All languages have their difficulties. English pronunciation and spelling is a mess but grammar is easy for example. My native language has 3 genders and 4 cases for example and there are languages with more.
That makes it harder. 7 is the limit of Balto-Slavic languages but I know that one Baltic language used to have more, loaned from Estonian or something, but lost them over time. So my guess is your local dialect preserved one? Otherwise I have no clue. I think modern Indo Aryan languages have less, Semitic languages have 2 genders and I don’t know how many cases. I could rule out some more to show off but not much.
Lithuanian! Im not sure if they were loaned from estonian :3 we used to have 10 (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, illative, allative, adessive, and vocative) allative is basically dead outside of a few words like velniop, adessive is just dead (only really seen in old writings) but illative is the interesting one: it’s not used in standard lithuanian outside of some set phrases (kairėn, dešinėn, and in our anthem vardan), but it’s still used in dzūkija and east aukštaitija, so… Yeah that’s some lore :3
Why? There’s plenty of strange things in English, inconsistent grammar rules, weird pronunciations, and pointless words for simple ideas.
Like there’s umpteen words to describe different kinds of meat, pork, beef, veal, mutton. In Chinese you can get away with saying just the animal + meat, 猪肉, 牛肉, 小牛肉, 羊肉 (pig meat, cow meat, young cow meat, goat meat).
English has stupid rules around pluralisation. There’s been arguments that the origin of the word should dictate how it’s pluralised, and other arguments that a “true English” pluralisation rule should apply, but then incorrect usage slips into common vernacular and suddenly it’s perfectly okay to pluralise a Greek word with a Latin plural suffix. Then you end up with the plural of octopus being octopodes, octopuses, and octopi!
The long and the short of it is that all languages have weird-ass quirks in them that don’t necessarily make any sense but feel natural to their native speakers. It’s a prime example of how intuitiveness isn’t actually real a thing.
It really is illogical lol :3 I tried teaching my parents before and trying to explain why all 3 Es in mercedes or all 3 Cs in pacific ocean make different sounds like “they just do”
Though my native language is quite hard for non-native speakers as well
In English’s defence, it’s not an English word. It’s a German company named after a Spanish name. And at least to my ear, the Spanish and German pronunciations also have 3 different Es. One helpful Redditor also provided an IPA guide to the German pronunciation, agreeing with my ears:
mɛrˈtseːdɛs
The “e” in the middle is long and stressed.
Edit: I would also say, that most of the times it is even pronounced like this:
məˈtseːdɛs
But I can’t even begin to justify the letter c sounding like /s/, /k/, and /ʃ/.
For Spanish, at least, your ears deceive you. It’s /meɾˈsedes/ in the vast majority of the Spanish speaking world, and /meɾˈθedes/ for large parts of Spain. All 3 ‘e’ sounds are identical.
Spanish can be weird and nonsensical at times, but it’s mostly counterintuitive grammatical rules. Things like “antes de que” having to be followed by the subjunctive, even in the past tense when you’re speaking of an event you know for certain occurred as you’re saying. The relationship between phonology and orthography in English is just a mess that’s gone and contaminated this one.
I do wonder if there might be a difference between the phonemes and the realisation, the way there was in German according to the German commenter.
But also, even without that, stress undoubtedly changes the perception of the vowel (not nearly as much as in English, but certainly not nil), as does an r after a vowel.
Well the c being s and k thing comes from latin I think :3 like v and u being the same letter… and I believe i also had a second sound? Plus there’s vowel shifts that happened after the writing was standardized and all that, and characters that no longer exist like Þ and ð
Either way it can be confusing when coming from a language with a fairly regular pronunciation ^^ (though of course we also have some quirks lol)
Good job. English is a very hard language that barely uses logic.
English is one of the easiest languages in the world to learn.
All languages have their difficulties. English pronunciation and spelling is a mess but grammar is easy for example. My native language has 3 genders and 4 cases for example and there are languages with more.
7 cases in the standard version of my language, 8 in the dialect I speak :3
You didn’t mention genders so I guess you have none which leads me to Uralic or Turkic languages maybe?
