What are some mind-blowing facts about the English language?
1. At least five drinks can also be used as verbs:
Water: A clear, tasteless liquid; to spray water onto plants.
Milk: A white liquid made in most mammals; to extract this liquid for consumption, typically from a cow or goat.
Juice: The liquid stored in fruits and vegetables; to turn fruits and vegetables into this substance.
Shake: A drink made of ice cream and milk; to move an object up and down or from side to side with rapid, forceful, jerky movements.
Cream: A milky liquid used in coffee and other hot drinks; to utterly defeat.
2. The following sentences are all grammatically correct:
Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo:
(Buffalo from Buffalo, NY, bully other buffalo from Buffalo, NY.)
Police police police Police police:
(Police from Police, Poland, patrol other police from Police.)
The can can can can the can can.
(The can-can dance is able to outperform the can-can.)
The last one doesn’t make literal sense, but grammatically, it is correct.
3. Yuo can msot liekly raed tihs.
Did yuo raed taht crorectly? No. But yuo can stil undresantd.
This is because our brains often look at the first and last letters of a word to determine its meaning, and assumes words without having to fully read them.
4. No and Go are the shortest sentences that can be formed.
5. If the ‘gh’ from ‘rough’ make an f sound, the ‘o’ in ‘women’ makes an ‘i’ sound, and the ‘ti’ from ‘nation’ makes a ‘sh’ sound, then ‘ghoti’ is pronounced ‘fish’.
6. The sentence “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” contains every letter in the alphabet.
In fact, keyboard manufacturers type this sentence in order to ensure that all of the keys work.
7. If the Saxons and Angles hadn’t immigrated to England in the Middle Ages, America would likely be speaking Celtic.
The Angles were the ones who brought the earliest form of English to Britain.
8. There IS a word that rhymes with orange.
This word is “sporange”, which is a celled plant structure found in fungi, mosses, algae, and other plants. In these pods, spores are produced.
A lot of people complain about how hard learning English is. Now try Korean or Chinese.
Do you find English a difficult language to learn? What languages are the most difficult ones?
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