Interesting and Unique Traits of the English Language

October 12th, 2024 – Interesting and Unique Traits of the English Language

Photography by Jheny Neriza Amanda

Language has always fascinated me. One of the reasons I became a scopist was because I wanted to spend my time learning more about and working with the English language. I don’t think I am alone in believing that the more you know about what you work with, the better you will be at that job. As a scopist, English is the language I work with, so I think knowing as much as I can about it, what makes it special, how it functions, and why the rules exist makes me a better scopist.

I grew up speaking English with my family, predominantly, but I spent a lot of time learning, practicing, and speaking French with my friends. As I grew older and became more interested in languages, I kept these languages and also began learning and speaking Korean and Thai as well. I have a lot of reasons for wanting to know more languages, but I always enjoyed learning the functions of these languages and comparing them to each other. English feels like such a young language, comparatively. The way this language works is different than a lot of other languages, and the rules it follows are just a mix and match from the original root languages English comes from. These things make it a uniquely difficult language to learn and understand. It is curious that English is the universal language in business and education. I hope it doesn’t surprise you to hear that this choice was cultural rather than practical. Today, I wanted to talk about some of the things that are pretty unique to the English language.

Now, don’t take this to mean that they are exclusive to the English language. Languages in and of themselves are built on one another and often borrow from each other as they grow and evolve. It is not common for you to find a language that has traits exclusive to that language. However, in English, there are some quirks that it does not share with many other languages in the world. This makes the language both incredibly fascinating and difficult to learn.

Photography by Samantha Hurley

Nouns are genderless

This was one that always struck me as odd when I was growing up learning French at the same time that I was learning English. French is a gendered language, so any seemingly random object would be gendered. French is not unique in this way, as many other languages follow the pattern of gendering their nouns (think Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic, etc.) Probably because English was my mother tongue, I thought the fact that certain things with seemingly no gender could be categorized as male or female was incredibly strange. I still don’t totally get it, but I am realizing that it is not other languages that are strange for this, but that English is strange for not adopting this specific feature.

Photography by Sajjad Hussain M

There are no “sister/brother” languages

At university, I had two friends who were very close to me. My one friend spoke Spanish as her first language, and my second friend spoke Portuguese as his first language. When I introduced them to each other, it came up in conversation and they decided to speak to each other in their language to see whether they could understand each other. My Spanish-speaking friend said, “It sounds like you’re trying to speak Spanish while sticking your tongue out.” It was hilarious at that moment, but it was also a very interesting parallel that they definitely understood some of what the other was saying even though they spoke different languages.

This is not uncommon for a lot of languages to have sister or brother languages that have similar words and speech patterns. English does not have sister or brother languages like this. English borrows from so many other languages, and other languages incorporate English into their vernacular also, but English is a terrible language to use when trying to learn other languages. The differences between English and other languages in terms of sentence structure, speech pattern, vocabulary, and grammatical rules are so vast that it’s almost like learning a new language with absolutely no basis in language at all.

Photography by Shopify Partners

Rare sounds

Even though English has adapted from other languages as the root, it has taken on sounds that a lot of other languages simply don’t have. The ‘th’ sound in English is not a common diagraph in other languages. The ‘v’ sound in English as well is one you won’t find in many other languages. This is going to make it incredibly difficult for most other language learners to make any sense of English as they’re trying to learn the alphabet and the digraph sounds. There is no basis in most other languages to put those two letters together (T and H specifically) and create a different sound.

Photography by Matthew Henry

Third Person Singular

We just had to be special.

In English, we have decided to take the opposite route to most other languages when we are denoting our third-person singular. Most languages would make changes to the person (first, second, and third) and the amount (singular, plural, or others.) This leaves the third person singular to be left with no suffix or prefix at all in most cases.

English, however, has decided that we would change ONLY the third person singular and leave everything else alone.

The list goes on and on. The amount of other languages in the world that mark their third person singular this way is not a high number.

Curse Words

This one kills me every time I talk about it. The F word in English is one of the most versatile words. It can take many forms, it can have many meanings, and it can be expressed with different emotions as well. You can even add it into the middle of existing words (fan-f***ing-tastic!) in a way that cannot be done in other languages. The versatility we have allowed our curse words, specifically the F word, is not exclusive to English but is very uncommon. Curse words exist in every language, but we have really outdone ourselves with the F word.

Photography by Cansu Tastan

In Conclusion

This is not an exhaustive list. English is a strange language and there are a lot of things that it does not share with a lot of other languages. As much as we like to borrow and steal from other languages, we have definitely tried to leave our own stamp on things by not following all of the rules the way other languages do. Learning other languages, understanding the function of these languages, and being able to compare them to one another is incredibly interesting to me. I think it’s important to speak and know more than one language because it helps us to communicate with others but it also helps us to be more knowledgeable about differences between people and cultures. Besides, English is the hegemon language now, but who’s to say that won’t change? It certainly isn’t the practical choice for a universal language.

I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did! If you liked this post or want to share your own experiences and tips, make sure to leave a comment down below. If you want to see more, check out the last post below or the previous posts on the blog. And if you’re interested in learning more scopist, proofreading, or transcription information, make sure to check back for a new post on the Next Step Scopist blog!

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Sources

https://www.quora.com/What-makes-English-unique-than-other-languages-around-the-world-What-advantages-does-it-have-that-other-languages-don-t-have
https://www.reddit.com/r/linguistics/comments/2et7j6/what_can_english_do_or_what_does_it_have_that/
http://typo.uni-konstanz.de/rara/intro/index.php
https://toppandigital.com/translation-blog/english-rules-languages/#:~:text=But%20there’s%20one%20way%20the,t%20assign%20genders%20to%20nouns.

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