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English Language - TV Tropes

  • ️Sun Mar 14 2021

"If the English language made any sense, lackadaisical would have something to do with a shortage of flowers."

— Doug Larson

Hi there. This sentence you are reading right now is in English. As you can tell, it is the language that we at TvTropes use in our articles.

So, what exactly is English?

English is a West Germanic language note and the third most spoken native language behind Spanish and Mandarin Chinese. English is by far the most spoken second language, due to the fact that 67 countries have English as an official language, and its current status as the global lingua franca means that English language lessons are a part of school curricula throughout much of the world, not to mention the influence of primarily American cultural exports like music, TV shows, cartoons, movies, sports and the Internet.

Nouns

Unlike most European languages, English lacks grammatical genders entirely. To refer to a single object, "a" is always placed before the noun, unless the noun starts with a vowel, in which case "an" is used. "the" is placed before the noun when the object(s) is/are specified.

Plurals are also quite simple in English, as barring some exceptions as "mice", most countable nouns are turned into their plural forms by sticking an "s" at the end of said word. If the noun ends with an "s", "es" is used instead. For Latin/Greek loanwords, "i" is used to replace the "us" at the end of said words, as in the case of "cacti" and "octopi".

He, She, They, It - Pronouns

Despite doing away with grammatical gender, English still retains gendered third person pronouns. Gendered pronouns are used when referring to people or animals of a specific sex/gender, though maritime vessels curiously have "she/her" as a pronoun.

"They/them" as a pronoun has been involved in controversy due to its current usage referring to non-binary people, but "they/them" has been a pronoun used to refer to persons of unspecified gender for a long time. Most non-binary people are fine with being referred to as "they/them", but it is always better to ask them directly about which pronouns they prefer, as pronouns are a highly personal thing.

"It" is used to refer to animals or inanimate objects and is not used to refer to people unless as an insult.

Auxillary verbs (am, are and is) are influenced by the pronoun posessed by the subject/object. For instance, the sentence "I am sick" is gramatically correct, while the sentence "I is sick" is not.

Cough, Tough, Dough - A Fonetick Treignwreck

By far the strangest feature of the English language is how phonetically inconsistent it is. For most other languages, words are spelled more or less the way they are pronounced. For example, the "ei" in German always makes an "eye" sound.

Take for example, the words "cough", "tough" and "dough". They should sound mostly the same, after all, only the first letter diffrentiates the three words, right?

WRONG.

The "gh" in "cough" is pronounced the same as the "f" in fish and the "ph" in telephone, while the "o" is pronounced the same as the "au" in author. The "o" in "tough" is pronounced the same as the "u" in under. And in the case of "dough", the "gh" is not pronounced at all, and the entire word is pronounced exactly the same as the word "doe", as in a female deer.

In fact, this is the reason why most spelling bees are done in English, as without proper knowledge of the etymology of a word, the way a word is pronounced doesn't tell you much about how it is spelled.

For more about the various accents and dialects of the English language: