I am a native English speaker, I can read and (hopefully obviously) write in English. I am not proficient in any other languages, but I know English pretty well.

Despite having a widespread knowledge of English, I didn’t really begin to understand how flawed it is as a language until I had children, and tried to teach them how to read.

Vowels, consonants, phonics, rules; we went over the basics and beyond. It didn’t take long before we got to some words that I had so seared into memory, I never gave them thought. Yet these young brains, applying the rules I had laid out, demonstrated glaring holes in the construction of the English. Not intentionally, of course. They did so by strict adherence to the principle groundwork I set early on, only to watch it crumble at the forming of basic sentences.

I always wanted to share my frustrations someday, and here we are. I don’t claim to be able to make a perfect language from scratch, but I think we can make improvements.

I will update this as I remember and discover “new” complaints. If you have some of your own, share them in the comments. Let’s hate English together. 🙂

Homonyms

Homonyms are this giant category of words that look or sound the same as one or more other words. The word “homonym” comes from the Greek words for “same name”. But in linguistics (the study of language), the name can be visually the same, or audibly the same. Because of this ambiguity, there exist subcategories of homonyms. Homonyms suck.

Homographs

Words that have the same spelling, and otherwise look identical, but have different meanings. Yay, confusion!

Contradictory Homographs

This isn’t even a formal linguistic concept (I made it up), but it befuddles and aggravates me. Words are homographs when they look exactly the same. The Contradictory Homographs are words that look exactly alike but whose meanings are opposed to one another, as in:

Might vs. might

This is one of the most embarrassing oversights in all of the English language. Might – meaning strength and power – exudes confidence. Contrast that with might – meaning “maybe”; uncertainness. What is this, the tower of Babel? We can do better.

Example of might vs. might in a sentence: If we use our might, we just might defeat our enemies. (Ugh, that’s a linguistic train wreck if I’ve ever seen one.)

Homophones

to, too, two

Look at this. The English language committee ran out of sounds, so we ended up with three distinct words all pronounced “too”. This is one of the most common idiosyncrasies in written English. It fools many native English speakers well into adulthood. The late artist formerly and then eventually again known as Prince may have struggled with these words. He just wrote “2” in place of all three.

there, their, they’re

Another classic! Spellcheck is no use when you use a correctly spelled word, but the wrong word nonetheless. The internet is full of ‘their’s mistaken for ‘they’re’s, followed by immediate rebuke. It’s about as bad as loose and lose.

Heteronyms

putting vs. putting

A fine example of the heteronym, these two words are spelled the same but pronounced differently. How do we know there are two words here? Maybe I just wrote the same word twice. Well, you’ll just have to trust me.

Say, for example the first word is

live vs. live

One is the verb “to live”, as in “to be alive”. The other is an adjective meaning alive. These heteronyms are a particular problem because even if you memorize the particular spelling of a word, you don’t know the actual intended word unless you read the surrounding context. This is fine if the word is at the end of a sentence, like “Plants need water to live”. Not so good if it’s the first word of the sentence, “Live animals are cuter than dead ones.

Individual Letter Sounds

S vs. C, C vs. K

I wanted to divide this section up better, but I found that there are so many examples of ‘s’ and ‘c’ sounding like each other, and ‘c’ and ‘k’ sounding like each other, that I grouped them together. Some words even combine both of these into a single word.

After careful consideration, we should just get rid of the letter ‘c’. If ‘c’ either sounds like ‘s’ or like ‘k’, what good is it? The only case I can think of is where it’s used with ‘h’ to make ‘ch’ as in change or Charlie. In other cases where ‘ch’ sounds like ‘sh’ as in Charlottle, let’s just spell it “Sharlotte”. It looks funny now, but if you never knew the ‘ch’ way, it wouldn’t bother you. Other languages have digraph letters (letters made up of 2 characters). Spanish has the “ll” letter and it has its own sound. The Greeks have many digraph letters. Even English with the “W” (literally “double ‘u’ “) has digraph letters in its history. So why don’t we go back a few hundred years where the English language had some reasoning behind it? Bring back the digraph.

succinct

This amalgam of misappropriated letter sounds combines the ambiguous usage of the soft ‘c’ and the hard ‘c’ sounds, as well as an ‘s’. Why spell a word with an ‘s’ and a soft ‘c’? It reminds me of another disaster, “success”.

success

Sometimes a ‘c’ sounds like an ‘s’, and other times like a ‘k’. In “success”, the first ‘c’ takes the role of ‘k’. But the very next letter, another ‘c’, takes on the sound of ‘s’. It is then almost immediately followed by two actual ‘s’es. What the heck!? Surely this could be spelled “suksess” and in one or two generations, no one would care. I would go so far as to say that if we banished the letter ‘c’ and it’s imitation pronunciations, historians would look back and scratch their heads at our silly use of the letter ‘c’. It would be konfounding.

