One night years ago when I was visiting
Buenos Aires, I had dinner with an
acquaintance. We were speaking in English
because he spoke my language far better than I
did his. I apologized for my inadequacy in
Spanish and complimented him on his
bilingualism.
He replied, “That’s understandable. After
all, English is so easy to learn and Spanish
is very difficult.”
I was stunned. In school, Spanish had been
regarded as the gut course among foreign
languages, far easier than French, German, or
Latin. And English, at least among
English-speakers, was thought very difficult,
with its irregular spelling and pronunciation
given as the usual reason. I have never tested
this hypothesis, but I bet every culture
regards its native tongue as difficult to
learn. After all, foreigners always struggle
with it, so it must be difficult, right?
Not necessarily. Most people are oblivious to
the oddities and weirdnesses of their native
tongue—as well as its simplicities—for
precisely the same reason that fish are
oblivious to water. My Argentinian friend, for
instance, had no idea that Spanish spelling
and pronunciation are absolutely regular. To
hear a Spanish word is to know how to spell it
and to see one is to know how to pronounce it.
There are no spelling bees in Spanish-speaking
schools because there are no bad spellers
among native speakers of the language.
So, is English actually hard to learn? Well,
yes and no.
Historically, English is one of the Germanic
languages but because of its insular evolution
it now bears little resemblance to the other
Germanic languages, such as German, Dutch,
Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish. And while
there is some overlap in vocabulary with
French, the two grammars are very different.
Indeed, English grammar is quite unlike any
other language in the world.
That’s the bad news for foreigners. The good
news is that basic English grammar is
ridiculously easy to master. In French there
are three conjugations of verbs (the so-called
-er, -ir, and -re verbs, after their
infinitive endings). Each conjugation has its
own set of endings for each tense and each
mood (such as the indicative and subjunctive).
A typical French verb has more than 50 endings
that must be learned. Spanish also has three
conjugations. Portuguese has four, Latin five,
German two.
English has only one conjugation. And most of
the endings (“inflections” is the linguistic
term) disappeared with the transition from Old
English to Middle English 800 years ago. So a
regular English verb has a grand total of only
four forms: walk, walks, walked, and walking.
The most irregular verb in the language, to be, has
only eight forms: be, am, is, are, was, were,
being, and been.
And while many other languages, such as
French and Spanish, make frequent use of the
subjunctive mood, it has nearly disappeared in
English. (The Rodgers and Hart song “I Wish I
Were in Love Again” is the only instance in
popular culture I can think of that uses the
subjunctive.) Also vanished is the second
person singular (thee and thou), which in many
other languages is booby-trapped with social
nuance.
Even English irregular verbs are simple. They
all come from Old English and, except for to be and
to have,
are all irregular in the same way: they change
the radical to express the past and perfect
tenses. Thus swim,
swam,
swum.
(There’s one verb in English that is either
regular or irregular depending on the subject
of the sentence. People are hanged, but other
things are hung.) All the irregular forms of
all the irregular verbs in English can be
listed on less than a page of a paperback
dictionary. It takes 16 pages to do that with
Spanish irregular verbs.
English nouns are equally easy to deal with.
They have no gender, for instance. French
nouns, however, are all either masculine or
feminine. And while there are a few helpful
rules (French nouns ending in -tion are
almost always feminine, those that end in -eau are
almost always masculine) most of the time the
student of French simply has to memorize which
gender a French noun belongs to, and it is
maddeningly arbitrary. You might think that
the French words for army and navy would be
masculine, but you’d be wrong. A few French
nouns, amour,
for instance, are masculine in the singular
and feminine in the plural.
German and Latin divide nouns into masculine,
feminine, and neuter with an equal
arbitrariness. The German words for knife,
fork, and spoon are, respectively, neuter,
feminine, and masculine. In these languages
adjectives must agree with the noun they
modify in both gender and number. English
adjectives are invariable.
And let’s not even get into Latin nouns,
which have endings to mark what part of speech
they are being used as (and are divided into
no fewer than five different groups, called
“declensions,” each with its own set of
endings.)
Some languages, but not English, have very
different written and spoken forms. French has
a past tense that is only written, not spoken,
while casual spoken German and Greek are
practically different languages from the
formal written versions of those tongues.
.
But English, of course, while known to
linguists as the “grammarless language,” is
hardly without its difficulties for
foreigners. English spelling and pronunciation
are, unlike Spanish, not well coordinated.
There are three reasons for this. One is that
English has a lot of phonemes (the individual
sounds that make up a language), and
especially a lot of different vowel sounds.
Spanish has only five vowel sounds, one for
each vowel letter. English, depending on the
dialect, has at least twelve, plus diphthongs
and even triphthongs. Another reason is that
English just doesn’t like diacriticals (accent
marks and such) that many languages use to
indicate differences in the pronunciation of a
letter.