Oh if we’re doing a guessing game then…
3 genders technically, though the 3rd one (neuter) is super rare, so it’s basically 2 in practice :3
That makes it harder. 7 is the limit of Balto-Slavic languages but I know that one Baltic language used to have more, loaned from Estonian or something, but lost them over time. So my guess is your local dialect preserved one? Otherwise I have no clue. I think modern Indo Aryan languages have less, Semitic languages have 2 genders and I don’t know how many cases. I could rule out some more to show off but not much.
Lithuanian! Im not sure if they were loaned from estonian :3 we used to have 10 (nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, instrumental, locative, illative, allative, adessive, and vocative) allative is basically dead outside of a few words like velniop, adessive is just dead (only really seen in old writings) but illative is the interesting one: it’s not used in standard lithuanian outside of some set phrases (kairėn, dešinėn, and in our anthem vardan), but it’s still used in dzūkija and east aukštaitija, so… Yeah that’s some lore :3
Yeah same. 6 cases, 3 genders and also dual form because why not.
I wish for spelling reform, but that’ll never happen.
Have you tried French?
Chinese, Arabic, and Russian speakers laugh at me when I say this.
Why? There’s plenty of strange things in English, inconsistent grammar rules, weird pronunciations, and pointless words for simple ideas.
Like there’s umpteen words to describe different kinds of meat, pork, beef, veal, mutton. In Chinese you can get away with saying just the animal + meat, 猪肉, 牛肉, 小牛肉, 羊肉 (pig meat, cow meat, young cow meat, goat meat).
English has stupid rules around pluralisation. There’s been arguments that the origin of the word should dictate how it’s pluralised, and other arguments that a “true English” pluralisation rule should apply, but then incorrect usage slips into common vernacular and suddenly it’s perfectly okay to pluralise a Greek word with a Latin plural suffix. Then you end up with the plural of octopus being octopodes, octopuses, and octopi!
The long and the short of it is that all languages have weird-ass quirks in them that don’t necessarily make any sense but feel natural to their native speakers. It’s a prime example of how intuitiveness isn’t actually real a thing.
You can get away with lots of things in English too! Just curious, do you speak another (than english) second language ?
I speak Japanese, and can still read German and understand most of it. German’s the secondary language I studied.
I’m a native Swedish speaker so technically English is my second language, and the others came after.
It really is illogical lol :3 I tried teaching my parents before and trying to explain why all 3 Es in mercedes or all 3 Cs in pacific ocean make different sounds like “they just do”
Though my native language is quite hard for non-native speakers as well
In English’s defence, it’s not an English word. It’s a German company named after a Spanish name. And at least to my ear, the Spanish and German pronunciations also have 3 different Es. One helpful Redditor also provided an IPA guide to the German pronunciation, agreeing with my ears:
But I can’t even begin to justify the letter c sounding like /s/, /k/, and /ʃ/.
For what it’s worth, all the ‘e’ in mercedes pronounced in swedish sound the same (first can sound ‘ä’ in some regions though).
For Spanish, at least, your ears deceive you. It’s /meɾˈsedes/ in the vast majority of the Spanish speaking world, and /meɾˈθedes/ for large parts of Spain. All 3 ‘e’ sounds are identical.
Spanish can be weird and nonsensical at times, but it’s mostly counterintuitive grammatical rules. Things like “antes de que” having to be followed by the subjunctive, even in the past tense when you’re speaking of an event you know for certain occurred as you’re saying. The relationship between phonology and orthography in English is just a mess that’s gone and contaminated this one.
I do wonder if there might be a difference between the phonemes and the realisation, the way there was in German according to the German commenter.
But also, even without that, stress undoubtedly changes the perception of the vowel (not nearly as much as in English, but certainly not nil), as does an r after a vowel.
Don’t know about other Germans but for me, the last e is a schwa. So it’s more [mɛɐ̯ˈtseːdəs] I think but I’m not completely sure.
Well the c being s and k thing comes from latin I think :3 like v and u being the same letter… and I believe i also had a second sound? Plus there’s vowel shifts that happened after the writing was standardized and all that, and characters that no longer exist like Þ and ð
Either way it can be confusing when coming from a language with a fairly regular pronunciation ^^ (though of course we also have some quirks lol)
Me, an English teacher: nods somberly