English: A funny language

Gaston Bachelard once said, “ A special kind of beauty exists which is born in a language, of a language, and for language." 

When I was young, I had an amazing English teacher with great pronunciation. Listening to her pronunciation, I come home and correct my family members' pronunciation. They retaliated at me and said "Kai hodna English ak Kai aan amma naanchi.”(Konkani. Meaning: It's okay. English doesn't have a parent. )

I ignored them back then, but now I’ve realized how true it is. For instance, think about what comes after the letter 'Y'. If I go to different parts of the world and ask this question I'd get a mixture of zeds and zees. But we don't do that with other languages, do we? In Kannada(an Indian language) the letter ಕ is the same in the whole of  Karnataka. 

Funnily, we pronounce P-U-T as put and C-U-T as cut. Why? Why do we have to say those words differently? If you ask a 2nd-grade kid to spell Enough he’d definitely end up spelling it as E-N-O-F. Wait, that too sounds enough right?

Q-U-A-Y is a word pronounced as 'ki'. If asked randomly, 90% of people would pronounce/spell it wrong(Except for spell bee champs). Why is it so?

For all these questions English has an answer. And that’s Phonetics. But wait; This language has something called Vowels which states A, E, I, O, and U are the sounds produced by our vocal tract.  Apart from these basic sounds, we have 44 other sounds in phonetics where all mathematical tools are used for this 26 lettered language. They join a and e to get æ which sounds like ‘a’ like in have/cat/and 

This is the reason why we spell queue as queue and not Q/Que/Queueueueueueueueueue…..

 

I’m not done yet. This language gets funnier the deeper you go. There are these oxymorons and repetitive words which makes it funnier. I once heard someone say “I’m a deeply superficial guy.” That’s nearly far from making sense. Isn’t it?:P 

‘The bandage was wound around the wound.” It’s crazy that two words which spell the same have two meanings.

What makes it even funnier is the punctuation. Let me give you an example.

Once, a teacher wrote “ A woman without her man is nothing.” and asked her students to correct the statement.

All the males in the class wrote;  “A woman, without her man, is nothing.”

On the other hand, all the females wrote; “A woman: without her, man is nothing.”

A smart student would have written, “ A woman without man is wo.” Free from controversies :P 

 

There are other things that make no sense at all. Like, Where’s egg in an eggplant? Why is a boxing ring square? Why is it called a pineapple when it’s neither pine nor apple? If the plural of tooth is teeth and the goose is geese why isn’t the plural of booth beeth? 

 

The Funniest part is that I had to do all this in English. 

 

To end with, I've got a translation to do. "Uska vishwas jitna bhi raha ho, jeevan ke parinaamon ke upar uska koi asar nahi pada." This in English is "All the faith he had had, had had no effect on the outcome of his life."

 

No offense.

Thank you.

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