Language

I need to apologize for not 'blogging' very often. The whole concept is new to me, and being a member of the 'older generation', I tend to think of writing letters before emailing and blogging. I'll try to be better in 2008, although I suspect that my daughter is the only one who reads these things anyway.

The English language is a rich and varied one, where the rules seem to be made to be broken. Where else can you 'polish' your 'Polish' furniture and change the pronunciation of a word just by capitalizing it?

For example - how would you pronunce 'ghoti'? In 'tough' and 'enough' the 'gh' is pronounced like an 'f'. In words like 'condition' the 'ti' is pronounced like 'sh'. Now if you pronounce the 'o' the same way it is pronounced in 'women' you have:
ghoti = fish

It has been said that English is one of the hardest languages to learn because of all of the broken rules. It is particularly fun to watch the kids struggle with learning how to spell things. Our older daughter once wrote that if you exercise you will get 'strog mucles'. My personal favorite is when the stamp store called to tell me that my Great Britain supplement was in, and our younger daughter dutifully wrote down the message - "Mom, your grape written supplement is in". Is it possible to die from laughing too hard?

My father particularly enjoyed all of the weird things that can happen with the English language, and wrote a poem about it. I won't quote it in it's entirety here, but some of the lines were:
There are some things everyone understands
You don't get music from rubber bands
When two streets meet they don't shake hands.
If mouse becomes mice, does house become hice?
If a man who keeps sheep is a shepherd, is a man who keeps lion a leopard?

Sometimes things just seem so logical, that you can totally understand why kids say them. We frequently talk about things that happened yesterday, so our grandson started talking about things that happened 'yesternight'.

Its not just the spelling and the different ways that certain words can be pronounced or used (look at bow and it's different meanings), but the punctuation can also have a profound difference in how something is interpreted. And English professor once wrote the following sentence, without punctuation, on the board and asked the class to put in the commas where appropriate.
Woman without her man is nothing.

The men in the class wrote "Woman, without her man, is nothing".
The women wrote "Woman, without her, man is nothing".

I will close with something I read recently that really struck me. At a military conference where American, Canadian, British, Australian and French officers were attending, one of the French generals complained about the fact that Europeans learn several languages, but english-speaking nations don't. He wanted to know why these conferences always had to be in english, instead of french.

One of the American officers quietly said, "Because the Americans, Canadians, Brits and Aussies made sure that you wouldn't have to speak German".

Here's hoping that 2008 will be the best year yet for all of us!