Monday is Presidents' Day, and Cadence (in the US) will be off for the day. Breakfast Bytes will be off, too, and as is now traditional, the post before the break is about whatever I feel like. Today, some obscurities about English that you probably don't know.

Somebody once asked me "What's the first person present subjunctive of to be?". My first reaction was "Do we even have subjunctives in English?" and then try and reverse engineer it by looking at French, which I speak, and working out what might be equivalent. But that didn't really deliver the goods. It turns out that it is "be", as in "If I not be mistaken." But even there it is dying out and most of us would say "If I'm not mistaken". Although "If I had a hammer" doesn't work as a song lyric if you change it. Nor "God Save the Queen", which is the British National Anthem. If it were not subjunctive (like that "were" a few words ago) it would be "saves" with an "s" on the end.

Oh, and since this is an off-topic post about language, here's a question for you. Why do Spanish footballers or Olympic medalists not mouth the words of the National Anthem, like the teams of most nations do? The answer is simple but surprising. The Spanish National Anthem has no words. It was originally a military march and written as such. So it's a little like asking why The Stars and Stripes Forever has no words... although I'm messing with you since Sousa did write lyrics for it, they are never used. And talking of God Save the Queen, how did the British National Anthem end up being the music for My Country 'Tis of Thee? That used to be one of the de facto anthems of the US until The Stars and Stripes became the official anthem in... I bet this is a lot later than you expected...1931. But there was a period when one of the US National anthems was the British National Anthem. Great way to celebrate independence from the crown!

Word Order

When I moved to France in the late 1980s, I had to learn French. I'd done some in school, and I managed to pass my French O-level (don't ask) but like a lot of language learners, my written French was okay but I couldn't carry on a conversation since that is how it gets taught and tested in school. All languages have their peculiarities, and one in French is that sometimes the adjective comes before the noun, and sometimes after. There are enough French place names in the US that we don't need to look any further: Baton Rouge (red stick) or Belle Fourche (beautiful fork in the river). If you want to bemuse someone in France, ask them what the rule is. Like me being asked the subjunctive of to be, they'll have no idea.

I was taught BANGS. Beauty, age, number, goodness, and size. Those adjectives come first. All the rest after the noun. That's why it's Belle Fourche (beauty) but Baton Rouge (color, not on the list).

But English does have similar rules for adjective order. You know them, but don't know them. In Mark Forsyth's The Elements of Eloquence, he says:

Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out.

Of course, there are exceptions. Little Red Riding Hood is fine, but the Big Bad Wolf breaks the rule. But that's because there's another rule, known as ablaut reduplication, this time about the sounds. Mark again:

All four of a horse’s feet make exactly the same sound. But we always, always say clip-clop, never clop-clip. We say tick-tock, never tock-tick. You will never eat a Kat Kit bar. The bells in Frère Jaques will forever chime ‘ding dang dong’. If there are three words then the order has to go I, A, O. If there are two words then the first is I and the second is either A or O. So mish-mash, chit-chat, dilly-dally, shilly-shally, tip top, hip-hop, flip-flop, tic tac, sing song, ding dong, King Kong, ping pong.

This law wins, which is why you can't have a "bad big wolf".

Spelling

If you are a foreigner, then you already know that the worst thing about English is the spelling. We are pretty good otherwise compared to many languages. No gender (in the linguistic sense). So adjectives don't have to agree with nouns. We don't have multiple definite articles (le, la; il, la; der, die, das, etc.). You don't have to know that a table is feminine in French and Spanish but masculine in German. Yeah, tons of irregular verbs, but all languages are like that except...Chinese. Verbs don't decline. There are no tenses. But those ideograms! The two are connected though. There are plenty of ideograms already, so there is no mechanism for making small changes to them (like declining verbs).

Okay, let's admit it. English spelling is not easy. We have spelling bees because it takes a lot to be a teenager who can spell better than anyone else (for some reason, all the winners have been Indian descent for the last 10+ years). The French have Dictées (dictations) since their weirdness is how many words sound the same and you can't spell them without understanding the context. For example, all these words are pronounced the same: vers (towards...or a verse), verre (a glass), vert (green), ver (a worm), and I think a couple more.

Chinese is full of words that sound the same, such as shi. Its most common meaning is the verb to be, but also a thing, a lion, 10, and many more. They have different symbols and are not all the same tone (the way shi is pronounced). Here is a poem, The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den. Every word in the poem is shi (35 seconds):

I Bet You Can't Read This Aloud Perfectly the First Time... Even If Your Native Language Is English

I take it you already know 
Of tough and bough and cough and dough? 
Others may stumble but not you 
On hiccough, thorough, slough and through. 
Well done! And now you wish perhaps, 
To learn of less familiar traps?

Beware of heard, a dreadful word 
That looks like beard and sounds like bird. 
And dead, is said like bed, not bead -
for goodness' sake don't call it 'deed'! 
Watch out for meat and great and threat 
(they rhyme with suite and straight and debt).

A moth is not a moth in mother, 
Nor both in bother, or broth in brother, 
And here is not a match for there, 
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear, 
And then there's doze and rose and lose -
Just look them up - and goose and choose, 
And cork and work and card and ward 
And font and front and word and sword, 
And do and go and thwart and cart - 
Come, I've hardly made a start!

A dreadful language? Man alive! 
I learned to speak it when I was five! 
And yet to write it, the more I sigh, 
I'll not learn how 'til the day I die.

Parthian Shot

No, it's not "parting shot". You'll have to look that one up. But here's mine.

In English, unlike most other languages, "Every noun can be verbed."

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