G vs J

Similar to the ‘s’ vs. ‘c’, and ‘c’ vs. ‘k’ categories, ‘g’ vs. ‘j’ is an example of a letter taking another’s identity. But unlike the previous example, I don’t think we need to get rid of ‘g’ or ‘j’. They each have their own identity, unlike ‘c’ which is a mimic, copying the phonetic sounds of other letters to give it the illusion of purpose. No, ‘g’ and ‘j’ have their own identities, we just need to keep them in order.

The problem with these two is that the ‘g’s “soft” form sounds like a ‘j’. Easy fix, ‘g’ no longer gets a “soft” sound. There is nothing wrong with that, plenty of letters don’t have a “soft” sound. “D” doesn’t have a soft sound and no one questions its validity. And so, “giraffe” becomes “jirrafe”, “genetic” and it’s ‘children’ become “jenetics”.

More examples:

Turn the paje.
Jinjerbread cookies (yum).
Jently pet the bunny.
The English languaje is a mess.

Don’t be mad at me if these look wrong. I’m just pushing for some consistency here. I’m good at following rules, as long as I know what the rules are. English needs more rules. Then, once you memorize the rules, you know the spelling/pronunciation of the word. More rules, less exceptions please.

The many sounds of ‘O’

‘O’ is a vowel. All vowels have multiple sounds, at least a “long” sound and a “short” sound. No problems so far, we can get more mileage out of our letters this way. But of course there is a problem, and once again it’s inconsistency. Even my own name, Orion, has two different pronunciations of ‘o’.

‘O’ has a bunch of different sounds, long ‘o’, short ‘o’, short ‘o’ 2 (alternate short ‘o’), fake double ‘o’ (‘oo’), .

“ove” and its flexible forms

The cringe-worthiness happens when you look at words that contain “ove”. There is almost zero consistency in how these words are pronounced. Look at this mess:

Long ‘o’ – grove, stove, dove (the verb), over, cove
Short ‘o’ 2 – love, above, dove (the bird), cover, hover, oven
Fake double ‘o’ – move, prove

Try to find the rule for which ‘o’ sound applies in these words. Ha! There isn’t one! Rote memorization is the only method for learning.

good food

Ready for some more rote memorization? I hope so, because next we have a true oddity.

For some reason (or no reason), there are several double ‘o’ words that look like they fit a perfect pattern. consonant->double ‘o’->consonant. It seems perfectly reasonable to assume that the “oo” in each of these words would make an identical sound. That is not the case.

good, wood, hood and the subtle pattern variant stood all sound like should, would, and could.

Food and mood seem to make actual sense. They both make the common long ‘o’ sound as in balloon.

But what about one and once? ‘O’ takes on a ‘w’ sound, making one sound identical to won as in “we won the ball game last night.” It seems that there are letters better suited for this purpose. I kind of don’t even want to understand why this was done.

Then there is the ‘o’ in woman, which sounds like the ‘u’ in push. But the ‘o’ in women sounds like the ‘i’ in fish. What?!

Letter Combinations

‘ph’

Must we use ‘ph’ to make the ‘f’ sound? We already have an ‘f’!

Loanwords (or loan words)

A loanword is a word that originated in a given language, that is adopted by a second language without changing the word to at all. I have no problem when this comes to foods. I don’t think English speakers need a new name for nachos, or schnitzel. But do we really need to use renaissance, maelstrom, and juggernaut?

One of the main reasons I initially oppose loanwords is because they are lazy. Why make your own bread if you can steal it? Well, maybe our bread would taste better, or at least be easier to chew. That’d be a good reason. Do you think the average English speaker could spell maelstrom correctly on the first try? Forgive me if I have my doubts.

The second reason I am against loanwords, in general, is because they can break the rules we (theoretically) set up for our language. Then we have a mix of words that follow one ruleset, and other words that follow a different group of rules altogether. This makes for chaos, especially for a young individual trying to learn the nuances of the language.

Inconsistent Prefixes

in-

Most people know the word flammable, it means “easily set on fire”. Many people are familiar with the word inflammable also. But most people don’t know that it also means “easily set on fire”.

This is massively confusing, since the prefix in- tends to negate the word following it, kind of like saying “not” immediately before the word.
Example: secure vs. insecure – the first meaning “confident”, and the second meaning “not confident”.