ENGLISH FEATURES I DON'T LIKE

May 15, 2025 - Published

I have a friend who jokes that I hate English, but I don't! It's a language with fascinating linguistic evolution and great expressiveness in its vocabulary.

However, I am a designer by trade, and looking at English's design fills me with great pain. Is it unfair to look at English that way? Yes, it is, because unlike what some people may think, English was not designed by a single person (even if there's an argument to be made about certain dictionary writers having a large influence over it).

Still, I would compare it to judging the aesthetics of a tree in a forest. Is it the tree's fault it looks that way? No, not really, but I also reserve the right to judge its appearance for fun.

-- SPELLING --

Alright, let's just get this one over with first.

Everyone knows English's spelling stinks, but I feel like a lot of people dislike it for relatively illogical reasons.

"Q is a useless letter!" Yeah, sure, Q is basically a second K that has to be paired with U at all times, and it WOULD make sense to remove it entirely if it was, say, a new language without context.

However, alphabets are also really important for historical context. Even though French spelling is notoriously confusing since it doesn't match up with the spoken language, its preserved spelling DOES allow it to be very easily recognized by speakers of other Romance langauges.

In other words, if English eliminated the letter Q, words like "quiche" would be spelled something like "keesh," creating a larger barrier for English speakers learning other languages and vice versa.

I don't have any issues with Q being in English because it's a remarkably consistent letter. The ACTUAL issue I have is with letters being inconsistent.

The entire point of having a written language is to have a physical representation of the spoken tongue. This generally necessitates letters to be consistent so that words can be read (or written!) even if the reader has never seen the word spelled out before. Otherwise, every single word will have to be memorized individually.

English is really bad at this!!!

Like, it's OK for letters to be pronounced in different ways, as long as it's consistent. The letter A sounds different between the words "par" and "pare" due to the silent E at the end, and that's a safe rule to memorize.

If you hear a word that sounds like "rair", you can safely guess that it's spelled either like "rair" or "rare" due to the vowel sound, and you'd be correct on the second one! Same with "stair" and "stare". However, get this for the word "tare", and for some reason, it's spelled "tear"!

"Tear" is spelled and pronounced the same way as "bear", "wear", and "pear", but NOT "sear", "rear", and "tear" -- yes, despite being spelled EXACTLY the same way. This is utter nonsense!! You just have to memorize basically every single word because the rules just aren't consistent at all.

It's not like some other languages where exceptions aren't common, it's basically the standard when it comes to English spelling. An example I used in another article is that the letter A makes a different sound in the words: father, have, about, orange, and bald! Why do I keep bullying the letter A specifically? Uhh, read that article, probably.

-- MORPHOLOGY --

English words conjugate and inflect in weird ways sometimes, but I'm gonna focus specifically on a few types of inflection.

First is the plural! Yes, these are irregular and it can be kind of annoying. Why is "feet" the plural of "foot" when the plural of "hand" is "hands"? However, I think we give too much credit to even the DEFAULT way of pluralization.

While there are some words that add an -es (like "dishes"), most words just add -s. Rocks, papers, houses, forests. However, using a consonant to create the plural form in English, a language that already has ridiculous consonant clusters, is wack!!

"Sixth" is a word that already has the consonant sounds K + S + TH at the end, but the plural makes it "sixths", which is 4 consonant sounds back to back!!! Mind you, this is a language that has words that don't even CHANGE for plurals (deer, sheep, etc.) meaning that plurality doesn't even feel necessary at all (there are many languages that function perfectly without it)!

However, the second feature is what really makes this even worse for me. This is the possessive form, like saying "The dog's bowl." You see the issue with this? In speech, it's ALSO an -s. It's a good thing that they're written differently, but "dog's" and "dogs" are pronounced exactly the same in speech.

What happens if you have both? Well, you pronounce BOTH of them, of course -- "These are my dogs' bowls." This would probably be considered an inserted vowel between the two S sounds (which is definitely a Z sound, by the way), but it's still horrifying to me that you could reasonably construct a sentence featuring both of them on TOP of a word with a large consonant cluster, like "His bowl had two-sixths' worth of the pot's soup," I don't know.

Anyway, there's a third one. You can contract "is" into other words. That's right!! The dog's dogs' dog's good!!! That's a completely grammatically correct sentence!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

-- CONCLUSION --

OK I think that's about all I got for now, because pretty much any other point I make would just be retreading old ground with other articles I've written. This is like my third article on English and I think that's even more than I need LOL