A lesson in Language - a prompt from Dizzy Dick

Who's Dizzy? This guy.

Dizzy wonders about stuff, much in the same way I do. He asked me to write something up about languages, a topic he covered not long ago because my comment on it was worthy.

I guess it was, so here's a story about languages.

English, being a language was my strongest subject in school. For years I argued my way into the top classes. I enjoyed English because it intrigued me how, when and why things were the way they were. Someone had to have figured it out. Someone had to have written the rule book. Starting with a capitol letter, punctuation and so on.

The least used characters in spoken languages are the colon and semi-colon. Most people don't know where and how to use them.

I knew in school. I also had no issues differentiating between the words "There", "Their" and "They're" and all the other words that sound exactly the same but are spelt differently and mean something different.

Don't confuse me with someone of intelligence. While I know the difference between the three words, I don't know what that difference is called. I also don't know what synonyms, antonyms, nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc are.

Probably because I was never taught it. And there lies the problem. The people that don't know the difference between there, their and they're were never taught it either.

So it's pretty fair, and stupidly obvious of me to say we don't know anything we haven't been taught.

Fair enough.

But why is Wednesday spelt the way it's spelt?

Why is there a silent "K" in knife, know, knee?

These were questions I asked in school. But no teacher had the answer. I was told to be quite and stop disrupting the class. I was also told a host of other words which I won't go into today.

Words are a funny thing. And that's only in English. There are words in other languages that don't exist. But they do in English.

Other languages don't have the problem of having three words sounding exactly the same but meaning different things. However, they do have an issue with the same word having different meanings when used in certain context, different context.

Yep, languages as a whole are pretty poorly designed. And that doesn't even take into account how the young kids of today speak English, using acronyms my generation invented for speaking on the Internet like "WTF, CBF, LOL, ROFL" and so on, now used in real conversation with people face to face.

Some people say that the youth of today are degrading the English language. As someone over 30, who speaks English "properly", I'd be quick to agree. But I don't and I can't.

I'll explain why. It's very simple actually. Think about this next time you shake your head at the illiterate and broken speech of some young hoodlum. Imagine what Shakespeare would think of your "proper" English and how degrading and illegible it is.

Languages change, some new ones can be invented, while there are cases of other languages disappearing, while some languages are based on older ones, they are seldom the same these days, and will be share less commonality in the future.

The truth is, language morphs, it's allowed to. What was spoken as little as 200 years ago is considered "funny". What we speak today will be read in ancient history and spoken of as a "funny" language. And what their ancestors read and hear will be considered "funny".

When you break it down further, and I'm going to hurt your brain for a moment... you'll realise that all language is a series of silly sounds someone invented. How on Earth we comprehend these silly sounds while not being able to understand others (ie: other languages) makes me wonder why there's such a difference at all. Regardless of how different our characters may be from English to Arabic, from Chinese to Armenian, we all have the same sounds. But the German word "Ausfart" to me means "Australian Fart" in German actually means an Entry or Exit point. And while I see humour in "Exit" point. It is furthest away from a fart, considering you'll see a sign displaying this word in Germany at nearly every freeway exit.

But when you break it down, the letter "A" has the same sound in German as it does in English. Following the "U" and the "S" there's nothing unusual there. And the rest of the word "fart". I just wanted to say that word. But seriously, again.... there's nothing unusual there. In fact, each character is pronounced pretty much as it would be in the English language.

Right... Well, I'm going to stop now because my brain is starting to hurt.

Cheerio! :)