English Language Annoyances And Musings

What features of the English language are deeply ingrained but add little value?

* Gendered honorifics and titles. There are Mr., Mrs., Miss, Mistress, Ms. which convey both gender and, for women, marital status. 

There is also "Master" which paradoxically can refer to either someone who has compulsory authority over someone who is greatly subordinate to them (e.g. a slave or servant), a boy with high social standing, or an expert. It is strongly gendered when referring to a boy with high social standing, is neuter when referring to an expert, and is only very weakly and residually gendered, with the feminine counterpart being "Mistress" when referring to someone in a master and servant type relationship. But Mistress can also refer to either the female companion of a respectable man, or to a concubine or partner in adultery of a man (especially a married man). Meanwhile "Lady" can refer to any female older than a toddler, can be a non-honorific description of a female adult, or can refer to an aristocratic woman or gentry as a feminine version of "Lord".

Yet, honorifics don't have to be gendered. 

The suffix honorifics of Japanese are not gendered. 

The professional honorifics "Doctor" and "Professor" are not gendered and this creates no problem at all. 

Historically the honorific suffix "Esquire" was so masculine that it is the name of a "men's magazine" and generally refers to men as the lowest tier of the British aristocracy that can also refer to esteemed non-aristocrats. But, as an American honorific suffix, referring to people who are admitted to the practice of law, is is gender neutral. 

The title "Chair" works almost as well as the gendered "Chairman" and "Chairwoman". "Policeman" has been replaced with "Police Officer".

One path to get there could be to convert historically male honorifics into gender neutral ones, just as many professional titles that were once gendered are now gender neutral. There used to be a Testator and a Testatrix, but the term Testator is now used in a gender neutral way. The same is true of Executor and Executrix. Actor used to be a strictly male gendered word with the counterpart Actress, but now a female who acts can be called an Actor as well. Even the word "guy" is only weakly male gendered, in part, due to the plural second person expression "you guys" that is a counterpart to the Southern "y'all" in the Northeastern United States.

On the other hand, the use of the gendered word "man" to refer to a person or all people, regardless of gender to include women as well, has become archaic and ambiguous.

* Gendered third person pronouns. We manage without them in the first person and second person. If the third-person pronoun could be narrowed down to gender neutral person v. gender neutral thing, that would be a win.

* Frequently confused words. Two combinations of words are particularly prone to errors: their, there, and they're, and it's and its. Interestingly, four of these mischievous five words involve third-person pronouns, but this time, the gender neutral ones. There are also to, too, and two. Really common words like these shouldn't have equally common homonyms, and instead, should be distinct, unambiguous words. Also, there should probably be different grammatical symbols for a possessive and a contraction, rather than trying to make the apostrophe do all of the work for both of these purposes. I'd favor keeping the apostrophe for possession, and finding a new one to indicate contractions.

* Agreement as to number. It doesn't add much clarity and is a pain when you are editing something and the number of the thing you are talking about changes.

* Spelling words with "qu" instead of just "q", most absurdly in the British English "queue" meaning to get in line or referring to a group of people waiting in line, in which all of the letters but the first are silent.

* The letter "c" which is almost always pronounced as either a "k" or an "s".

What are language features that we're glad are mostly absent in English?

* The formal v. informal second person pronoun that is present in most Romance languages, with the formal second person pronoun doubling as a plural pronoun, is not found in English (although there is residual royal "we" to indicate a formal first person pronoun rather than a plural first person pronoun). Closely related is the distinction, primarily in first person pronouns in Japanese, between speaking as an individual, speaking of multiple people, and speaking official on behalf of a group, which sounds in Japanese like "Wadi wadi" although that isn't the proper romanization (I tracked down the correct one once, but I have forgotten it).

* Abjabs. A writing system that omits vowels in its written version, such as written Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew (sometimes with notations such as accents or dots to indicate the missing vowels in ambiguous cases) is called an abjab, and I'm glad that English is not one of them as there is too much pronunciation ambiguity that you just have to know without being able to discern it from the text itself.

