English isn't Broken

(Note: this article is about a Cracked top 5 list about "defects" in English that was shared on my Facebook wall. I'm not linking to it here, but you can find it with a little google-fu)

So I don't normally pay much attention to Cracked articles. I'm generally morally opposed to lists of this style that exist only to get easy page clicks for ad revenue. Cracked is especially guilty because they break up their 5 item list across two pages for no other reason than to double the number of potential page views they get from anyone reading through the list. It's shitty, but that's not what this blog is about. Let's talk about language!

First let's talk about the language in their title. The use of the word "defective" implies that English is somehow broken, that it's worse than other languages that don't share the "defects" in this list. This is of course ridiculous. There is no concept that any natural language can express that cannot be expressed in any other natural language; however, some languages may handle certain situations more gracefully than others. This is perhaps most easily illustrated with a concept called "lexical gaps", where a language lacks a word for something found in other languages. I'll write more about this another time, but for now, consider the word Gemütlichkeit in German. There's no word for this in English, so to express this concept of Gemütlichkeit, we might instead talk about a kind of coziness, warmth, and comfort felt when surrounded by friends, family, and good food and drink. We can express the same concept, but what takes one word in German, requires a whole sentence or more in English. Does this mean English is defective? No, it just means we have a different way of expressing the same ideas.

Saying "yes" to negative questions

With that out of the way, let's move on to their actual list. Number 5 probably should have been number one, as it's actually the most interesting. English, they rightly point out, has no real systematic way of contradicting a negative assertion. Here's what I mean by that. If someone asks you "you're not going to the movies with us tonight, right?" you are presented, as an English speaker, with a dilemma that almost always ends in having to clarify your answer further. Answering "no" is simple enough, and implies that you're not going to the movies. But if you say "yes", does that mean "yes, I am not going to the movies tonight" or "yes, contrary to your assumption, I am in fact going to the movies tonight"? You've no doubt found yourself in a similar situation before, having to use a whole sentence to express what is essentially a simple yes or no answer.

This is not a problem that is unique to English; however, many other languages have come up with a solution that lets speakers give a perfectly clear one word answer. Take German for example, which essentially has two "yes" words and a "no". For most questions, ja is used to answer in the affirmative and nein for the negative. There are variations on each of these in actual speech, just like you can say "yeah", "uh huh", "word", "yup" or any number of other things to mean "yes" in English; but they all essentially mean either ja or nein. Where German differs, however, is when answering a question like the one above. Du hast keine Allergien gegen Erdnüsse, oder? ('You're not allergic to peanuts, are you?') is an important question to answer properly if you are in fact allergic. This is where doch comes in. In German, to say "no, I'm not allergic", you would still just use nein, but for clarity's sake, if you want to say "yes, I am actually allergic, please don't kill me", you simply say doch, instead of ja. The word doch here means not only "yes" but also has the extra meaning of "contrary to your assertion...yes".

It's really handy; and as an English speaker, I will admit that when I first learned this about German, I could only think "wow! Why don't we do something like this?" Still, just because we don't have our own doch doesn't mean English is "defective", nor does it mean we are incapable of expressing the same meaning as doch. We just need a few more words than German does.

Confusing science words, or as those of us who can read call them: words

Number four on their list is "Our Language Is Full of Confusing Science Words". I was tempted just to write "read a damn book" for this section and leave it at that, but I won't. These "confusing science words" are just words of Latin or Greek origin because Latin and Greek were for centuries the lingua franca of European academia. If I may simplify things just a little, when you consider the history of the Liberal Arts in Europe, this just makes sense. Traditionally the Liberal Arts included grammar, logic, rhetoric, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy (which until relatively recently, also included astrology). For centuries in Europe, consulting the greatest minds in each of these areas meant reading the works of classical thinkers like Cicero, Euclid, Aristotle, and others whose works were preserved in their own languages, namely Latin and Greek. These two languages were therefore a prerequisite for advanced study, and by the time universities began to spring up around Europe, everyone smart enough to be studying or working there already spoke Latin and Greek, so they became the de facto languages of the academic world.

What this item on their list is actually talking about is borrowing. Borrowing is when a language takes some linguistic unit from another language, usually a lexical item (this is loosely the same thing as what we'd generally think of as a "word", but can also include things like idioms where the whole phrase essentially acts like one big word). All languages do this, though some are more willing or resistant than others. Icelandic is notoriously resistant to borrowing, due in no small part to the pride Icelanders take in their language as part of their cultural identity. While nearly every other European language uses some variation of "telephone", which was constructed from Greek, Icelanders say sími, which literally means 'cord' or 'wire'. Similarly, they don't use the latinate "computer" but rather say tölva, which is a Portmanteaux (a combination of two words, like English "smog" = "smoke" + "fog") of the words "tala" ('number') and "völva" ('seeress'). English on the other hand, is about as willing to borrow as a language can get. Yes, we have a lot of words with Latin and Greek roots, and yes, this stems both from the aforementioned traditional European university culture as well as the Norman Invasion of 1066. You'll notice, for example, that we generally have two different words for animals depending on whether we mean the animal as food or the animal as a living creature (steer vs beef, chicken vs poultry, swine vs pork). This is because the Anglo-Saxon farmers working on the farms raising the animals called them by their Germanic names (e.g. swine), but when they were served to their Norman rulers as food, they used the Romance words (e.g. pork from Latin porcus 'pig').

