5 English Facts you (Probably) Didn't Know

February 18, 2024 - Published
(An adaptation of sorts of my Cohost draft I posted before the site went down)

As a native English speaker, I kind of took the language for granted. In fact, I didn't even like it that much. Other languages always felt cooler, more interesting, with better spelling and less word robbery.

English still isn't my favorite language, but there's a lot of facts I've learned about it that made it much more interesting to me, even if these may be common knowledge for those that are more linguistically-inclined. Still, I hope it helps you look at it in a new light, too!

#1: English is a Germanic Language

This is one of my favorite English facts, because it's such a simple, fundamental fact that completely blew my mind.

Most English speakers at least vaguely know the language families of other European languages. Russian is a Slavic language. German is, obviously, a Germanic language. French is a Romance language (which isn't named after romance by the way, but the Romans). However, if I asked a USAmerican what they thought the closest language to English was, they'd probably say something along the lines of French or Spanish, since they're commonly taught in schools and often cited as some of the easiest languages for English speakers.

The actual closest languages to English include the Frisian languages, Scots, and Dutch, which are all West Germanic languages. North Germanic languages like Swedish and Norwegian are often cited as the actual easiest languages for English speakers to learn (as far as I know, they just have much simpler grammar). Why don't you hear about these languages more often? 

Well, there are many reasons, but a notable one would be that it goes both ways -- Germanic speakers can learn English very easily! While there are certainly reasons to learn these languages, the fact that 90% of the Netherlands' population can speak English probably discourages people from thinking of learning Dutch as a helpful language.

Anyway, what makes English a Germanic language? Well, even though English has a lot of DNA from other languages, linguists take a look at a variety of features to figure out where the language evolved from, to put the process simply. English has a lot more in common with the Germanic languages when looking at it grammatically and phonetically, despite having similarities to French and Spanish. Even if a language hypothetically, say, had the majority of its vocabulary from a different language family, that wouldn't say anything about its own language family because those words would simply be borrowed. Hypothetically. 

#2: The majority of English's vocabulary are from Romance languages

OK so yeah, this is why I think many people get confused about the Germanic stuff.

The 3 most major areas that English pulls its vocabulary from are Germanic languages, French, and Latin. To be clear: it's VERY common and normal for languages to "steal" from other languages -- this is not unique to English, nor is it even uncommon (I had a lot of fun poking my Spanish friend with words from Tagalog like "kuwaderno"). However, I do feel that this specific distribution is very interesting, and not something I've seen in other languages.

According to this chart, less than a third of English's vocabulary even comes from Germanic languages, and over half come from Latin and French. That's wild! Despite being a Germanic language, it has less Germanic words than it does French words.

How does that work out? Well, being beautifully illustrated in this Youtube Short, that's because English's most basic words are all of Germanic origin. It's only when you start branching out to more formal, scientific, and other terms that English dips more into Romance words.

When you look at word origins, this will occur fairly often! If you get a basic word like "small" (Germanic origin), you'll find a lesser-used formal equivalent like "minuscule" (French/Latin origin). There's "loving," and then there's "affectionate." There's "tool," and then there's "device." It's almost scarily consistent!

#3: English has at least a dozen vowels

A E I O U, and sometimes Y. That's how I was taught about the vowels, but it's all a LIE!

Germanic languages usually have a lot of vowel sounds, but English was assigned the Latin alphabet, which was only built for 5 vowel sounds. The result is that these 5 (and sometimes 6) letters carry a LOT of different sounds. Say these words out loud and think about the sound that the letter "A" makes: father, have, about, orange, bald. These are completely different! "Orange" literally pronounces the "a" like the "i" in "bit"! 

Depending on the dialect of English and the analysis of the vowels, English has anywhere from 14 to 25 vowel sounds, which is unreasonably large considering how they're all written the same. This is the reason other Germanic languages use accent marks for letters like ä and ü, to be able to express more vowels. 

While we're talking about it, it's worth mentioning that English spelling is a bit of a crime in general -- scrolling through the English orthography page for this article made me realize it's a very fun experience if you want to see some real horrors! While English had multiple attempts at spelling reforms, simply none of them have taken off.

#4: English had some words rewritten to be more like Greek and Latin

Now for one of my least favorite English facts! 

Do you hate random silent English letters? Do you feel like it would be way better if they were spelled more like they sounded? Now, what if I told you that some of these were spelled worse ON PURPOSE???

There are a number of English words that scholars in the 16th and 17th centuries rewrote in order to make them resemble their Greek/Latin counterparts more. For example, "debt" used to be spelled "det," but they added in the "b" to make it resemble Latin's "debitum." The problem? Some of these weren't even correct!

"Island" used to be "iland," but they added in the "s" to make it more like Latin's "insula." This is somewhat reasonable to assume, except that's not actually where the word came from! Compare to Old English's "īeġland." This crime was also carried over to the "c" in "scissors," the "c" in "scythe," and the "h" in "ache" (which used to be "ake")! 

The worst part is that I can't find a single proper source for WHY this happened. There is a very biased book linked on Wikipedia from 1920 saying that they did it "to emfasize** their classical erudition," which is about the best we got. In casual English, that basically means "they just wanted to show off how smart they were." Knowing how much people worshipped the Greek and Latin ancients, I would not be surprised myself if that was the reason, but it does feel pretty icky to me.

** That's not a typo -- the book was about a proposed English spelling reform, and they sure did emfasize it with their spelling!

#5: The English "TH" sound is very rare

OK, let's wrap things up on a more positive note. 

Despite being in the most common English word, the "th" sound in "the" very rare across languages! It only occurs in 5% of all documented languages, which excludes "almost all languages of Europe and Asia". Do you feel any more special yet?

Well, actually "th" makes 2 different sounds in English. Say "that" and "think" out loud -- notice how "think" is a sharper sound, more like an S, while "that" is a softer sound like a D. The "think" sound is even rarer at 4% of all languages! This does make it rather difficult for foreigners to learn the sound though, which is why you may hear them substitute other sounds instead.

Which to be fair, imagine trying to explain to someone the difference between pronouncing "think" and "sink." Feeling it in your mouth, it's just a slightly different tongue shape that's very difficult to describe. Kudos to anyone learning English as a second language...

Sorry for all the blue text! Just wanted to make sure everything was nicely sourced so it didn't look like I was just spouting nonsense. I hope you all enjoyed, and that this helps convince you to learn an auxlang you have a great day!

• Vecderg