Why English Is So Weird (and Why That Might Actually Be Fascinating)
- U I Team
- Jun 30
- 4 min read
Ever wondered why English is so wildly inconsistent? Why dough, tough and bough look like cousins but sound like strangers? Or why you can run out, run up, run over, or even run down, and each one means something completely different? English might seem like a linguistic circus act at times, and you wouldn’t be wrong. It’s an oddball, a patchwork, a beautifully mangled mosaic of borrowed bits and home-grown quirks. But the story of how it got that way is… utterly interesting.
Language Families and Where English Fits In
To make sense of this madness, we have to zoom out a bit. There are about 6,000 languages spoken on Earth today, and many of them are related to each other like cousins in big extended families. Linguists study these relationships and sort languages into family trees, tracing how they’ve branched out over centuries through migration, trade, conquest, and culture.
English belongs to the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family — along with Dutch, German, and the Scandinavian tongues. But if you peer into its vocabulary, you’ll notice something odd. A huge chunk of it doesn’t feel very Germanic at all.
That’s because English has been generously sponging off its neighbours for centuries. First, the Romans gave us Latin. Then the Norse dropped by. Then came the Norman French with their castles, courts, and 10,000 new words. By the time Shakespeare was writing plays, English was already an unruly mash-up. Roughly 26% of English vocabulary is Germanic, about 29% is French, and another 29% comes from Latin — often via French. This means that for native French or Spanish speakers, English might feel oddly familiar at the word level.
Take liberty, justice, nation, dignity, all Latin-derived and relatively straightforward for Romance language speakers. Compare that to the Germanic core: house, dog, water, go, sleep, these words are basic, but the further you venture into abstract or institutional territory, the more you enter French-Latin-English hybrid territory.
The Spelling Nightmare
Even for native speakers, English spelling is a minefield. Words like cough, through, bough, though, thought, and rough show just how unreliable English spelling can be. Same letters, wildly different sounds. This isn’t a case of a chaotic system — it’s more like a series of historical artefacts that have never been tidied up.
Much of this mess stems from Middle English (the era of Chaucer), where spelling often mirrored how words were pronounced. But the sounds have shifted dramatically since then, especially after the Great Vowel Shift of the 15th century. Unfortunately, the spelling didn’t shift with them. We’ve kept the spelling but lost the logic.
Take the Scots word loch, for instance. The “ch” once represented a guttural sound, similar to the one still used in modern Scottish pronunciation. But in most English dialects today, that sound is extinct, although the spelling clings on like a linguistic fossil.
Grammar Gremlins
Another thing that makes English head-scratchingly tricky is grammar. Not necessarily because it’s complex — in many ways, it’s simpler than languages with gendered nouns or elaborate conjugations — but because it’s full of hidden traps.
Let’s start with phrasal verbs. These are verb phrases like put up with, get over, take off, and turn down. Often, the tiny preposition changes the verb’s meaning entirely. You take off your shoes, but a plane takes off into the sky. You put up a shelf, but you also put up with annoying people. These phrases make perfect sense to native speakers, but they can be baffling to learners, especially when the meanings seem totally unconnected to the words themselves.
Then there are idioms, another Everest for learners to climb. If someone kicks the bucket, they’ve died. If they spill the beans, they’ve let a secret out. If you’re over the moon, you’re delighted. If you’re under the weather, you’re unwell. And these aren’t just quaint expressions, there are tens of thousands of them, each with its own peculiar backstory or metaphor.
Languages around the world have idioms, of course, but English has an unusually large number and a love for creativity in combining them. For someone learning English as a second language, it can feel like a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an idiom.
Syntax That Twists and Turns
And then there’s English sentence structure. It might seem straightforward on the surface, but it hides some oddities. Consider the ditransitive construction — a sentence that uses a verb with two objects: “John gave Mary the flowers.” You can flip it around (“John gave the flowers to Mary”), but that original structure — verb plus indirect and direct object — isn’t as common in many other languages.
It gets even stranger in contexts that aren’t grounded in realism. Take this example from C.S. Lewis’ The Horse and His Boy: “The King gave the horse a boy.” Grammatically correct, sure. But a learner might understandably read it as the boy giving away a horse — unless they know that in this fairy-tale world, horses can talk and be recipients of gifts.
One reason English learners can struggle with these constructions is that English lacks a case system — the kind of grammatical markers that show who’s doing what to whom. In Latin or Russian, for instance, word endings change depending on grammatical role, so there’s no ambiguity. English used to have this, but it’s gradually worn away over the last 1,500 years.
So Why Bother?
If English is so weird, why do so many people bother learning it?
Well, for one, it’s everywhere. From business to pop culture, science to international travel, English has become a kind of global bridge language. And while its irregularities are many, its strengths lie in its flexibility, rich vocabulary, and creative expressiveness. You can ghost someone, doomscroll all night, and binge-watch a show, all modern coinages that feel instantly understood.
English evolves fast. It borrows, it invents, it repurposes. It’s a bit of a mess, sure, but it’s a fascinating one.
Sources:
Crystal, David. The Stories of English. Penguin, 2004.
McWhorter, John. Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English. Gotham Books, 2008.
Trask, R. L. Language: The Basics. Routledge, 1999.
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