
person singular form for regular verbs. Just let me explain: So take the verb “smell”. It stays the same in the present tense for I, you,
we and they, but it changes for he and she and it and ONLY for he and she and it. And
that feature of English is unique so far as we know. English also has some other
bizarre tense stuff going on. Staying in the present: our so-called
“present progressive” tense is a bit odd. You know, the way we use the verb “to be” plus
another verb with “-ing” on the end of it. For example, “I am reading a book” means
that the reading is an ongoing process. This would be considered in many
languages an unnecessary faff. Why not just say “I read book”? Why
all the extra bells and whistles? I personally think we’re better off with it. “I
am standing up for it”. And will continue to. But I won’t necessarily
stick up for this next one. Have you ever noticed English
doesn’t actually have a future tense? To talk about the future we have to find
clunky ways around it using the present tense: “I am going to do it.” “I am doing it tomorrow.” Even when we say “I will do something” we’re invoking the present form of
an old word meaning to want. Not having a future tense
isn’t weird as such - some languages manage without having any tenses at all, they just say when something is going to happen - but having so many different ways to get
around not having a future tense is definitely… well, a bit weird. It’s time for number nine. Our next
weird aspect of English is: the a. Okay, I’ve tried to be a little clever there, because what this section is about is
the words “the” and “a” and also “an”. These are known as articles. “The”
is what’s called a definite article. You use it when you want to be specific
about “the chair” or “the gorilla”. If you want to just talk about any old
gorilla, you use the indefinite article, which in English is “a”, or “an” if
the word starts with a vowel sound. Now English articles could
be weirder. Much weirder. I give you… German. But the fact that English
has both a definite article and these indefinite articles is surprisingly odd. It’s not at all common to have an indefinite
article outside of the Indo-European languages. And even among those, it’s by no means a given. Celtic languages like Irish and Welsh
have no equivalents of “a” or “an”. Nor do Slavic languages. But the question is… Do we need them? If you have a definite article
for when you’re being specific, do you need to have another
article for when you’re not being? Can’t you just have no article at all? And in fact, do you even need
a definite article either? Would you genuinely be confused
if a non-native English speaker said something to you along the lines of - I dunno - “I want cup of tea”
I guess they’re trying to fit in. The fact they’ve missed off “the” or
“a” doesn’t really matter, does it? You can usually tell from context whether they
are asking for any cup of tea or a specific one. So yeah, the fact English has definite
and indefinite articles is a bit weird. “Do we need indefinite article?” Maybe not. Okay, we’re there. Weird
thing about English number 10. And for this one, I want your help. I think our tenth weird thing about English should be about what the language doesn’t
have, rather than what it does. Because there are concepts that don’t exist
in English that do in other languages. For example, English doesn’t have a gender
non-specific word for a parent’s sibling. To talk about them generally we’d
have to say “aunts and uncles”. That seems to me like a niche that needs filling. Maybe we could use “auncles”... “auncles” “ancles”? I don’t know. Come up with a better one. We also don’t have separate words for our mother’s parents and our father’s
parents, like some languages do. We don’t have a word for the day after tomorrow or
the day before yesterday like some languages do. And we don’t have a word to negate a negative
statement like lots of other languages do. If you say to me: “Rob, you didn’t take the bins out again” I can’t challenge that outrageous claim with
a single word. If I say “no” it’s ambiguous, do I mean “no, I did” or “no, I didn’t”. Ditto with “yes”. Whereas in German the word “doch” and
in French the word “si” are reserved for just this situation. To
disagree with the sentence. Why don’t we have something like that? So help me out here, what other weird
gaps are there in the English language? What don’t we have words for
that many other languages do? Let me know in the comments. If you’ve enjoyed this romp through the wonderful
weirdness of English, may I ask two things of you? 1: Subscribe to this channel and 2. Watch this video next and I do
hope I will be seeing you over there, eh? I’m going to go.
