In the Land of Invented Languages

[Francis Hult]

The Washington Post

 

In the Land of Invented Languages

 

One surefire way to become aware of the absurdity of the English language is to have a kid. My 5-year-old son's sensible linguistic assumptions are constantly butting up against the deep weirdness of our mother tongue. He tells me "I runned to the store." He should be right. He says "no more asparaguses." That should be correct. And what's the opposite of "upside down?" "Upside up," of course. As opposed to "right side up," which is peculiar and confusing. 

 

As Arika Okrent writes in her new book, "In the Land of Invented Languages," "from an engineering perspective, language is kind of a disaster." English in particular is choked with irregular words and anachronistic phrases that long ago stopped making intuitive sense. If it were a car, it would be a jalopy patched together from a bunch of spare parts. Such is the curse of the natural language. It's not as if French or Swahili is much more logical. 

 

Full story:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/26/AR2009062601723.html

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