These are a few of my favorite things

As a connoisseur of linguistic delights, I have learned to appreciate the unique ways each language approaches communication, often wishing that the “trick” could be copied to other languages.

Here is a partial list of my personal language favorites:

French – The word si expressing disagreement to a negative statement:  “You don’t want another piece of cake” “Si”, i.e. yes I do.

Russian: the pronoun свой [svoi], which refers to the person in the subject: I, you, s/he, we:, they see свой face.

Spanish: the upside down question mark at the beginning of a question: ¿You understand?

Hebrew: The intense use of roots, making learning new vocabulary much easier: write, dictate, address, letter, correspond all have the same root, כתב [katav].

English: the lack of agreement in gender and number between adjectives and nouns, massively reducing the chances of error in making sentences, as large hand(s), not large(s) hand(s).

Italian: The natural sing-song rhyme of the language that leaves you no option but to smile: Io amo parlare italiano tutto il giorno.

Alas, nothing is perfect; here are a few aspects of these languages I am less fond of, namely:

French: the lack of firm rules to know whether a noun is masculine or feminine, which has caused me to spend a lot of time checking dictionaries.

Russian: the awful tendency of Russian to have one page of exceptions for every page of rules; believe me on this point.

Spanish: the subjunctive mode will quickly change your opinion that Spanish is an easy language to learn.

Hebrew: the binyanim or verb groups have always defied my understanding; call this a personal taste.

English: The spelling system, based on a wide base of extremely varied pronunciation patterns, is beyond logic.

Italian: Listening to Italian, how can you take the message seriously?

So, while I am also fond of raindrops, whiskers, kettles, and mittens, those are also a few of my favorite things.

Able-bodied Words

English spelling is rather confusing, to put it mildly.  Native speakers spend (or used to, anyways) years mastering and memorizing the order of letters for a given meaning.  It is not just an intellectual exercise either.  I have no hair is rather a different problem than I have no heir or even I have no hare.  Not having a good visual memory, I often struggled with able versus ible. Do I drink potable or potible water?  Being born before the day of Office Spell Check, I had to either look in the dictionary or discover a rule. 

The rule I found, which works most of time, is that able follows an actual verb while ible follows a root, noun, or adjective.  For example, learning English is both feasible and doable. It is also both reasonable and sensible to learn other languages.

You will many ibles in this verse from the song “When you are old and grey” by the great American musical satirist (and math professor from my alma mater, the University of California at Santa Cruz):

“An awful debility, a lessened utility, a loss of mobility is strong possibility.  In all probability, I’ll lose my virility and you your fertility and desirability.  And this liability of total sterility will lead to hostility and sense of futility.  So let’s act with agility while we still have the facility for we’ll soon reach senility and lose the ability.”

All the “able-bodied” words follow the rule.

To end this blog, I’ll cite the end of the song:

“So please remember, when I leave in December, I told you so in May.”