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How English can be a Confusing Language
It’s been said that the English dictionary has two to three times as many words than dictionaries for other languages. Not only do we have the original English words, but we have many French, Latin and Greek words as well, just to name a few (English), couple (Latin), pair (French), some (German).
It’s wonderful to have so many words available to us, because there is then lots to pick from.
But at times it can be confusing as well. The famous English sentence “It is I” is laughed about throughout the world because the construct does not exist in any other language other than in English.
In French folks say: “It is me.”
In German folks say: “That am I.”
You can see immediately where the English got confused. They wanted to say “It is me,” but the grammar nazis demanded that ‘I’ was put inside the sentence.
“Who is there?”
“I.”
And that is the correct answer.
It got confusing when the person starts to say, “Oh, it’s….”
Notice how the pronouns are placed in an awkward manner here. The point is to show that ‘ME’ and ‘WE’ rhyme but that they each belong to the other category. Me belongs to us, I belongs to We.
This setup also makes it easy to see why the confusion gets compounded. Where all other European languages have two different versions for ‘YOU’, in English…
