I Hate English

English is simultaneously both a very efficient and woefully moronic language, and the more I learn about it the more conflicted I feel about it. We'll do this in 2 parts.

Part 1 - What's good about it: Efficiency

The efficiency of English is due in no small part to a little something called the Saxon genitive. Here's a small example: a kid named John has a bike. In French, if we were to express this bike in a phrase, it would be le velo de John, or "the bike of John." If we were to describe his bike, we would say something like le velo de John est un piece d'ordures, or "the bike of John is a piece of garbage." This sounds rather weird to my fellow native English speakers and I. Were we to describe his bike, we would simply refer to it as John's bike. That little 's at the end of John is used to denote his owner ship of the bike, and does a great deal to shorten phrases. The 's, or Saxon genitive, is an incredibly useful linguistic tool that is used to decrease the amount of time explaining something. While other languages have similar morphemes, most of them are expressed as a different conjugation of the word, whereas English speakers are fat and lazy and prefer to just tack a 's or ' on the end of everything (a simple ' would be used if the subject ends with an s, such as Francis' bike or Jesus' teachings). English has all sorts of little tricks like this that make it terrifically easy for speakers to express ideas in a clear, succinct and precise manner.

If you wish to express the phrase "the tank of Phil has turned into a terrifying bird of death," you might want to reassess your priorities and focus more on running away from the thing.

Part 2 - What's bad about it: Everything else

This poem pretty accurately illustrates why I don't like English. Because English lacks accents or any indicators of pronunciation, the way you pronounce words is based largely on completely arbitrary rules that will randomly get up and leave depending on what word you're using. We have nothing to indicate which syllable to emphasize, whether it's a hard or soft c, if a word ending with the suffix 'ain' is pronounced like curtain (sounds like kerten) or pertain (which actually sounds like it's spelled). A thousand different kinds of problems arise because whoever invented English decided to be a trendsetter and chose to omit the accents that were becoming all the rage with other languages. This was a terrible idea on their part.

This next problem is more of a personal irritant than anything else, but English is decidedly more difficult to rhyme than other Romance languages. Take Dante's Inferno, for example. Were one to read Inferno in its original Italian tongue, they would probably find that it contains a pretty consistent rhyme scheme. That's because just about every word rhymes with each other in Italian. However, when reading an English translation, the rhymes are infrequent and completely optional, because one would really have to stretch in order to express all of Dante's ideas while maintaining a rhyme. English' nature is that of a very blocky and efficient language, one that excels at expressing ideas and couldn't give less of a shit about artistic endeavors or foreigners who are unfortunate enough to try to pick it up as a second language. Hell, I think most English-speaking rappers should get an award for linguistic proficiency because they are seriously using one of the most ill-suited languages ever to convey complex ideas and tell a story, all while preserving a consistent rhyme.

Hauling around 3 and a half pounds of metal on his teeth can't possibly make his job any easier.

So yeah. I don't actually have a way to end this post...but here's a picture of Ralph Nader.

Yo.