On my side, I've always uttered that English is an illogical language. I collected, obviously, more agreements from British than from Italians, who always try to demonstrate that I'm wrong. Well, I'm not alone in my firm belief and at least one English mother tongue linguistic says the same. Bill Bryson, in his book "Mother Tongue" writes at page 1, line 20: To be fair, English is full of booby traps for the unwary foreigner. Any language where the unassuming word fly signifies an annoying insect, a means of travel, and a critical part of a gentleman's apparel is clearly asking to be mangled. And at page 2, line 5: The complexities of the English language are such that even native speakers cannot always communicate effectively [...]. And so on. The most critical part of English is, probably, the spelling, which resisted to any attempt to reform it along the centuries. Following a test from Bryson's book, written at page 112.
Just as a quick test, see if you can tell which of the following words are mispelled.
supercede
conceed
procede
idiosyncracy
concensus
accomodate
impressario
rhythym
opthalmologist
diptheria
anamoly
afficianado
caesarian
graffitti
In fact, they all are. So was mispelled at the end of the preeceding paragraph. So was preeceding just there. I'm sorry, I'll stop. But I trust you get the point that English can be a maddeningly difficult language to spell correctly.
No comments:
Post a Comment