Note: This post was not reviewed/edited/written by any LLM/“AI”.

As a linguaphile I just love languages and speak/write 3 indic languages apart from English. Although all of these come from the same root language, English was still a challenge for me to learn quickly because of a lot of confusing parts that I’ve grown comfortable with over the years.

This post is not about the inconsistent pronounciation around everything English which one gets used to in due time(for ex. why are “so”, “no” pronounced differently from “do”, “to”) but other aspects that may further confuse non native speakers.

Same word, opposite meanings (Contronyms)

One of the most baffling parts of English for me- just look at these examples

  • bolt: secure something / run away suddenly
  • oversight: careful supervision / an accidental omission
  • fast: moving quickly / firmly fixed
  • bound: moving towards a destination / restrained and unable to move
  • lease: rent something to someone / rent something from someone
  • left: remaining / departed

So many more words like this.

To negate or not to negate

The first letter of Sanskrit/Hindi is “अ” (similar to English “a”) which absolutely negates. In English the negation may or may not happen-

  • typical -> atypical
  • moral -> amoral
  • theist -> atheist
  • social -> asocial
  • symmetric -> asymmetric

yet

  • sleep -> asleep
  • gape -> agape
  • board -> aboard
  • drift -> adrift

are almost similar meaning.

Unpaired words

Speaking of prefixes/suffixes, there are a lot of words in English that don’t have non *fix bearing counterparts. For ex.

  • Reckful / reckless => there’s no reck(at least in common usage)
  • Inept => no ept
  • Inert => no ert
  • Hapless => no hap

Month naming issues

Every culture came with its own way of naming months- in my mother tongue the names are very different from the Gregorian ones. Yet there are some issues with the names and the order which I believe to be the problem of the language. This has caused me much confusion over the years-

September - the word sept implying seven yet September is the ninth month

Similarly, October (oct = 8, yet 10th month), November, December.

Missing vowel that appears everywhere

At the beginning of the post, I promised not to mention anything about pronounciation but this one is too big to ignore- there’s a missing vowel that determines the sound of so many words yet it’s not a part of the English alphabet.

Think about the pronounciation of the following words and see if you can spot it-

Rust, dove, matter, mercy, mother, rattle, gestation, blood, torque, merge, majestic

Delightful yet pervasive collective nouns

You are required to learn the collective nouns for a lot of nouns which is yet another drag on non native learners. In my case, the time spent on this has been quite productive because in a way they lend a certain beauty to the language but ymmv.

Right now we’re figuring out what we should be calling a group of influencers. Possible proposals are “clout” , “cringe”. What about a collective noun for programmers? I propose “semantic drift” as in “A semantic drift of programmers!”

Conclusion

I don’t believe this is nearly an exhaustive or significant collection but from the perspective of a foreign learner, I can happily conclude that English is a memory oriented language. Its grammar while well defined leaves a lot of room for rote memorisation which can be a thrilling or exhausting proposal to different learners. If I come across any more such issues, I’ll be sure to put them in another blog post.