The English Language: The Madness Language

By Damilare Adeleye

English is a prestigious language. Prestigious because it is a language that has been linguistically, well and sufficiently documented. Besides, it enjoys currency in global commercialisation. This makes it a medium of engaging with wide-ranging audience across the world. However, despite English's global acclaimed; it is, undeniably, a language that is relatively notorious to learn, most especially, when one is not a native speaker. With no doubt, The often difficulties posed on non-native speakers by English is of the result of the grammatical and lexical inconsistencies that embody the language structures and forms. Like any language, English has rules of structure. The syntactic and morphological structures of English, however, compass rules that challenge the cognitive reasoning on its foreign learners. This is owing to the incessant exceptions in every rule that is called grammar.

In this regard, it is my utmost pleasure to welcome you to the world of English where the plurals of key, man, loaf, baby, church, stadium, stereo, child, ox, sheep mouse are keys, men, loaves, babies, churches, stadia, stereos, children, oxen, sheep, and mice respectively. Hope you clearly notice the irregularities? Furthermore, according to the law of agreement in Concord, every singular subject must attract singlar verb, while plural item is required to take plural verb. However, in this expression: "I have to go home now", is obviously not obeying the initial subject and verb agreement. 'I' is a singular entity that supposed to go along with "has" yet it does attract plural auxiliary verb "have". If I may ask, who do we query for this insanity? In the same vein, personal pronoun "you", whether it is used in singular or plural sense, the verb that must be in accompany of it must be a plural. Mind you, you are correct to say; "Everyone was present at the inauguration", but you are not grammatical right to utter; "All people WAS present at the inauguration". If I may ask, is everyone not all people?

Along these lines, if not somewhat madness, why will "led" be the past tense of "lead" meanwhile, the past tense of " plead " is "pleaded" and not "pled" instead? In addition, even in articulation, alphabet "d" is not pronounced in the following words; slapped, clapped, shocked, asked, flapped, checked, etcetera. In the foregoing, what you are expected to articulate is phoneme 't' not the figurehead or deceiving "ed" . Even, phonetically, "A" is not for "Apple". The initial letters of the following words; Psalm, Psychology, Pneumonia, Knight, Knife, Knee, Knew, are articulated neither; they are said to be silent.

One of the linguistic features that enrich the aptness of English is that it has specific name associated to every gender. The sex of a specie is foretold by its name. These names are however not usually parallel. To be exact, the feminine gender of the following creatures or entities; tiger, lion, prince, actor, host, etcetera are known by adding " ess". On the contrary, "dogess" is not a female dog, neither is "roasterees, wizardess, widoweress, alumnusess are feminine sex of the following nouns: dog, roaster, wizard, widower, alumus. Rather, the following are the appropriate female gender of the foregoing: bitch, hen, witch, widow, alumna respectively.

Moving on, I will seize this privileged time to disclose to you that some nominal elements can also be best acted as verbs. To be precise, " nurse" is a noun; a person who usually takes care of sick or injured people in a hospital. But in this expression, "she nurses her little girl everyday", the 'nurses' there does not mean "many nurses" but a singular verb that agrees to the corresponding third person pronoun "she".

In furtherance to this treatise, let me quickly remind you that a process of sending a parcel or goods by either car is SHIPMENT, but, what is used to transport goods by ship is called CARGO. Mind you, "in" as a morphological item denotes, when it prefixes a noun, a opposite of something. For exactude, "indiscipline" is the opposite of "discipline". But, who should we challenge that "inflammable" is still synonymous with" flammable" and " invaluable" is not the opposite of " valuable", please who?

Anyway, Inasmuch as you are speaker of English, it is pertinent you make English a timeless to study. Because, it demands laborious tasks from you before you can fluently speak without falling into the pit of grammatical goof.

Damilare Adeleye can teach English, edit and proofread for people. He can be reached via; 09063561152.