Irregularity (17)

10 Name: Anonymous Linguist : 2008-01-01 20:53 ID:0psVZ5Uk

>>3 -- certainly English verbs have fewer forms per verb than other heavily-inflected languages. But students still have to memorize and internalize dozens of strong verbs, where the vowel changes for the past tense.

>>5 -- you make a good point in that spelling has remained largely the same even though pronunciation has drifted. This has been true for centuries; our strange "silent E" pronunciation rule stems from how that "E" used to be pronounced, and had a lengthening effect on the vowel before it. The final "E" became weaker and eventually wasn't even pronounced, but the lengthening effect remained. And the Great Vowel Shift affected long and short vowels differently. But you don't learn any of that when you're learning to read English; you just have a bunch of rules and exceptions.

But the real tragedy of learning English isn't the weird spelling, but the varied pronunciation you'll encounter in the real world. If you're learning English for business, you have an advantage in that people will be speaking formally and clearly; people who drawl or jabber at home are likely to reel it in a little at a white-collar job. But that's not true if you're driving a cab. Add that to the difficulty of being understood with an accent, especially if you've learned the words in print. Actually, maybe spelling is kind of a curse to the English learner, since a word's spelling doesn't really tell you how to pronounce it these days.

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