I find the transformation and evolution of languages in general and English in particular fascinating.
Old English was a Germanic language primarily. After 1066, the court language of England became French and remained so for centuries. It was in this period that the Middle English transformation happened.
The fascinating thing about this is that the language became much more regular in that period and, more importantly, it dropped a lot of what I as a native English-speaker at least consider pointless grammatical cruft.
For example: Old English had 3 noun genders (male, female, neuter; this being the norm for European and Semitic languages). Middle English lost that (other than male and female for people). Old English had 5 cases. By comparison, modern German has 4, Latin has 6, some Eastern European languages have more. The concept of case has almost completely disappeared from English (pronouns and the Saxon genitive notwithstanding).
It's fascinating because it seems what keeps languages unchanging is a ruling class. It's a bit like the philosophical view of grammar as being descriptive (my view) vs prescriptive. It's almost a model for conservatism being the resistance to change.
As a native English speaker I've found it difficult to learn other languages not just because of the ubiquity of English but because other languages have concepts that English just doesn't, like in German where adjectives and pronouns have to agree by case, number gender and article of a noun (eg "the" vs der/die/das/den/dem/denen/der/des). That structure just seems like such pointless cognitive load, at least to learn. I'm sure it's zero cost if you grew up with it.
But it does seem like it makes English easier to learn. Obviously there are some complexities in English (eg adjective order and the tenses).
And before anyone mentions Asian languages for simple grammar let me just point out: no clear word separators and the writing system in general (although this varies too).
The biggest problem that non-native speakers face with English is the pronunciation. There are no consistent rules which can be applied to letter combinations; and that alone makes it hard to master.
English is not my native language, but I've been using it for decades. Still have to look up pronunciation. OTOH, my native language Malayalam (and other Indian languages) doesn't really have the pronunciation problem. They're just read as they are written.
> The biggest problem that non-native speakers face with English is the pronunciation. There are no consistent rules which can be applied to letter combinations; and that alone makes it hard to master.
Compared to, say, Italian, sure, especially coming from another language using the Latin alphabet with nearly equally consistent and mostly similar mapping between sounds and writing (say, Spanish).
Compared to languages where the primary script isn't even phonetic, though, I don't see it.
What I’ve always wondered about this is if there’s a better way to present this: pronunciation in English is sort of path-dependent and I wonder if a two-phase approach of recognizing the etymological groups (Germanic-origin, French-origin, Spanish-origin, etc.) and then applying the rules for that group would make the pronunciation appear more regular.
That’s not a counter-example: the Latin root “corpus” was borrowed through French twice: once in the 16th century (corps) and once in Middle English (first corse, then corpse). This is a case of path-dependence: the newer borrowing is pronounced more like French while the older one has been regularized.
It's a definite advantage if a language is phonetic (eg German, Turkish) but there are also worse than English. French springs to mind.
English pronunciation inconsistencies are really a product of how many loan words there are, when they entered the language (ie they tend to become more regular over time) and what language they came from (eg you see consistencies in words of Latin origin vs Greek origin).
Also, at least the vowels are written in English (unlike, say, Arabic or Hebrew, generally speaking).
French pronunciation is more consistent than English, by far. Not that it is a high bar. There are more rules (digraph, silent letters and such), which is more complicated initially, but English is particularly inconsistent.
I don’t think words become more regular with time, actually. There are plenty of irregular words of Saxon origin much older than the Norman conquest. This can be seen easily in lists of irregular verbs: there is almost no Latin root there.
I don't think that's true about French. It has some weird rules, the refusal to pronounce the last consonant in a word is especially galling (ok, pun was intended), but it's fairly consistent once you figure it out.
English, though, is a slough. Enough practice, thorough practice, and you'll get through it. But it's rough going.
I think that's also the reason why Indians have a thick accent while speaking English.
A lot of the languages we learnt in India have a script that's spoken exactly the way it's written. The words contain all the information on how to pronounce it and there are no exceptions. This seems to carry over when we try to learn English (mostly to the everyone's amusement hah).
I’m a native British English speaker with two postgraduate degrees and I still come across words that I know the meaning of but when I think to use them in conversation I realise that don’t know how to pronounce them. Sometimes you just have to say ‘I’m not sure if I’m saying this right but...’ and have a crack at it.
Pedantic nitpick here, but the issue you are raising is orthography, not pronunciation.
A difficult pronunciation implies that a language has difficult sounds that non-native speakers can't pronounce (regardless how those sounds are spelled, or even if the language has a writing system at all).
Just a personal anecdote, my native language is Hungarian, and I have been studying English from pretty early on in primary school. And I was really terrible at it, I assume in part because of the “rules” that has more exceptions than applicable cases. And the language “clicked” much later on, when I accumulated enough of the language that I could “hear” whether a given sentence sounds right or not.
