English, you're quite unusual. You can say things most languages just can't! And I think some of your most interesting
skills can tell us something about you and a little about languages the world over. We met some linguistic skills English
is missing out on, but what about the features it does have? I mean, does it already possess any uncommon
or rare traits? Why yes, yes it does, compared to most languages. Now, "most" should have a bunch of asterisks
next to it, because figuring out what most languages do is hard. There are several thousand and we'll just
be taking samples, but you're not here for stats lessons. You're here for the cool features. When exchanging stories about English's quirks,
there's one thing I see most everyone rush to first: spelling. And yeah, your spelling is whoa (whough!),
and yeah it's fun to keep bringing up "ghoti" as a whimsical way to spell "fish" following
your own "rules". But a spelling system is not a language, and
even if you never wrote a word, there are English oddities you'd have to contend with. Forget letters for now. Start with numbers. English is already among a smaller group for
putting its numbers before its nouns instead of after. But things really get out of order with your
firsts, seconds and thirds. See, if languages need ordinal numbers, assuming
they're using them at all, one thing they do is keep them consistent, maybe at worst
having a "first". Going off-number with your firsts, seconds,
or even three-plusses is common in Europe. If you want to play along with the crowd,
try extending your fourths and fifths down to oneth, twoth, threeth. Speaking of numbers, English has plurals. When you have bee times many, you call them
bees, not bee. That's less normal than you might expect. In fact, plural markers like these are left
out in many languages, and they're optional in others. Sometimes they even show a preference for
animacy, so humans and animals may get the plural treatment but place and thing get left
alone. Articles are THE way to go in English, or
at least A way. But having a's and the's is not the only way. (Or the norm?) Plenty of languages just have the: it's dog,
it's the dog. Or no articles at all! I saw dog. Is that a nonspecific dog? That exact dog? Well, languages can help you out with more
info if needs be, but how often is it really ambiguous? Be like Korean or Russian and save yourself
some words. If you're a collector or hoarder and you like
your possessions, this verb is surely known to you: have. Except not all languages have it. In fact, it looks like most don't. Forgoing it means doing something else, building
some clever constructions. Maybe say "it's of you" like Nepali, "it's
to you" like Gàidhlig or, my preference, go Sango style with a conjunction: "you are
and it". That's not the only weird "have"-thing. If you have spoken or have read much English,
you have run into this before. Ok, I'll stop the hints: it's the perfect. Maybe you've thought nothing of it. But think something! It is a highly unusual characteristic of Western
European languages. French, German and Italian have really gone
all in on this and... ne hanno fatto il modo principale di parlare del passato, made it
the main way to talk about the past. In languages that haven't perfected haves,
some forgo it altogether. Others have strategies, like in West Africa
and Southeast Asia, where they opt for "already" or "finish". Since we're talking about your verbs and their
Europeanness, consider that pesky thing school warned us to avoid: passive voice. But you don't have to avoid what isn't there,
and for most languages the passive is not. I guess those writing drills were preparing
us for worldwide verbs. Verbs go hand in hand with cases. Language nerds know this well. Except English behaves odd here, too, asymmetrically
casing your pronouns, like they eat hay, but not your nouns in horses eat hay. The way you use that verb is less common,
too. It only marks the subject. It's more common to mark both the subject
and the object, let me make this up, horse eats'm hay, or just nothing at all, horse eat
hay. Well, at least the way you align nouns and
verbs is nothing special. It's called accusative alignment, and it means
that the "I" in "I see you" is the same as in "I sleep", but changes to "me" in "you
see me". Plenty of languages go for "me sleep", that's
ergative, or they adopt even more fluid strategies. Wow, is your head still on? Or was that stranger than you ever expected
languages can get? Stranger than... is a comparative. And the way English compares, with an adjective
plus a suffix plus this comparer particle, is rare outside Europe. In fact, this pattern may be like a fingerprint. When it shows up elsewhere - boom! - European
influence suspected. The next time you want to say "your language
is tougher than mine", may I suggest the Subsaharan strat of saying it's "tough exceed" mine. Or look to Uzbek and declare that it's "tough
from my language". Or simply be balanced like Sona in Papua New
Guinea: "your language is hard, mine is easy". English, you even sound rare compared to other
languages. I mentioned this once before in my video about
weird phonemes, but interdental fricatives are uncommon. That's your θ and ð. They're honestly difficult if you didn't grow up with
them. And if you want to know what life is like
without them, to stop it, you've got to stop it! Turn the fricative into a stop consonant,
just like Irish and again many Nigerian English speakers do when they say [ð]is [d̪]is way
or [d]is way. Also, your vowels are odd. Few languages have more distinct vowel sounds
than English. Kabyle, a Berber language, has just three. Maya has a very normal five. British English has 13 distinct vowel qualities. (See, I told you they're odd!) But the oddest sounding thing about you might
be arrr. This r sound isn't too common. What may be even rarer is the way people who
pronounce their Rs between a vowel and a consonant actually say those vowels: far, fir, for. Those vowels are unique. You can hear them in English, in Mandarin
Chinese where it's become a whole érhuà process, and rarely anywhere else. Before we get to my last feature, I have a
quick honorable mention that isn't about the whole world so much as it is about specific
regions where English would be out of place because it has fingers, hands, and arms. Around Eurasia and closer to the equator in
Africa and the Pacific, the words for your "hand" and "arm" are the same. Even rarer, the word for "finger" and "hand"
match up often in the Australian languages and sometimes the Americas and the Pacific. One place all three of these collide is Tahiti,
where tō'u rima can mean my arm, my hand or my finger! We've seen a bunch of things that are
surprisingly weird given how routine they feel in English, but this mundane "one" may currently be my favorite "one". Take a noun-less adjective, a sad
one, happy one, or this red one, and notice that English expects one word after it. This is uncommon. Why not just use the adjective like most languages,
or mark it with a suffix or prefix? Or take the rarest strategy. At least one lone language in Australia does
not let adjectives float free without nouns. No red ones, no red. It's a red and a house, or it is not red! Well, that was fun to spend a couple videos
thinking about the unusual things English English lacks and has. I'm curious to know if you have any favorites,
or if there's one particular feature you'd really want me to spend more time getting animated
about. Credit goes to this tool, WALS, for the basic data and maps I relied on here. And to my patrons and audience, you were all kind to let me play with these while
I'm in the midst of working on a more serious tale from language history. To patrons, thank you in all of the unusual English
I can muster, and to everyone watching, stick around and subscribe for language.