Finally, English is orthographically
conservative. When a word is borrowed into
English, we tend to maintain the spelling of
the foreign word even as we adapt the
pronunciation to the English sound structure.
We borrowed two Greek words to coin photography
and we still spell it in the Greek fashion. In
Spanish, they quite sensibly spell it fotografia.
But the lack of coordination between sound
and spelling is no worse than, say, French,
with its myriad silent consonants and
functionless accent marks. For example, the
circumflex accent in French, such as in hôtel,
doesn’t affect the word’s pronunciation.
Indeed, all it tells the reader is that the
vowel used to be followed by an unpronounced
S, an S that was dropped—because it was
silent—300 years ago, when French spelling was
reformed. The circumflex was then added to the
preceding vowel to let the reader know the S
used to be there, as if the reader cared. This
is known as French logic.
An even bigger problem with English for
foreigners is the fact that its everyday
vocabulary is so immense, thanks to the many
languages that contributed to it over the
1,500 years of its existence. The average
speaker of English has a vocabulary with about
half again as many words as the average
speaker of, say, French or German. English
abounds in synonyms, each with its own
slightly different nuance or meaning. That’s
why the thesaurus and the dictionary of
synonyms are standard reference works in
English but seldom found in other languages.
Learning the subtle differences in meaning and
tone between, say, “penniless,” “broke,” and
“impecunious,” is, to put it mildly, a chore
for foreigners.
One of the quirks of the English language is
that nouns originating from Anglo-Saxon often
have associated adjectives that come from
Latin or Greek. This is especially true of
body parts, such as ear-aural, heart-cardiac,
liver-hepatic, etc. While the names of farm
animals are usually Old English in origin, the
words for their meat are usually from French.
(Possibly, this is because after the Conquest
the English-speaking peasants cared for the
animals, but it was the French-speaking Norman
aristocracy who ate them.)
This multiplicity of words even extends to
prefixes. To negate an adjective, for
instance, one uses un- (as in uninterested),
dis- (dishonest),
in- (inattentive),
or a- (amoral).
Which one to use often depends on the
particular word’s etymology, but some words
take more than one, producing thereby a slight
change in meaning (uninterested is not quite the
same as disinterested).
Equally often, however, it is arbitrary, just
as French gender is. It can even vary over
time. Jefferson used unalienable in the
Declaration of Independence. Today we say inalienable.
The advantage of the huge vocabulary of
English, of course, is that it makes English a
superb literary and scientific language, able
to express fine and precise shades of meaning
far more easily than other tongues. This is no
small part of the reason English has become
the near universal language of science. It
also makes English more efficient. The English
version of a lengthy text is always
substantially shorter than versions in other
languages.
But while English has a very large everyday
vocabulary, it also has the maddening habit of
using the same word to mean many different
things. Fly,
for instance, means an annoying insect, a part
of a pair of trousers, a part of a theater, a
means of locomotion, the outer edge of a flag,
a type of hit in baseball, and a type of hook
for catching fish. A flyer can be either one who
flies or a printed advertisement that is
handed out. A bill is everything from the
jaws of a bird to an invoice to a piece of
legislation under consideration to an
advertisement that is posted on a wall, not
handed out.
So English has its full share of oddities and
complications for the foreigner, and is as
difficult to fully master as any foreign
language. But, thanks to its very simple
grammar, it is probably easier to grasp its
rudiments, regardless of the student’s native
tongue, than any other language not closely
related to that native tongue. That’s
fortunate, for English is now inescapable.
In the Western world, Latin was the common
language of the educated classes for
centuries, the last, linguistic, remnant of
the Roman Empire. Newton wrote his Principia
Mathematica, published in 1687, in
Latin, not English. In the seventeenth
century, French took over as the language of
diplomacy, a position it kept until the
twentieth.
By the twentieth century, however, English
had become the second-most common native
tongue (after only Mandarin Chinese). And it
is by far the most common second language,
thanks, initially, to the British Empire and
then to America’s economic and cultural
dominance in the post-war world. Thus English
became the world’s new lingua franca (to use
an Italian term that literally means “Frankish
language”).
English dominates the Internet. It is the
only language used in air traffic control. It
is the overwhelmingly dominant language of
science. (Even the premier French scientific
organization, the Institut Pasteur, publishes
its papers in English first and only later in
French). Sixty percent of all students
studying a foreign language today are studying
English. It’s a required course in school,
starting early on, in an increasing number of
countries.
So we native speakers of English have a great
advantage. Learning English at our mothers’
knee is almost like being born able to do
algebra. Those not so fortunate can still get
a handle on it fairly easily, however. That’s
lucky for them because, like it or not,
acquiring a competence in English is now a
necessary part of every serious education
around the world.
