English isn't Normal

Some (or maybe all?) schools teach kids to associate sounds with letters of the English alphabet; and then use that association later on to teach them spelling. Try doing that second part (spelling by sound association) in your head and you’ll be wondering how anyone who knows English thought that this idea could possibly work! After all, as John McWhorter wrote in this great article:

“For a normal language, spelling at least pretends a basic correspondence to the way people pronounce the words. But English is not normal.”

But wait, continues McWhorter, spoken English is no less weird:

“It’s weird in ways that are easy to miss, especially since Anglophones in the United States and Britain are not exactly rabid to learn other languages. But our monolingual tendency leaves us like the proverbial fish not knowing that it is wet.”

But we Indians can surely appreciate that part. Take gender association with objects in other languages, says McWhorter:

“We think it’s a nuisance that so many European languages assign gender to nouns for no reason, with French having female moons and male boats and such. But actually, it’s us who are odd: almost all European languages belong to one family – Indo-European – and of all of them, English is the only one that doesn’t assign genders that way.

Do read the article if you want to know why that happened.

Another difference is the existence of so many synonyms. No other language has so many synonyms that it requires a thesaurus. But why?

“English got hit by a firehose spray of words from yet more languages… English had thousands of new words competing with native English words for the same things.”

A key point there is that all those words co-exist because there is no equivalent of the French Academy that decides which words constitute “proper French”. Instead, in English words just had “culinary transformations”:

“We kill a cow or a pig (English) to yield beef or pork (French).”

Lastly, this very co-existence of words from different languages and “firehose spray of words from yet more languages” means that English is one of the few languages where etymology can be a meaningful field of study:

“The very idea of etymology being a polyglot smorgasbord, each word a fascinating story of migration and exchange, seems everyday to us. But the roots of a great many languages are much duller. The typical word comes from, well, an earlier version of that same word and there it is. The study of etymology holds little interest for, say, Arabic speakers.”

But for now, I am guessing my kid will be cursing the weirdness of English spellings.