anghraine:

pet peeve of the day: English is the worst special-snowflake language no rules PURE CHAOS

um no

English orthography is a mess in relation to pronunciation, yes. Germanic(ish) grammar + majority Latinate vocabulary + a smaller number of very frequently used Germanic words (e.g., very often Germanic noun + Latinate adjective regardless of context) results in some odd features, like many many doublets. This is not unique to English. It’s not even that rare!

And English has very strict rules about some things, which Anglophones mostly don’t notice because it’s so wired in, like adjectives (“red tall

four

trucks” = wrong–yes, Virginia, descriptively) and extremely rigid word order (why Yoda sounds funny). Again, this is not the weirdest thing ever. Most languages have rules around word order. Some are also highly rigid, even if we’re on the strict end (not alone there!). 

Likewise, plenty of languages have, ah, challenging correspondence between written/spoken, like Hungarian, Arabic, French (thanks, Normandy >_>), and Hebrew. Many many languages have etymologically multilingual lexicons, even very much so, as with mixed languages (strictly defined), creoles (linguistic controversy: was Middle English a creole?), and dialects with very heavy borrowings.

idk, it’s like it always has to be ENGLISH IS THE BEST EVERYONE MUST SPEAK IT or ENGLISH IS THE WORST HOW DOES ANYONE LEARN IT, always exceptional. But really, English is just… a language.