* Alphabets where letters used together combine into combination characters. This is something of an intermediate stage between an alphabet and a syllabary. For example, in Korean hangul, multiple letters in a syllable or word are combined in a fashion that looks superificially a bit like a Chinese character. Arabic cursive script and many South Asian alphabets also have this feature.

* Syllabaries. A writing system where a single symbol represents a single syllable, rather than a single sound, are called syllabaries. Japanese has two of them, and many languages use syllabaries rather than alphabets like the roman and Cyrillic and Greek alphabets where individual symbols represent particular sounds and are combined into syllables. As a result, syllabaries have more characters than alphabets do. When you are writing with a pen and paper, syllabaries can be more efficient, but in the digital age where you are mostly typing, alphabets are superior.

* Heavy use of logograms. Chinese has a writing system in which a symbol represents a whole word and there are many thousands of them. Japanese, Korean, and some other Asian languages use them to a lesser extent through direct borrowing from Chinese (although sometimes with semantic drift as these borrowings often took place during the Tang Dynasty (618 CE to 907 CE). Essentially every language has some logograms (symbols and characters such as emojis which are associated with a whole idea) and they have their place (e.g. the universal symbol for biohazards), but even these can get out of hand (such as the logograms used for fabric care on clothing and bed linen labels).

* Heavy use of honorific hierarchy. Japanese makes very heavy mandatory use of hierarchical honorifics in many forms of conversation, which ingrains hierarchal thinking into people who speak in it, which can cause undue deference to authority.

* Fuzzy gendered pronouns. In Japanese, which is overall a very sex divided culture, it isn't just honorifics that are mostly gender neutral. Some honorifics and pronouns have weak male or female or age or hierarchy connotations, but don't fit in a black and white way into one gender and/or age and/or hierarchy combination or another. They are used more often to refer to someone with certain particular combinations of those, but not exclusively.

* Gendered definite articles (the equivalent of the English word "the"), especially for nouns that don't have a natural gender, that is found in many romance languages.

* Heavy use of inflection. Latin is the worse offender, but many, many other languages also use it heavily. English, however, uses short additional words, such as articles, in lieu of inflection in most cases.

* Fusional languages. I am thankful that English doesn't combined multiple word fragments into very long words that are almost sentences the way that German does.

* Grammatical tone. Many languages of almost all language families, primarily in tropical areas, use grammatical tones as substitutes for additional vowels and consonants.

* Non-gender grammatical genders or cases. Many languages have multiple categories of nouns used in a manner similar to grammatical gender for words that don't inherently have a gender, only they refer to things like whether something is animate or inanimate. Sometimes there are as many as five or ten such arbitrary noun categories. This kind of system is found in the aboriginal Australian that is discussed in the linked video. 

* Dual number. English distinguishes between singular and plural nouns and requires agreement of number in many cases (with some notable exceptions), and requiring agreement in grammatical number is mostly useless feature of our language. But some languages are even worse and singular, dual, and plural in excess of dual grammatical number that works the same way.

* A surname shortage. Many cultures and languages have a serious surname shortage. 

In Asia, this is mostly because when one aristocratic house absorbed or conquered another aristocratic house, everyone subject to the subjected house took the surname of the dominant house, so as the number of aristocratic houses controlling most of the territory dwindled, everybody ended up with the same few surnames. Vietnam is the worst case, but China and Korea are both pretty bad.

In the Americas, this is partially a founder effect phenomena, with the surnames of the initial wave of Spanish colonists who had many descendants in the early generation becoming dominant. 

In other places (Scandinavia and many Slavic countries, for example), patronymics (like Johnson) and sometimes matronymics (like Marydaughter) were used in a transition period to fixed surnames and the existence of very common given names caused patronymics (or matronymics) associated with those given names to become very common among unrelated people.

Thankfully, in the U.S., there are a great variety of surnames, with none too dominant, so this has made distinguishing people by the names easier.

Romanization of foreign languages

It would be nice to have a consistent, global system of romanization of foreign language words and sounds that is consistent with how English words with the same letters are pronounced that is not redundant. So often, I subconsciously ask myself what the heck someone was thinking when they came up with these romanizations.

