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> The absolute selling point of English is the fact that since it has no proper rules ...

Anyone who thinks English has "no proper rules" clearly has never had the joy of learning English as a second language.

(Or maybe they have a really warped notion of what "formal rules" mean when it comes to languages. There are no natural human languages in the world that are dictated by formal rules. All formal rules are after-the-fact descriptions devised to explain the language that is already there.)



> Anyone who thinks English has "no proper rules" clearly has never had the joy of learning English as a second language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophony#Ablaut-motivated_comp... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reduplication#English

Tic Tac Toe is the one that I remember most easily...

> Examples include: bric-a-brac, chit-chat, clip-clop, ding-dong, flimflam, flip-flop, hip-hop, jibber-jabber, kitty-cat, knick-knack, mishmash, ping-pong, pitter-patter, riffraff, sing-song, slipslop, splish-splash, tick-tock, ticky-tacky, tip-top, whiff-whaff, wibble-wobble, wishy-washy, zig-zag.

Saying any of those in the wrong order sounds wrong to a native ear.

It even shows up in Live, Laugh, Love.

And then there's adjective order... https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/...

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If people want a language with "proper rules"... head over to conlangs. https://youtu.be/x_x_PQ85_0k https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil is my favorite (I've got a copy of the grammar guide that is on my shelf of random things next to Random Numbers by the RAND corporation).


English regularly violates its own rules and additionally has no correcting body (Swedish has central body that dictates language rules for example).

That's part of why it's so difficult to fully master, and there are rules (sentence structure) for clarity, but there's no actually solid rules for pronunciation (it differs depending on word) or even what words are really proper words (there are central dictionaries that largely agree, but there are also "Hinglish", patois and the other creole dialects).

English steals aggressively from other languages, since that's its history. Other languages might borrow some words but there's multiple branches of these inside english. You can use English with only latin-root words, or English with only Germanic-root words and both are as valid english as each other.

Easy to learn; awful to master.


> English regularly violates its own rules

That's true for any human language. E.g. in Russian, adjectives use the gender, case and plurality of a noun, until they suddenly don't.

> English steals aggressively from other languages, since that's its history.

That's not unique to English. E.g. Japanese has even borrowed numerals, and some of its pronouns are borrowings. Russian has borrowed verb forms.

Having a lot of Latin borrowings is quite common in most European languages. Even in Romance languages, there are a lot of Latin borrowings (e.g. minuto is Latin borrowing, miúdo is a native Portuguese word).

> You can use English with only latin-root words, or English with only Germanic-root words and both are as valid english as each other.

That's similar to how e.g. Romanian has Latin-based and Slavic-based vocabulary. This is not that unique.

> but there are also "Hinglish", patois and the other creole dialects

Many languages have or had patois and creoles based on them.




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