• radix@lemmy.worldEnglish
    124·
    2 个月前

    queue

    Most “Q” words are weird to start with, then just adding a bunch of silent vowels at the end doesn’t make it any less so.

  • Davel23@fedia.io
    48·
    2 个月前

    I suppose technically it’s Latin, but I’ve always been fascinated with “syzygy”.

    • Lauchs@lemmy.world
      8·
      2 个月前

      “To be” averbs, at least in romance languages usually have a bunch of different forms. “To have” usually too but English is a bit of an exception there.

    • WFH@lemm.eeEnglish
      6·
      2 个月前

      “To be” being highly irregular il a common feature of a lot of Indo-European languages. But there’s worse. In Spanish, “ser” and “estar” both mean “to be”, but have wildly different meanings and cannot be substituted for one another.

    • viralJ@lemmy.world
      5·
      2 个月前

      “be” is an irregular verb in all languages, so it’s not unique to English. Bonus fun fact: Russian doesn’t have the verb “to be”.

      • kureta@lemmy.ml
        2·
        2 个月前

        Not in Turkish. It is “olmak” but the actual “to be” as it is used in “I am, they were, etc.” is, now unused “imek”. it has become a suffix and it is completely regular. Just i + person suffix.

      • 2xsaiko@discuss.tchncs.de
        2·
        2 个月前

        Yes, and I feel like it’s even more irregular in Russian than just not existing. It’s not used in present tense as a copula, so in most cases where you would expect it in English. However it absolutely exists – быть – and is used like normal verbs in both past and future tense.

        For example: «я здесь» – “I am here” (same word order, but this sentence has no verb), but «я был здесь» – “I was here”

        And in the cases where it is used in present tense, there is a single conjugation regardless of subject: есть (in contrast to all other verbs, I assume at least, which all have distinct conjugations for 1/2/3rd person singular/plural).

        A simple example for this would probably be sentences with “there is”, affirming the existence of something, as in “there is a bathroom” – «ванная есть». Contrived example for sure but I can’t think of something better right now.

        • Nibodhika@lemmy.world
          2·
          2 个月前

          Was going to reply that, it’s not that Russian doesn’t have it, it just gets omitted in the most common form.

          But also one interesting thing is that from the examples you gave I can know your gender, because the verb to be is gendered in the past in Russian, which is very unique, I don’t know of any other language where verbs are gendered.

    • Phen@lemmy.eco.br
      2·
      2 个月前

      And it has multiple meanings. “you are sick” can mean that you’re currently sick but can also mean that you’re a sick person. Other languages usually differentiate the verb in those two cases

    • kureta@lemmy.ml
      6·
      2 个月前

      Let me introduce you to the British pronunciation of the word “lieutenant”.

      lieutenant (UK: /lɛfˈtɛnənt/ lef-TEN-ənt)

    • Elsie@lemmy.ml
      4·
      2 个月前

      It used to be spelt “coronnel” in Old French and we took that pronunciation, but then we also took the updated french word “colonel” but kept the old pronunciation.

    • Eiri@lemmy.world
      3·
      2 个月前

      Is this universal or are there places where they pronounce it closer to its spelling?

    • SLVRDRGN@lemmy.world
      3·
      2 个月前

      I remember I was in 6th grade and the teacher made the class read a couple paragraphs of a book. She called on kids at random to read from their seat out loud for the whole class to hear, paragraph after paragraph. When it was my turn, the word “colonel” appeared, and it hadn’t been said yet in the book. Now, I had heard of a ker-nal before, but I never assumed it would be spelled that way, so when I saw this word I just thought it was something else.

      I got to the word and read it out loud as cahl-uh-null and needless to say there was many a snickering to be heard. Luckily I’m not easily embarrassed so it was fine, but I thought it was odd (and still do) that people generally act like this word being said this way is a given.

  • voracitude@lemmy.world
    35·
    2 个月前

    Pick any of them, and repeat it over and over again. It’ll quickly become the weirdest word in the language, at least for a while.

  • palordrolap@fedia.io
    35·
    2 个月前

    Akimbo

    It’s an honest-to-goodness English word and not derived from French, Latin, Greek or anything else, like a lot of the words here. Yes, it looks like it might be from an African language, but it’s a squashed form of “in keen bow” meaning “well bent” or “crooked”.

  • Clepsydrae@lemmy.world
    27·
    2 个月前

    “Though”

    The first two letters don’t sound like themselves, and the last three are silent. The word is 83% lies.

      • invertedspear@lemm.ee
        5·
        2 个月前

        No, they’re demonstrating how to line up quietly.

        Side note, I was a young teen when I first saw this word and it was in reference to computer things I barely grasped and had no idea. I was asking my parents what a qwe-we was because I could not for the life of me figure out how to pronounce it. It stuck with me for years until BBC content started coming to America, then it all finally made sense.