Even though it shares similar origins with words Cracked mentioned like equine, I'm not so sure that pork really constitutes a "confusing science word" for most, but then again, I like to think people are generally a little smarter than that. Cracked clearly disagrees. What they also leave out are all the other borrowings we use all the time. I guess because they're not so easily grouped together with all the "confusing science words". Punch (the drink), pajamas, shampoo, toddy (as in hot toddy), cot, juggernaut, and bandana are all of Hindi or Urdu origin. Banjo, zombie, zebra, jumbo, gumbo, funk, and chimpanzee are all from Bantu. Aardvark is Dutch. Pet is Gaelic. Shiv is Romani. Algebra, alligator, and alcohol are all Arabic. Cravat (which depending on your age and where you're from, might be another word for necktie) is from an old German word that means 'Croat' because Croatian soldiers used to wear a distinctive scarf that became fashionable around Europe and eventually turned into what we now know as the necktie.

Yet I don't think anyone would consider any of these words "confusing". Languages have basically two options when they need to come up with a word for a new concept: make it up or let someone else do the hard work and just borrow a word from them. English just happens to lean pretty heavily towards the latter. Sometimes we even borrow words multiple times. Bodega and apothecary are the same word. We just borrowed one from Latin and the other from a much later form of Latin most people usually call Spanish. Or sometimes we'll even borrow words we already have in Germanic from other Germanic languages (Aardvark is cognate to earth-pork...a much better name if you ask me) like skirt, which is the same word as shirt, we just borrowed it from Scandinavian because...I don't know. Why not?

He, she, it, they

The next item on their list asserts that we don't have a gender neutral singular pronoun. In fact, we have two. For anything that doesn't have biological gender, there's it (although sometimes we impart gender where there isn't any, such as with ships, which are nearly always feminine). For anything that does have a gender, like say...people, there's they, as in if anyone needs a break, they should take one now. Now, Cracked points out that they is unacceptable to "grammar professionals", but ignoring for a moment how much I absolutely hate the mere idea of a "grammar professional" as a class of person, they're falling into a trap that so many people do when talking about language. They completely ignore the fact that we use different registers when communicating in different circumstances.

I'd wager that they is absolutely the gender neutral singular pronoun we all use in regular day to day speech (and as a "grammar professional"...barf...I can tell you it's absolutely fine to do so), but in more formal speech, we follow a different set of rules. This often means our tools for communication are more restricted, or at least different. In formal writing we can't use they for this purpose, just like we can't use fixin' to as a way to mark imminent future. This does not mean, however, that English doesn't have these structures. We're just picky about when we use them. There's actually a wonderful little rant by Stephen Fry about register and how important it is not to get too caught up in the minutiae of language when so often they really don't matter. Click here and turn up the volume. The man has a thoroughly pleasant voice.

Excuse me, ma'am

The next item on their list--"We Suck at Politely Addressing People"--does not apply to anyone from the South. No we don't have separate formal pronouns like German, or an incredibly elaborate system of honorifics like Japanese, but I've found that sir and ma'am get the job done quite nicely. Really...that's all I can say about this one. They're just wrong. For those of you who aren't from the South, well...bless your hearts, I'm not sure there's much to be done for you. You could always try to marry up if it's not too late.

Y'all, yins, you guys, yous guys

The last item on their list laments the lack of a distinctive second person plural pronoun in English. Again, this boils down to register. Basically every dialect of American English has a distinctive you plural. The South is well known for its use of y'all, while yins shows up in Pennsyltucky, and you guys finds much broader favor across the rest of the country. No, you would not use y'all in a formal essay (mostly because you shouldn't be using second person at all in a formal essay), but it's perfectly acceptable and downright useful in normal speech. Hell, Southern English has even gone so far as to differentiate between inclusive and exclusive you plural. What do I mean by that? Well, let's say I'm talking to a group of three people. I can address just two of them by saying y'all better be nice to your other group member. Then I can address them all by saying and all y'all need to put your names on the assignment. So I can use all y'all to explicitly address the entire group, while y'all can be any plural subset of the group (including the whole group). So you see, not only do we have these pronouns, but they're actually part of a relatively robust and complicated system. Even without them, it's almost always clear from context whether the person is addressing a group or a single person. Too often people talk about language in a vacuum, which is utter nonsense. Language is an intrinsic part of the human experience.

Maybe I should write something about register at some point, although this pretty well covers it. We just use different chunks of our language for different social situations. What pedants do is pretend that the language we use in everyday speech isn't part of the language because it's "improper". Well, it's nonstandard, but as I think I covered in my very first entry, no one speaks Standard English. No one. Not even your eighth grade English teacher who was so mean to you. It's silly to ignore all these other parts of our language just because they're not things we would say in a job interview. And if English doesn't even work the same way depending on your given social situation, it's pretty safe to assume that other languages are going to have different ways of expressing the same ideas. Sometimes they'll be able to do so much more efficiently, sometimes not. The evolution of languages is a messy thing, but my job would be dull as hell if it weren't, so I'm grateful. There's beauty in the different ways languages work. I'd never call any of it defective.

In short...don't read Cracked. It's terrible.