Language

English

English has about 650000 words (French has about 450000, Danish 300000). Perhaps this is why people consider it a difficult language to learn. In fact, it’s not — all languages are of approximately equal complexity. English has a much simpler grammatical structure than many languages. (Well, it would be easier to learn for a German or French speaker than a Xosa speaker. But then German or French would be easier for a native speaker of English to learn than Xosa.) The problem is probably our spelling, which unfortunately was frozen by the invention of the printing press and the dictionary. As a living language, English changed, but spelling had already been standardized. You can sometimes get an idea of how the language once sounded by looking at oddly-spelled words like "knife" — it was written that way because there were no silent letters.

Kid Speak

Here’s a few samples of child idioms:

• "Peeling" Christmas presents (instead of unwrapping them) — Benjamin, age 2
• "Cooling" birthday candles (instead of blowing them out) — Benjamin, age 2 1/2
• "My legs are tired. They can barely keep their eyes open." — Amanda, age 5 1/2
• (After suddenly driving down a steep hill) "That scared my tummy." — Amanda, age 6
• "Baby eggs" (because they would hatch baby spiders) — Paige, age 5
• Both butter and peanut butter are "peanut butter" (later, both are "butter"); ice cream, even in a dish, is "ice cream cone" — Nichole, age 3
• "A lot and a lot" (instead of "a whole lot") — Nichole, age 3
• "Scraping" leaves (instead of raking them) — Nichole, age 5
• Bees are called that "because they go beeeeeeee!" — Nichole, age 5

Books

Puns

I never did get around to my PhD, but I’ll include good puns here if you send them to me.

Links

• Ancient Scripts covers writing systems
• Brahmi Scripts
• Ethnologue catalogs the world’s 6912 known living languages
• Human Languages Page
• If English were written like Chinese
• Langmaker
• Omniglot covers writing systems (e.g. Mongolian script). It’s pretty amazing that people were writing (likely phonetically) 8000 years ago.

David Dunham Page