* Pronunciation of the letter "x" in Romanized words is not consistent. It is usually pronounced "ch" in words of Greek origin, and "sh" in words of Chinese and Mesoamerican languages. At end of French words, the "x" is usually silent.

* Pronunciation of "ph" usually in words of Greek origin, as "f".

* The letter combination "ng" in Vietnamese usually comes out as something like a "wh" sound. That isn't quite right, but few English speakers can get closer.

* The letter combination "wh" in Romanized Maori is usually pronounced like an "f".

* I'm not entirely sure what the letter combination "ts" which appears in Japanese and in many Slavic languages is supposed to sound like, and I usually end up just treating the "t" in "ts" as silent.

* It is annoying that "ll" in Spanish is pronounced basically as "y" (the consonant).

* It is also critical to know the source language when a word has a "j" or an "h" in it. The "j" in Spanish tends to be pronounced as an "h", and the "h" in Spanish tends to be pronounced like the "w" in "win".

* On the other hand, the nasal "n" with a tilde over it, in Spanish (or less often other languages) is completely unambiguous.

* There is a sound in Korean, for example, the initial letter in "kim chi", the ubiquitous fermented cabbage with hot pepper and garlic side dish, and "gim bop" (basically a sliver of what is also called a "California roll") that is more often Romanized with a "k" than a "g", but has a pronunciation that is closer to a "g".

* Another source of consternation in Romanization are the long consonant strings, that seem to be missing necessary vowels, in Welsh and Polish.

* Romanizations of Irish proper names, and British place names, are also incredibly fraught. For example, as a stand alone geographic division, the word "shire" is pronounced "shy-er", but as a suffix in a British place name it is pronounced "shir" which is almost the same as "sure". Many Irish proper names and British place names aren't even pronounced remotely like you would think that they should be given their spellings.

* The biggest problem with French spelling, famously, is that so many of its letters are silent, such as the "h" in the borrowed phrase "h'orderves", which also has the common French feature of being a contraction of more than one word that sounds like a single word.

* You could try to learn the International Phonetic Alphabet. But, this requires learning a completely new script that is only vaguely related to the Roman alphabet, and it contains quite a few sounds that are early entirely absent from most English dialects, which makes them hard to both heard and pronounce, or are very hard to speakers of many English dialects to distinguish from each other.

* In contrast, Japanese has three different scripts in addition to roman letters that you have to learn, but is pretty easy to learn to pronounce well, because Japanese has fewer sounds than English, doesn't have tones, has virtually no sounds that are absent from English, and has more strict rules on how syllables can be constructed than English. If the sounds of a Japanese word are spelled out in roman letters, the main pronunciation difficulty is getting the flow and accent of long words or phrases that are spoken quickly correct.

* Some languages in Romanized forms have excessive numbers of accents, diacritical marks (like tildes and umlauts), often because there isn't a good equivalent to a sound in a language in the roman alphabet. When this is the case, combinations of roman letters or just whole new letters for sounds not found in English, are probably a better solution. Then again, using combinations of letters for novel sounds leaves you with hard to parse consonant clusters like those found in Polish.

Is There A Method To The Madness?

There are annoying turns of phrase that strike me as ungrammatical but are becoming so common that they are now just slightly informal constructions. There may be some patterns and general rules lurking in them, but I haven't fathomed them yet.

* Using the word "gifted" to mean, having been given a gift (i.e. "gave") rather than to mean possessing great talent. I suppose that this is really a use of a regular form rather than an irregular infix.

* Say that someone "graduate high school" rather than "graduated from high school." I'm not sure what linguistic force is driving that and it seems to have its origins in a rural dialect.

* Saying that you "garnisheed" someone's wages or bank accounts, rather than "garnished". A "garnishee" is a third-party to whom a writ of garnishment is directed who controls and holds property for its true owner or who is indebted to the garnishee.

A lot of the other annoying phrased come from business slang or jargon.