wanted to compile some facts i expect to surprise people that i've learned on my language journey
**another one of my drafts! i wanted to add more facts that were less English-focused but i couldn't think of any, so i'm posting it as-is
- infamously, linguistics still does not have a solid definition of what constitutes a "word." any strict definition is usually unsatisfactory, and the reasons why becomes very clear when you look into it
- many people imagine linguists to be snobby about using correct grammar, but essentially no real linguists truly believe in a "correct" way to use a language, since living languages are constantly changing
- most people in the world know more than 1 language; this makes sense when you consider the history of language, but the USA has much more notable monolingualism
- there is actually no real line between a language being a language or a dialect; many mutually-understandable languages are often considered separate due to political reasons (e.g. a country wanting to declare independence) rather than any features of the language itself
- "the" is the most common word in English, but it doesn't exist in many languages. this actually makes it difficult to learn for many English learners.
- relatedly, the "th" sounds in English are two of the hardest sounds for English learners since it's incredibly uncommon, so that's definitely a fun double whammy
- Romance languages are actually named after the Romans, NOT being romantic, since they descended from Latin; i had a native Spanish-speaking friend who did not know this lol
- English has 5 vowel letters but MUCH more than 5 vowel sounds -- consider just the letter A in the words: pad, father, was, water, comma. this is because English was given the Latin alphabet despite not being a Romance language, and never added letters/accent marks for new sounds for some reason
- English is a Germanic language! this surprises a lot of people, but it's because languages are classified by history (though English still has a lot of similarities to Germanic languages, like the high number of vowel sounds). it's more similar to Dutch than German, which is why Dutch seems uncanny to so many English speakers.
- despite being Germanic, the majority of English's words come from Latin and French (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign-language_influences_in_English). the Germanic words do mostly cover the most common vocabulary, but this is why so much of Romance vocabulary may seem familiar.