[beaversmom]

Fyi...language ping.

[familyop]

Fellow Americans, don’t try to use Oxford English, and do certainly avoid trying to emulate Limey slang. If you fail to follow that advice, you’ll end up sounding like a Frenchman.

[a fool in paradise]

Things really collapsed when twerk became a word.

[SMGFan]

I remember watching The Story of English

[BenLurkin]

What mess?

English is a rich an expressive language.

In a sane world — every human would be learning English.

[familyop]

So let’s pronounce owah ahs. On second thought, maybe we shouldn’t pronounce that way.

[doc1019]

Ain’t nut’n wrong wiff the English language that couldn’t be cured wiff writing in cursive wouldn’t fix.

[nickcarraway]

According to who? This is part of the brilliance of the language.

[RushIsMyTeddyBear]

First word that that stood out in first sentence. ‘Greed’.

No thanks, BBC. I’m sick of the commie class warfare.

[oincobx]

English has 205 ways to spell 44 sounds. Consider this - "cat," "kangaroo," "chrome," and "queue" all start with the same sound, and "eight" and "ate" sound identical. Meanwhile, "cough" doesn’t rhyme with either "enough," "through,"8n "furlough" or "bough." Even some identically spelled words, such as "tear," can be pronounced differently and mean different things.

Mastering such a language takes a long time and requires abilities that most children don’t develop until the middle or latter part of elementary school. 

By contrast, a language such as Finnish has regular spelling rules. Finnish also has the added bonus of a nearly one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters, meaning fewer rules to learn. So after Finnish children learn their alphabet, learning to read is pretty straightforward—they can read well within three months of starting formal learning.

[Jonty30]

The Dutch determined our grammar structure.

[Veto!]

Nope, it ain’t that bad, fellah. We’ums here in ammerica unnerstan it poifecly. We don’t need yore steenkin’ standardization.

[Stosh]

Wait ‘til the BBC finds out that across the pond English is being replaced by Spanglish and Ebonics.

[Yardstick]

I like English because it’s the perfect language for singing. It has a certain neutrality but with just the right amount of germanic crispness. Somehow the basic sound of English just seems well suited to music. I wonder if this is my bias and conditioning talking or if there’s any objective analysis out there that has concluded the same thing.

[bboop]

A friend from Germany said his thinking changed when he learned English. It is so loose, so free, so fluid in a way that German certainly is not. Words can be made up and changed. It is amazingly flexible. I teach ESL adults and kids English, and tutor other subjects as well. I think it is a wonderful language. You can see the history of the people as you study it - “Oh, this is from Norwegian. That is French, that’s why you don’t pronounce the last 4 letters.” Etc.

We have about 100,000 words and THEN the jargon from the different sciences, etc. Spanish - every letter is always pronounced the same, and it is spelled phonetically. There are also about 40,000 words total.

I’ll take English any day to any other language I’ve studied (about 5).

[SnuffaBolshevik]

Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew

[Yaelle]

The English language is built for expression and fun. The structure is such a great base for creation. It’s simple to learn. The hardest phonemes can be skipped without much problem. Adele is a multi millionaire for her use of the a english language, and she can’t even say L.

I am glad it’s my maternal tongue because the nuances are so rich, and you can make it do so very much. French is more descriptive, German is like Legos, infinite construction possibilities, but the layers of wit and meaning in English beat them both. I don’t know other languages except a bit of Hebrew.

[Vince Ferrer]

I like English because it can do this:

Airplane cockpit

Don't call me Shirley

Golly!

[zaxtres]

Gallagher says it best....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDFQXxWIyvQ

[SteveH]

ping