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
      51·
      2 个月前

      It would be half-true if we hadn’t gotten rid of a letter (the thorn, which made the"th" sound)

      For a long time, they used the letter “Y” instead of “th”.

      That’s how we have weird relationships with old English words like “You/Thou,” and “The/Ye.”

    • kureta@lemmy.ml
      6·
      2 个月前

      This word makes me physically angry. Why b? Why not governatorial? It is from the same word. Government, governor, etc. I know hsitorically bs and vs change places a lot, beta in Greek is pronounced veta but just pick either v or b god damn it!

  • Etterra@lemmy.world
    211·
    2 个月前
    • Funny weird: gobbledygook
    • Longest weird: antidisestablishmentarianism
    • Shortest weird: A
    • Literally weird: weird
    • Dangerously weird: Conservative
    • Unexpectedly weird: vanilla
    • Properly weird: FNORD
    • ianonavy@lemmy.world
      3·
      2 个月前

      I usually say “semiweekly” to mean twice per week. I also say “semimonthly” to mean twice per month (24 times per year) as opposed to “biweekly” (26 times per year).

    • Furbag@lemmy.world
      42·
      2 个月前

      This is the only word I know of whose meaning can be redefined by majority consensus.

      Case in point, my workplace wanted a bi-weekly committee meeting for our team to work on stuff over a zoom call. I asked what days these meetings would be held and they all agreed “Just Thursdays”. When I tried to argue that a bi-weekly meeting necessarily means that there must be two distinct dates per week, they all agreed that bi-weekly obviously means every other Thursday and that I didn’t understand what the word bi-weekly meant 😒

    • blackstrat@lemmy.fwgx.uk
      2·
      2 个月前

      The fact that American English doesn’t have the word ‘fortnightly’ is incredibly confusing on every level.

    • RBWells@lemmy.world
      1·
      2 个月前

      Biweekly is every two weeks (fortnightly)

      Semi-weekly is twice a week.

      Same rule as bimonthly and semimonthly.

  • tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
    18·
    2 个月前

    I don’t know about weirdest, but here are some quirky words:

    • inflammable means the same thing as flammable

    • “the/a”. If you’re a native English speaker, like me, it probably doesn’t look unusual. I was listening to a lecture series on linguistics and it wasn’t until then that I learned that most languages out there don’t have a mandatory definite/indefinite article. In most languages, if you want to say “cat”, you can say “cat”. English requires you to say “a cat” or “the cat” – the presence of an article to indicate whether the thing you’re talking about is unique or not. That’s an unusual feature for a language to have. It’s baked into how I think, but a lot of the world just doesn’t work that way.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_(grammar)#Crosslinguistic_variation

      Articles are found in many Indo-European languages, Semitic languages (only the definite article)[citation needed], and Polynesian languages; however, they are formally absent from many of the world’s major languages including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, many Turkic languages (including Tatar, Bashkir, Tuvan and Chuvash), many Uralic languages (incl. Finnic[a] and Saami languages), Hindi-Urdu, Punjabi, Tamil, the Baltic languages, the majority of Slavic languages, the Bantu languages (incl. Swahili). In some languages that do have articles, such as some North Caucasian languages, the use of articles is optional; however, in others like English and German it is mandatory in all cases.

    • “data”. It used to normally be the plural of datum, but within living memory has normally become a mass noun, like “water” or “air” or “love”. It’s not the only word to do this, but it’s unusual.

    • “deer”. It’s not the only word to do this either, but it’s one of a small number of words in English where the plural and singular form can be (and traditionally, needed to be) identical. Today, it looks like regular forms of these are increasingly being considered acceptable, at least in American English (“deers”, “fishes”, etc).

    • tiredofsametab@fedia.io
      4·
      2 个月前

      Japanese doesn’t have articles or account for number with something as simple as an s (some words could take -tachi or -ra as a plural marker, but not all, and often it isn’t even used when plural unless there’s specific need for it). Often, we learn something is plural by other inference or a number given. My wife has a hell of a time with articles and the like when trying to speak English.

      I’m also learning modern hebrew (Arabic’s writing system seemed a bit much plus all the dialects vs written MSA, so that’s now a later goal) and they only have definite articles so the indefinite is the default state.

    • viralJ@lemmy.world
      3·
      2 个月前

      Although using “data” as both singular and plural is acceptable in modern English, I once sat through an online training stating “[there can be] negative consequences if data are misused or falls into the wrong hands” which is just so cringe!

      Edit: typos

    • JubilantJaguar@lemmy.world
      2·
      2 个月前

      English requires you to say “a cat” or “the cat”

      Generally true but not for abstract nouns and mass nouns: “The water’s warm”, “I’d like a water”, “Water is a liquid”.

      PS. It’s called the zero article.