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My understanding is that English is hard to learn for several reasons. For
one thing, our inflections have all flattened out. Words look/sound the same
in every declension and even verbs don't conjugate much for compared to a
lot of other languages. English is highly contextual, and word order
dependent (unless that's redundant, in which case, pick one). Plus we have
all those lovely homonyms like to/too/two and there/their/they're. I may
have the reasons askew, not being a linguistics expert, just a common or
garden variety lit major. Someone else can, I'm sure, make it clearer or
more accurate.
In any case, it can hardly be something Americans say to make ourselves feel
better since, last I looked, we're not the only native English speakers on
the planet.
Cheers!
Maggie Secara
secaram -at- mainsaver -dot- com
A Compendium of Common Knowledge (1558-1603)
is at http://ren.dm.net
Leap, and the net will appear.
--Orson Wells
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jonathan Soukup [SMTP:jsoukup -at- airmail -dot- net]
> Sent: Wednesday, November 10, 1999 12:07 AM
> To: TECHWR-L
> Subject: OT: Myth?
>
> I think almost everyone has heard the phrase, "English is the hardest
> language to learn," but I've never actually seen it in print. Does anyone
> know who said it or where it is published? Is this something that we, as
> Americans, have made up to make us feel better about ourselves? I don't
> know.
