Idiosyncracies of the English Language

While procrastinating the other day, I came across a particularly thought-provoking article about immigration, cultural assimilation, and difficulties around learning English. 

It began by challenging the classic adage that “If you come to this country, you should learn the language”: a sentiment long echoed across the lands of English-speaking countries as a chauvnistic rallying call for the dim. And in doing so it raised a number of important questions. Not least about the practicalities of thoroughly, or at least functionally, learning English or any other language.

English is widely considered quite an easy language to learn, and in many respects it is.

Its grammar system is very simple. 

Its verbs have only three forms (the infinitive, past simple, and participle); four if you count adding an “s” to the end of third persons (“he”, “she”, “it”). The language doesn’t assign gender, unlike its close neighbour German, for example. Nor does it demand word agreement, like French, Spanish or other romance languages.

English is also universal. The lingua franca. The go-to language should people from France, China, Mexico, and Italy come together and have to find a common tongue.

Difficult to learn? I don’t think so, especially given the amount of resources (literature, music, film etc.) out there. 

Difficult to master? Absolutely. 

The depth and breadth of the English language renders it a seemingly limitless void of cultural and national differences articulated through a bastard mix of Germanic, Anglo-Frisian, French, and Latin.

English is a language many of us speak but whose mechanics few of us really understand. At least, that is, until we embark upon learning another.

For me, it was learning Italian that opened my eyes to the idiosyncracies of the English language, and it was while subsequently training for a language teaching qualification that my awareness of its madness began to crystalise. 

That’s what inspired me to write this piece – to showcase the idiosynracies of the English language at their most barmy and brilliant.

English has a tense that’s neither past nor present, yet claims to be perfect

If someone asked you to explain the difference between the statements “I went to Paris” and “I’ve been to Paris”, what would you say? 

If you’re anything like me during the interview for my first ESL teaching job, you’d stumble for a moment, fluff your words, and ultimately give an answer that fails to convince even the most generous of interviewers that you are in fact a mothertongue.

The difference, I now know, is that the first tense is what we call “past simple” and the second is what we call “present perfect” – formed by adding the auxiliary “have” followed by the participle of the verb (in this case “been”). 

The past simple tense is friendly. 

We mainly use it to talk about completed past events, and it often comes with a specific time referenced in the sentence. For example:

“I went to Paris in 2014 and consumed my body weight in cheese and wine.”

The present perfect, on the other hand, is far from friendly.

And far from perfect. Not quite a past tense and not quite present, it’s used to articulate a variety of situations. The first is when we talk about a past event for which the time it took place is unimportant. For example:

“Yes, I’ve been to Paris before. Fantastic city, but shame about the Parisians.”

In this sentence, when I went to Paris is unimportant (if it were, I would use the past simple “I went two years ago”). What’s important is the action – that Paris is a city I have visited. Therefore, we use the present perfect.

But the present perfect is also used to describe events that started in the past and continue now. 

And this is where it gets confusing.

To read this article, you’ve opened this page (present perfect). And the fact that you are still on this page justifies the tense. BUT if we wanted to make a sequential order, we’d instead use the past simple:

Before reading this article, you made a coffee, turned on the computer and then opened this page.

Confused? Just wait – this is one of the kindest idiosyncracies of the English language.

Even its simple tenses are far from simple

In general, we use a tense called the present simple to talk about routines and things we do regularly:

“Every weekday, I set my alarm for 8 a.m.

We also use it to sequentially layer a series of events:

“Every weekday, I snooze my 8 a.m. alarm, go back to sleep for an hour, and wake up wracked with a consuming sense of guilt.

We use the present continuous (formed with the verb “be” followed by another verb ending in “-ing”) to talk about things we are doing right now:

“At the moment you’re reading the most insightful article you’ve ever read about the English language”

… and to describe several actions happening simultaneously:

“You’re reading this post while your friend is trying to get you to look at cat memes on Instagram.” 

(Thanks for not clicking; I appreciate your perseverance).

But as always, there are exceptions. When we talk about a habit that annoys us, even if it’s regular and routine, we use the present continuous to emphasize our irritation:

My client is always sending me briefs via voice messages.”

or

“He’s always posting Instagram stories of his dinner, even when it’s just a f*cking salad.”

