Musings on language
There has been an exciting addition to my life this week which is calming the web obsessed side of me. Yes, my new Michel Thomas Advanced French course has arrived in the mail from my good friends at Amazon. It promises to make learning French grammar easy. And perhaps because I’ve only listened to half of the relatively easy first disc so far, it seems to be working. Repeat now: Je veux envoyer une lettre a Jean Pierre. Je veux lui envoyer une lettre. Je veux la lui envoyer.
Anyway, my revisiting of both French and Japanese recently has got me musing on the profound ridiculousness of the English language. I like English. It is a flexible, flowing language with an astonishingly rich vocabulary and a high tolerance for bastardisation by Americans. However, it is littered with quite frankly bizarre stuff:
The whole ‘aught’ thing. Caught, taught, bought (that’s bought with an ‘ought to be difficult). It’s like that just to look pretty isn’t it?
Phrases which mean something, but at the same time, don’t. One of my very favourite English language expressions is ‘be that as it may’. As an idiom it’s a decorative way of actually saying something meaningful, but if you look at it too hard at it for too long it just turns into an apparently random concoction of short words which make no logical sense whatsoever.
Polite versus non-polite language. English speakers moan about having to learn other languages informal and formal verb conjugations but at least you know where you’re at with them. What’s the polite way of speaking to someone in English? Not swearing?! It’s all so very painfully subtle.Thank God English is my first language is all I can say.
Tags: language matters