The Weirdness of English

If you've ever taught English--heck, if you speak English--you've probably noticed that it gets pretty bizarre at times. There are plenty of things that we take for granted that are downright inexplicable when really think about them. Here are two examples.


To Be...
There's no more common verb in English than be. As a linking verb or a helping verb, it's the most used verb in the language. We are so familiar with it, in fact, that we usually don't even notice how odd it is.

Think about it like this. Take the verb sleep. Conjugate it and you get:

I sleep We sleep
You sleep You (all) sleep
He sleeps They sleep

Clearly, you call a verb like that, sleep, or the infinitive to sleep, right? Its past tense is abnormal (no -ed form), but it's easy to get the idea:

I slept We slept
You slept You (all) slept
He slept We slept

Now look at be:

I am We are
You are You (all) are
He is They are

I was We were
You were You (all) were
He was They were

So what do you call a verb like that? BE? There's not even the letter B in any of the forms! There's not another verb like it. I am sure some linguist could explain the various derivations and how they have their roots in the word be, but all I know is I'm glad I was born here and didn't have to learn English as a second language. This kind of stuff would drive me bonkers.

Woman...
And how about this one--the word woman. The plural form is women. Okay, simple enough for most of us, especially if we are already familiar with man/men. It's consistent. Unless you think about pronunciation.

Woman is pronounced WOO-MUHN

Now, we make the word plural by changing the a in the second syllable to an e: women.

How do we pronounce it? WI-MUHN

So, we change the spelling of the second syllable, but pronounce it the same, and we leave the first syllable unchanged, but pronounce it differently! It's simply baffling.