And then, when we’re feeling particularly mean, we use the present simple to talk about the future. You wouldn’t say, for example: “my train will leave at 4:30 p.m. tomorrow” You’d say: “my trains leaves at 4:30 p.m. tomorrow”. That’s because the train is running on a schedule. And for schedules in English we use the present simple.

The “Royal Order of Adjectives” is one of the great idiosyncracies of the English language

When we use two or more adjectives to describe a noun, we must put them in a specific and rather rigid order.

This order is called the Royal Order of Adjectives, and nobody knows a) what on earth makes it royal and b) where on earth this rule comes from.

But, much like the Queen, the Royal Order of Adjectives is here to stay. And we should ultimately be thankful that we adhere to it instinctively and haven’t had to sit down and study it for hours upon hours.

So here’s the order:

Determiner – Observation or Opinion – Size – Shape – Age – Color – Origin – Material – Qualifier

Cast your mind back to Tarantino’s classic “Pulp Fiction” and you might remember the scene where Christopher Walken’s character hands the young Butch a wrist-watch. Or rather a “beautiful, small circular, early 20th-century, bronze Tennessean wrist-watch that had been passed down through his family since his great grandfather, and stored most recently up Walken’s ass during his internment in a Japanese POW camp. 

The scene would have played out somewhat differently had Walken’s character instead waxed lyrical about a bronze circular Tennessean early 20th century small wrist beautiful watch. 

Fortunately for language-learners, this is one of those idioyncracies of the English language that rarely manifests itself. Because attaching so many adjectives to a noun makes you sound both deranged and arrhythmic, we tend not to use more than three adjectives at a time. 

Our idioms are the final straw

Every language has its own corpus of idiomatic expressions, where the meaning is not deducible from the individual words, but which convey a particular idea when taken as a whole. 

In English we have between ten- to fourteen-thousand of them. And to provide a narrative example of the idiosyncracies of idiomatic English in use, here is the tale of Johnny Foreigner.

Who’s come over here to take your job.

Johnny hasn’t been learning English for long and finds the language difficult. He sees no light at the end of the tunnel, and, adding insult to injury, has bitten off more than he can chew by accepting a job in sales.

He accepted the job at the drop of a hat so he could start earning and paying into the social purse. Contributing more, in fact, as an EU migrant than the average UK taxpayer.

There are no cutting corners in Johnny’s new job though, and sometimes with his difficult boss and demanding customers he truly feels stuck between a rock and a hard place. No wonder poor Johnny feels out of his depth.

But every cloud has a silver lining. Fortunately, when not at work Johnny’s also a bit of a couch potato and is on the ball when it comes to picking up the language by watching TV. In fact he finds this way of learning English a piece of cake. Eventually he wants to work as a professional translator, but, without wanting to beat around the bush, he hasn’t acquired enough of the language yet.

He’ll have to cross that bridge when he comes to it; in the meantime, as all his friends keep telling him, he shouldn’t give up the day job.

One of the idiosyncracies of the English language is that our verbs are in an absolute state

There are many English verbs that we almost always use in a simple rather than a continuous form ( “be” or “have” rather than “being” or “having”). 

They relate to:

State (“be”, “fit”, “mean”);

Possession (“have”, “own”);

Sense (“taste”, “feel”, “smell”);

Feeling (“love”, “hate”, “prefer”, “enjoy”);

Cognition (“believe”, “understand”, “think”)

These are called state verbs, and to students of English they’re fiendishly tough. 

Let’s take an example. You’re tucking into your delicious daily bar of Dairy Milk when in an outburst of sensory ecstasy you scream out “This chocolate tastes fantastic!” You use the simple form (“tastes”) because you’re describing the sensory quality – or state – of the chocolate. 

You wouldn’t say “this chocolate is tasting fantastic” as this would be an action. But you would say “the chocolatier is tasting the chocolate to make sure it’s up to scratch.” 

Let’s take another example. A mothertongue English speaker would say:

“Wow! I never understood the complexity of English grammar” not “Wow! I was never understanding the complexity of English grammar”. Why? Because they’re talking about cognitive ability (state).

Likewise, they’d say: “I have dark hair” not “I’m having dark hair” because we’re talking about possession (hair, by the way, is considered uncountable in English; an Italian, on the other hand, would say the plural: ho i capelli castani – “I have dark hairs”). 