This is in stark contrast to my (failed) attempt at learning German, where even though I know like 3 words all together, I could form quite complex sentences because the language is so regular. I didn’t like learning all the rules, but it “clicks” much faster if they are consistent.
So my experience (as a layperson) is that a language has to be “compiled” and one must hear what is correct to be able to speak it to any reasonable extant - and in the learning phase, sentence forming is more like being “interpreted”. And perhaps a more “dynamic” language is more troublesome to compile.
Semitic languages never had a neuter gender. That's one of the prominent differences between classic Semitic and Indo-European languages.
Otherwise this description is pretty correct, but it omits an important part. Middle English was highly influenced not by Anglo-Norman (the dialect of French spoken by the Norman nobility who conquered and settled in England), but also by the Old Norse spoken by the Vikings who conquered and settled the Danelaw before them.
English has gotten about half of its vocabulary from Anglo-Norman (either in French or Latin form) and this is truly a tremendous influence. It is interesting to note, however, that Anglo-Norman mostly supplemented — not replaced! — native Old English words, and often provided a more aristocratic alternative to them. Thus the peasants who raised chicken, cows, pigs, calves and sheep for meat used Old English words to refer to the animals, but the richer classes who actually ate the meat used Anglo-Norman words to refer to it: poultry, beef, pork, veal and mutton.
Old Norse, on the other hand, probably doesn't comprise more than a small percentage (2-5%) of Modern, English vocabulary, but the parts it affected are much more core to the language, and it often replaced the Old English word, which often had a very similar sound: e.g. sister (Old Norse: systir, Old English: sweoster), egg (OE: ǣġ, pronounced 'ey'), sky (ON: ský, OE: heofon - which became restricted to 'heaven'). Even the plural pronoun "they" comes from Norse (ON: their, OE: hīe).
The loss of grammatical gender and case was probably almost complete by the 1066, when William the Conqueror invaded England. The Middle English that we start seeing a little after the Norman conquest is already missing most of the case and gender endings, which led linguists to believe that this change happened earlier, but was not reflected in the conservative writing. As you say, what keeps language unchanging is the ruling class, but this is ONLY true for the written language, which can be policed. The nobles and clergymen can't very much execute every single peasant who drops a grammatical case. But once the Old English ruling class was replaced with a ruling class who only cared about preserving French, and the writing standards for Old English lost hold, the preexisting changes started surfacing in writing.
As to why Old Norse affected Old English grammar so strongly while it had a smaller impact (in sheer size, if not importance) on the vocabulary than French, there seem to be two factors:
1. Contact between Old English and Old Norse was much higher than contact between Middle English and Anglo-Norman, since the Viking migration brought in both lords and peasants, and intermarriage was common. Language contact was especially a daily thing around the border area, which happened to be just around London. This turned out to be important, since other English dialects took more time to lose the grammatical endings, but once became the capital, the London dialect became the more important during the 14th and 15th centuries, once the royal court gradually started replacing French with English, since the English of the kings and court was most influenced by the London dialect.
2. The two Germanic languages were mutually intelligible in vocabulary, but their grammatical endings were strikingly different. The easiest way for English and Norse speakers to understand each other was to ignore the grammatical endings, and thus they lost their meaning.
Old English was a Germanic language primarily. After 1066, the court language of England became French and remained so for centuries. It was in this period that the Middle English transformation happened.
The fascinating thing about this is that the language became much more regular in that period and, more importantly, it dropped a lot of what I as a native English-speaker at least consider pointless grammatical cruft.
For example: Old English had 3 noun genders (male, female, neuter; this being the norm for European and Semitic languages). Middle English lost that (other than male and female for people). Old English had 5 cases. By comparison, modern German has 4, Latin has 6, some Eastern European languages have more. The concept of case has almost completely disappeared from English (pronouns and the Saxon genitive notwithstanding).
It's fascinating because it seems what keeps languages unchanging is a ruling class. It's a bit like the philosophical view of grammar as being descriptive (my view) vs prescriptive. It's almost a model for conservatism being the resistance to change.
As a native English speaker I've found it difficult to learn other languages not just because of the ubiquity of English but because other languages have concepts that English just doesn't, like in German where adjectives and pronouns have to agree by case, number gender and article of a noun (eg "the" vs der/die/das/den/dem/denen/der/des). That structure just seems like such pointless cognitive load, at least to learn. I'm sure it's zero cost if you grew up with it.
But it does seem like it makes English easier to learn. Obviously there are some complexities in English (eg adjective order and the tenses).
And before anyone mentions Asian languages for simple grammar let me just point out: no clear word separators and the writing system in general (although this varies too).