English – It’s just a mess of words!

Subjectivity is how people comprehend everything they can in relation to their opinions and feelings instead of set influences, like definitions. According to this definition, everything is subjective. This is also true for language. How this can influence interpretations in English is written below.

There is no universal definition of writing in literature; the meaning is defined by the person that wrote it. This creates a lot of uncertainty when trying to understand literature, as the reader’s understanding may be literally correct, but may not be the meaning the author is trying to express. To compensate for this, readers have to assume the writer’s intended interpretation, through trying to understand the intention of their writing, the topic and the context of the statement being assumed. This is a good way to understand the writer’s comprehension, but can sometimes be confusing. This is called lexical ambiguity or syntactic ambiguity. Lexical ambiguity is very common in English as hundreds of thousands of words have many, many different meanings and can make it difficult to express yourself, as someone could interpret your statement in a completely different way.

The other problem is how popular culture influences language. This is not a problem that’s only in English, but in many other languages. People have a tendency to misinterpret everything, including literature. These inaccurate definitions and pronunciations are easily spread through conversations and interactions in many different forms. Eventually, languages become heavily influenced by how people understand it, as colloquialisms slowly become official words in dictionaries as more people start using them and meanings change or new ones are added in relation to how they’re used in everyday conversations. For example, the phoneme “kn” was considered difficult to pronounce and people began pronouncing words that start with “kn” as “n”, believing that it was more comfortable to articulate. In modern English, this has now become the official pronunciation. 

Another problem with the English language is the spelling and phonetic inconsistencies. Spelling is the act of putting letters of the alphabet into a form of a word that makes sense. Each letter should have its own pronunciation and should remain consistent with every word. This is absolutely not the case in English, as there are far too many phonemes and pronunciations to fit in the alphabet, so they have been merged with other letters. This makes it extremely difficult for people foreign to the language to learn English easily, as there are many different ways to pronounce a single word. Moreover some words are pronounced totally different from their actual spelling. For example, the letter “c” in “Pacific Ocean” is pronounced differently every time. On the contrary, some words do use diacritics, but overall, there are too few words that do and most people don’t bother using them.

In conclusion, English is just a mess of words from different languages put together with strings and paper glue, into something that has become the third most popular language in the world just by native speakers. There are many inconsistencies and ambiguities, making it extremely hard to learn for those whose mother tongue is not English, but with regular practice and a great deal of reading, it’s possible to be good at it.