We would, however, say: “I’m having a shower” because – you guessed it – we’re talking about an action.

And in case you’re thinking, yes: McDonalds’ “I’m loving it” is 100 percent grammatically wrong. Not that I imagine they lose too much sleep over that… 

But our verbs are in a complete state in another way too: their irregularity. 

English verbs have three forms: infinitive (“play”), past simple (“played”), and past participle (“played”). Some, like “play”, are regular – you just add a “-d” or an “-ed” to the end. 

Others, like “eat”, are irregular but just need some getting used to, like “eat”, “ate”, “eaten”. And then there’s “read”: “read”, “read”, “read”; spelt the same but pronounced differently. 

Cruel right? Oh yes.

English pronunciation has a propensity for being problematic

Ask any student of English the thing they find most difficult, and chances are they’ll say pronunciation.

Some languages are phonetic, meaning that the way in which they’re written corresponds closely to the way they’re pronounced. In Italian, when you see “ch”, you know it’s going to be pronounced hard, like “carrot”, while when you see “c” followed by “i” or “e” you know it’s going to be pronounced soft, like “chicken”.

Counterintuitive, I know, but at least it’s a stable rule.

Unfortunately there’s nothing stable about English.

In 1922, the Dutch writer and linguist Gerard Nolst Trenité published what was arguably his magnum opus: “The Chaos”. Here’s a short excerpt:

Dearest creature in creation

Studying English pronunciation

I will teach you in my verse

Sounds like corpse, corps, horse and worse

I will keep you, Susy, busy,

Make your head with heat grow dizzy;

Tear in eye, your dress you’ll tear;

Queer, fair seer, hear my prayer.

English seems to thrive on its repository of unpronounceable vocabulary. The standard advice given to learners is to check their pronunciation by talking to, or checking with, a mother tongue English speaker. But I, like many others I’d imagine, hold my hands up to sometimes coming across a new word and feeling at sea when it comes to its pronunciation.

Try giving it a go yourself by reading the sentence below which contains no less than eight different ways of pronouncing the sound “ough”. Then listen here to see how you got on:

A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed.

You can’t count on anything

When we produce English, we subconsciously differentiate between countable and uncountable nouns ( that is objects we can count and nouns we cannot).

If we can count it, it can have a plural form; so there’s “house” – “houses”; “car” – “cars”. If we can’t count it, it’s always singular: so ‘water’ but not ‘waters’, ‘news’ but not ‘newses’ (instead, you’d have ‘items of news’, because we consider items something you can count). 

Then we have modifiers that describe the quantity of a noun; words like “much”, “many”, “some”, and “any”. We use these words hundreds of times a day, but every time we do so we have to make them agree with either a countable or uncountable object. 

For native speakers this comes naturally. 

For people who don’t have English as their native language it’s very, very difficult. 

And this isn’t just a matter of agreement; in some languages, things we consider countable are uncountable (like news, for example) and vice-versa. 

To illustrate, let’s assume you’re at a dinner party and someone offers to refill your glass of wine. You accept on the basis that you don’t have much wine left in your glass. You wouldn’t say that you don’t have many wine left in your glass because wine, as a liquid form, is uncountable. However, a few hours later at this party the host has to make a run to the shops because he’s realized he doesn’t have many bottles of wine left. 

Yes, at our dinner parties we drink a lot.

You wouldn’t say he doesn’t have much bottles of wine left because a bottle, as an object, is countable. As has been drilled into us from infancy.

English has to put up with phrasal verbs

Phrasal verbs are verbs combined with particles (often directional words like ‘up’, ‘down’ ‘towards’ or ‘through’). And they’re a nightmare for English learners firstly because they completely change meaning with each particle and secondly because we have so many of them. 

Let’s take the verb “break” for example. 

Easy right? You break a leg, you break your phone, you break a promise. No. To help illustrate the fact, here’s the unfortunate tale of Johnny Robber.

Johnny Robber was an unlucky man. After breaking up with his girlfriend (it was her that broke it off), he broke away from society, broke into a bank, and ended up in prison. It was here, behind bars, that he had a breakdown.

