English must be so confusing to ESL people - where is the 'g' in anxiety?

[bucolic_frolic]

Surely there are other anomalies. But I was wondering about this one last night.

[intrepidity]

1. Sometimes the "g" silent, as in night

And sometimes it's invisible, as in anxiety.

[ret5hd]

2. Silent...invisible...don't laugh at ghosts.

[intrepidity]

4. Night...anxiety...ghosts...I hear you nt

[Haggard Celine]

3. ESL?

[Glorfindel]

8. English as a Second Language, I guess.

Love your new user name!

[Haggard Celine]

13. OMG!

I guess she thinks she looks good. Sad. No, autocorrect messed up my name when I put it in and I am stuck with this name for a few years, I guess. It's supposed to be Hagbard Celine, after the character in some Robert Anton Wilson novels. I guess people are going to think I'm making fun of Celine Dion now, and that is unfortunate.

[Glorfindel]

5. We also tend to pronounce "luxurious" as if it contained both a

g and a z. Also, the "wh" words are confusing. Half of English speakers pronounce them with a silent "h," as in "were" for "where" and "wen" for "when." The other half pronounce them as "hw" words, as in "hwere" and "hwen." Learning English would definitely be hard!

[ret5hd]

9. Cool Whip:

[Glorfindel]

12. Thanks! I have never seen "Family Guy."

Very cute.

[happybird]

18. Lol

We were talking about Wil Wheaton at work the other day and I kept pronouncing like that just to annoy my coworker.

[Warpy]

16. Dumdum's LUG-xhur-ee always made me clench my teeth, as did "YUGE"

Come to think of it, everything about that creature made me clench my teeth, and that was before the Russians greased him into office.

[Buckeye_Democrat]

6. Some people have anxiety, others angst-iety.

Yeah, "anxiety" isn't very phonetic, is it?

[2naSalit]

21. So I think you might be close...

There is a phenomena that occurs for people for whom English is not their primary language where they insert incorrect letters due to their internal etymology where they see they root of the word anxiety being included in the root for anger or angst, thus they insert it thinking that is the likely spelling of a word they may never have seen in written form.

I did a bit of proofreading for ESL students in college and found several patterns of incorrect spellings based on that reasoning. They really work hard to get it right with our very messy language.

[TxGuitar]

7. Or the p in hamster!

Saw that on FB recently

[Buckeye_Democrat]

10. I've seen people spell it with a 'p' too!

[bucolic_frolic]

14. I was just a hampster from New Hampshire

It will be a great tune!

[2naSalit]

22. Uh oh...

I had that very thought and I think I might have to write a bluegrass tune about that.

[bucolic_frolic]

24. A YouTube video could generate clicks and bucks

But even the most popular bank, I think I read, about 1 cent per 10 clicks.

But there are YouTubers making $55k per month! Or so they say ...

So if you can do it, get in that hampster wheel and run!

(Note to Admins ... we so need a smiley of a hamster wheel!)

[Warpy]

11. People from all over the planet have told me it's easy to communicate in English

with a limited vocabulary because most nouns don't have gender and there are no modifiers or declensions to note their places in a sentence. Most if it is Franco-Germanic/Viking very loosely strung on a Celtic framework. There are a lot of analogues to other European languages, making it easier to understand for European visitors.

The bugger is learning to speak it well.

(By the way, I pronounce it anks EYE uh tee, that's upper Midwest, upstate NY, and New England talking)

[Buckeye_Democrat]

19. I pronounce it that way too.

The 'g' reference confused me at first, but I later realized some people pronounce it a little differently.

[NCjack]

20. While thinking about the "writing on the wall," I became "beside myself"

when my wife told me to "knock myself out."

[2naSalit]

23. I say it with the "G-Z" slide...

I learned to speak in northern New England so I had French and English exposure full time along with snippets if many other languages at public schools.

I have discovered, while proof reading college papers for ESL and foreign students, that they often try to equate similar sounding words and go for it when choosing a letter such as "G" for anxiety, especially if they never saw it in written form prior. Your description of Modern English is the most succinct I have ever seen yet our English is still very messy.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

15. It's important to remember several things about our language.

One is that we have an awful lot of words we've "borrowed" from other languages. Which means the spelling may remain what it was in the other language.
Another is that pronunciation has changed over time.
A third is that a lot of our spelling was standardized at least 200 years ago, an the spelling and pronunciation no longer match up.

Every time someone suggests we switch to a purely phonetic spelling in English, I roll my eyes, because there would be various spellings of a lot of words, and some of them might be incomprehensible to many of us.

[Shermann]

17. It's the price of success

Successful empires like Britain tended to absorb a lot of the culture of those they conquered.

[2naSalit]

26. Well...

The close to 1/3rd of English being French derived is due to the French owning England for a time as well.

[Shermann]

27. Touche!

Too easy.

[2naSalit]

25. Thank goodness for standardization...

Trying to read text from the 17th and 18th even 19th centuries can be mind bending and distracting.

[Martin68]

28. There are a million "anomalies" in English that include weird spelling, grammar, and idioms.

I taught English as a second language in Japan for 20 years, so I sympathize with people who have to learn English as an adult. Perhaps the most famous is the one that George Bernard Shaw like to point out. "Ghoti" is another way to spell the word "fish" if you use the "gh" in "enough", the "o" in "women", and the "ti" in "nation." A lot of the confusion in English is that the language is a Germanic language that took on a lot of Latin characteristics while France ruled England. One result of French rule is that words for domestic animals usually derive from the Anglo-Saxon words the peasant farmers used, and words for the food made from those animals used the French words that the ruling class used. Beef for the food and cattle for the animal, Pork for the food and pig for the animal and so on.