Isn't it funny how if you read one word enough it ceases to be a word and just becomes a strange conglomeration of sounds?
English is weird. That title up there? That’s a sentence. It manages to use three different meanings of the word ‘buffalo’. It uses it as a place, being the city of Buffalo, New York, the rarely used verb ‘to buffalo’ (meaning to bully) and the animal itself. If you break it down into simpler terms, the sentence comes to mean something like:
Bison from Buffalo, which bison from Buffalo bully, themselves bully bison from Buffalo.
What.
No wonder those who choose to learn English when starting from another language have so much trouble. It also happens to cause a lot of trouble when learning another language, starting with English. The reason for this is that we have a lot of strange grammar rules, mixed up with a highly irregular set of words.
If you look at the linguistics of modern English, it has a rather lengthy backstory (the details of which I will save you). It started out with Old English, which was a very strange hodgepodge of Germanic, Celtic and Norse tongues. If you haven’t ever heard Old English, I’d recommend looking it up. It’s insane. After this, Old English moved to Middle English, which is a bit closer to what we have now. However, in both Old and Middle English, there were no standardized spellings of words, so it was all rather confusing to look at. Also, both of these included letters that most people haven’t ever heard of, like thorne!
All things considered, whether you've spoken English all your life, or you're just learning it, English is really weird. It has more irregulars in its composition than compliance with grammar rules, it has homophones and synonyms galore, and honestly it sounds quite strange in comparison with almost every other language in existence. However, these oddities let you do things such as "Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo," which really does make up for it in my opinion.
English may be really weird, but I love it all the same.
