English, you're quite unusual.
You can say things most languages just can't!
And I think some of your most interesting skills can tell us something about you and
a little about languages the world over.
We met some linguistic skills English is missing out on, but what about the features
it does have?
I mean, does it already possess any uncommon or rare traits?
Why yes, yes it does, compared to most languages.
Now, "most" should have a bunch of asterisks next to it, because figuring out what most
languages do is hard.
There are several thousand and we'll just be taking samples, but you're not here for
stats lessons.
You're here for the cool features.
When exchanging stories about English's quirks, there's one thing I see most everyone rush
to first: spelling.
And yeah, your spelling is whoa (whough!), and yeah it's fun to keep bringing up "ghoti"
as a whimsical way to spell "fish" following your own "rules".
But a spelling system is not a language, and even if you never wrote a word, there are
English oddities you'd have to contend with.
Forget letters for now.
Start with numbers.
English is already among a smaller group for putting its numbers before its nouns instead
of after.
But things really get out of order with your firsts, seconds and thirds.
See, if languages need ordinal numbers, assuming they're using them at all, one thing they
do is keep them consistent, maybe at worst having a "first".
Going off-number with your firsts, seconds, or even three-plusses is common in Europe.
If you want to play along with the crowd, try extending your fourths and fifths down
to oneth, twoth, threeth.
Speaking of numbers, English has plurals.
When you have bee times many, you call them bees, not bee.
That's less normal than you might expect.
In fact, plural markers like these are left out in many languages,
and they're optional in others.
Sometimes they even show a preference for animacy, so humans and animals may get the
plural treatment but place and thing get left alone.
Articles are THE way to go in English, or at least A way.
But having a's and the's is not the only way.
(Or the norm?)
Plenty of languages just have the: it's dog, it's the dog.
Or no articles at all!
I saw dog.
Is that a nonspecific dog?
That exact dog?
Well, languages can help you out with more info if needs be, but how often is it really
ambiguous?
Be like Korean or Russian and save yourself some words.
If you're a collector or hoarder and you like your possessions, this verb is surely known
to you: have.
Except not all languages have it.
In fact, it looks like most don't.
Forgoing it means doing something else, building some clever constructions.
Maybe say "it's of you" like Nepali, "it's to you" like Gàidhlig or, my preference,
go Sango style with a conjunction: "you are and it".
That's not the only weird "have"-thing.
If you have spoken or have read much English, you have run into this before.
Ok, I'll stop the hints: it's the perfect.
Maybe you've thought nothing of it.
But think something!
It is a highly unusual characteristic of Western European languages.
French, German and Italian have really gone all in on this and... ne hanno fatto il modo
principale di parlare del passato, made it the main way to talk about the past.
In languages that haven't perfected haves, some forgo it altogether.
Others have strategies, like in West Africa and Southeast Asia, where they opt for "already"
or "finish".
Since we're talking about your verbs and their Europeanness, consider that pesky thing school
warned us to avoid: passive voice.
But you don't have to avoid what isn't there, and for most languages the passive is not.
I guess those writing drills were preparing us for worldwide verbs.
Verbs go hand in hand with cases.
Language nerds know this well.
Except English behaves odd here, too, asymmetrically casing your pronouns, like they eat hay, but
not your nouns in horses eat hay.
The way you use that verb is less common, too.
It only marks the subject.
It's more common to mark both the subject and the object, let me make this up,
horse eats'm hay, or just nothing at all, horse eat hay.
Well, at least the way you align nouns and verbs is nothing special.
It's called accusative alignment, and it means that the "I" in "I see you" is the same as
in "I sleep", but changes to "me" in "you see me".
Plenty of languages go for "me sleep", that's ergative, or they adopt even more fluid strategies.
Wow, is your head still on?
Or was that stranger than you ever expected languages can get?
Stranger than... is a comparative.
And the way English compares, with an adjective plus a suffix plus this comparer particle,
is rare outside Europe.
In fact, this pattern may be like a fingerprint.
When it shows up elsewhere - boom! - European influence suspected.
The next time you want to say "your language is tougher than mine", may I suggest the Subsaharan
strat of saying it's "tough exceed" mine.
Or look to Uzbek and declare that it's "tough from my language".
Or simply be balanced like Sona in Papua New Guinea: "your language is hard, mine is easy".
English, you even sound rare compared to other languages.
I mentioned this once before in my video about weird phonemes, but interdental fricatives
are uncommon.
That's your θ and ð.
They're honestly difficult if you didn't grow up with them.
And if you want to know what life is like without them, to stop it, you've got
to stop it!
Turn the fricative into a stop consonant, just like Irish and again many Nigerian English
speakers do when they say [ð]is [d̪]is way or [d]is way.
Also, your vowels are odd.
Few languages have more distinct vowel sounds than English.
Kabyle, a Berber language, has just three.
Maya has a very normal five.
British English has 13 distinct vowel qualities.
(See, I told you they're odd!)
But the oddest sounding thing about you might be arrr.
This r sound isn't too common.
What may be even rarer is the way people who pronounce their Rs between a vowel and a consonant
actually say those vowels: far, fir, for.
Those vowels are unique.
You can hear them in English, in Mandarin Chinese where it's become a whole
érhuà process, and rarely anywhere else.
Before we get to my last feature, I have a quick honorable mention that isn't about the
whole world so much as it is about specific regions where English would be out of place
because it has fingers, hands, and arms.
Around Eurasia and closer to the equator in Africa and the Pacific, the words for your
"hand" and "arm" are the same.
Even rarer, the word for "finger" and "hand" match up often in the Australian languages and
sometimes the Americas and the Pacific.
One place all three of these collide is Tahiti, where tō'u rima can mean my arm, my hand
or my finger!
We've seen a bunch of things that are surprisingly weird given how routine they
feel in English, but this mundane "one"
may currently be my favorite "one".
Take a noun-less adjective, a sad one, happy one, or this red one, and notice
that English expects one word after it.
This is uncommon.
Why not just use the adjective like most languages, or mark it with a suffix or prefix?
Or take the rarest strategy.
At least one lone language in Australia does not let adjectives float free without nouns.
No red ones, no red.
It's a red and a house, or it is not red!
Well, that was fun to spend a couple videos thinking about the unusual things English
English lacks and has.
I'm curious to know if you have any favorites, or if there's one particular feature you'd really
want me to spend more time getting animated about.
Credit goes to this tool, WALS, for the basic data and maps I relied on here.
And to my patrons and audience, you were all kind to let me
play with these while I'm in the midst of working on a more serious
tale from language history.
To patrons, thank you in all of the unusual English I can muster, and to everyone watching,
stick around and subscribe for language.