After a few months, Johnny resolved to break out. At first he had no idea how to do this, but then he had a breakthrough. Taking inspiration from the hit TV Show Breaking Bad, he broke into the role of the prison’s most dangerous prisoner, eventually persuading his inmates to help break him out. 

Johnny Robber just couldn’t help himself though. On his way back home, he broke into the first shop he came across, breaking in through the shop door.

But again, luck wasn’t on Johnny’s side.

As well as unlucky, Johnny was also very allergic to domestic animals, and realizing he’d broken into a pet shop, Johnny broke out in rashes.

When the alarm went off, Johnny made a break for it. He hotwired a car outside. But the car broke down outside the first police station he passed. So, well and truly a broken man, Johnny Robber returned to prison.

English has to make do with ‘do’

Every language has its auxiliary verb of choice. Italian has either essere (“be”) or avere (“have”). In English, although we use these words as well, the award for the auxiliary word of choice goes to “do”.

We use “do” to form questions. When you first meet someone you might as “what do you do?”, which sounds fantastically Teutonic when you think about it.

We also commonly use it before the main verb to make negatives: “I don’t understand where the use of ‘do’ comes from” and for emphasis – “but I do like how it sounds.”

We also use “do” to talk about things we… well, do. Often in terms of actions, obligations and repetitive tasks. You do your job, for example, you do the washing up, or you do your hair before going out. But we also use “make”, and the difference between make and do is so subtle that it’s a constant stumbling block for English-language learners.

Put simply, we use “make” when we talk about constructing, building, or creating something.

If you like, it’s the result of the action that we do:

“I did some DIY around the house: I made some repairs to the bathroom” or “I was doing my math homework when I realized I’d made several mistakes.”

And then there are those instances where you can use both but with different meanings: to make good a bad situation, for example, but to do good within society. 

English has no future

Something that makes our language quite unique is that we don’t have a future tense, only a present and a past.

This needs some clarification.

To be defined as a tense, the ending of the verb has to change. So if, as an example, we take the verb ‘play’, we can talk about the present (I play football every week) or the past (I played football when I was young).

To talk about the future, however, we need to add an auxiliary verb: I will play / I’m going to play / I shall play.

The problem is, each of these auxiliaries express slightly different meaning.

Mothertongue speakers are used to using these forms correctly, but people learning the language often get caught out.

Most English learners believe that using “will” works perfectly well when talking about the future. But this isn’t the case. If we’re talking about intentions we use the form “going to” followed by the infinitive form of the verb. So instead of saying:

“This summer I will visit my friend in Spain”

You would say

“This summer I’m going to visit my friend in Spain.”

That is unless you’ve already booked the tickets and made the arrangement, in which case you’d use the present continuous and say:

“This summer I’m visiting my friend in Spain”.

Likewise, you wouldn’t say to a friend: “what will you do tonight. You’d ask: “what are you doing tonight.”

Again, it’s a present tense we’re using to talk about the future. And the reason for this is that we’re subconsciously assuming that they’ve made an arrangement involving other people.

We actually only use ‘will’ to talk about future predictions (I think 2017 will be a turbulent year) and when we make future decisions at the present moment.

For example, when you hear the phone ring and say “I’ll get it!” Want to check? Ring your own house phone if you live with someone else and listen out for the response.

Idiosyncracies of the English language

The English language has evolved, and indeed simplified, over thousands of years to become the beautiful mess that it is today. It’s a global language, with as many as two billion speakers – making it the third most spoken language on the planet after Mandarin and Spanish. And it’s undoubtedly beautiful: whether in its archaic Chaucerian or Shakespearean incarnations or in the slang-filled spoken English that fills the streets of countries across the world.

The idiosyncracies of the English language also render it fiendishly difficult in its own way – its very richness being in many ways its downfall. Whether in terms of its formless future, its phrasal verbs, its infinite list of idioms or its painfully problematic pronunciation, it’s a tough customer among the multitude of languages spoken across the planet.

But it is here to stay as the lingua franca, and hopefully this has gone some way in highlighting some of the weird and wonderful idiosyncrasies of the English language.

Continue to learn, continue to read, and continue to produce it in whatever manner you choose. And when you’re speaking to someone for whom English isn’t their native tongue, bear in mind the idiosyncracies of the English language, think about the difficulties inherent in learning any other language, and always remember to be patient. 

It is, after all, a virtue