All language is weird, but I sometimes wonder if English isn't the weirdest 🤔 Also, does that technically make liguistics a Weird Science 😁 P.S Never spell how it sounds 😜 @linguistics @humor@fedigroups.social @humor@lemmy.world @aiop @writingcommunity @writingbooks @joinin#LinguisticMemes #Meme #Memes #Linguistics #Language #Words #Humor #Humour #Funny#Reading #Readers #ReadersOfMastodon #ReadingCommunity#Book #Books #Novel #Novels #Fiction #Bookstodon

For some weird reason it became the global language. The typical English sentence is just a series of exceptions.

English isn't a language. It's three languages dressed up in a trench-coat, pretending to be one.

It's because it's a half dozen other languages dressed up in a trenchcoat pretending to be one grownup language. It's a mishmash of all the languages spoken by every invading army who has at one time or another occupied the island of Britain, plus whatever languages were already there, and a bunch of loan words.

This was further compounded by a bunch of posh dickheads who wanted to use their superior education and knowledge of Latin to, I don't know, flex on the poors I guess. For example, the word receipt didn't always have a P in it, but then some aristocrat started insisting that it had to have one. Like, "Well of course it's supposed to have a P in it, its root word in Latin is 'recepto,' how are people supposed to know that I'm a very fancy man who understands Latin if I don't spell it with a P?"

It's all just built on vibes.

Dead internet theory?

Homophones due to language change exist in every language. English has a few rarer features (some slightly less common phonemes, the specific ways that do-support works), but really isn't any weirder than any other natural human language.

Also, orthographic conventions aren't language.

ITT: Monolinguistic English speakers finding out pretty bog standard linguistic stuff and thinking their language is completely unique for it.

It became the global language due to what linguists often call "historical accident", which is effectively a shorthand for saying that it's due to language-external factors instead of language-internal ones. That is to say, there's nothing about the linguistic features of English in particular that led to it becoming the global language.

I'm not sure what you mean about the typical English sentence being just a series of exceptions though. I suppose it would depend on what you mean by "exception", but English doesn't really behave any differently from any other natural human language.

Threads like this are always chock-full of badlinguistics.