After spending my career in teaching and language-learning education, I've reached a conclusion: English is a passive-aggressive language. The reason comes down to English's history: it's a language shaped by many other languages.
English doesn't openly tell learners, "I'm going to make this difficult." Instead, it smiles politely and says, "Here's the rule."
Walk becomes walked. Talk becomes talked. Match becomes matched. The learner relaxes. A pattern has emerged. The universe makes sense.
Then English introduces catch.
Not catched. Caught.
At that moment, English doesn't just break the rule. It breaks trust. (And here's the joke inside the joke: catch is itself a borrowed French word - from Anglo-French cachier - that assimilated so thoroughly it started behaving like a native irregular verb. Caught is, in the words of the Online Etymology Dictionary, "a rare instance of an English strong verb with a French origin," and it only overtook the regular catched around 1800.)
And don't even get me started on read.
"I read books." "Yesterday, I read a book."
Same spelling. Different pronunciation. English changes the sound but refuses to change the spelling - and then quietly suggests that you should have figured it out from context.
As someone who works with language teachers and learners, I've often joked that English seems determined to keep us all employed.
Of course, there are historical reasons for all of these quirks. Languages evolve. They absorb influences, adapt, borrow, and change over time.
And perhaps that's exactly the point.
English isn't one culture's language. English draws on Germanic roots, French vocabulary, Latin scholarship, Greek scientific terms, and loanwords from languages worldwide — the product of centuries of influence from many cultures and peoples.
The result is a language filled with contradictions. Somehow, all of those influences coexist in a single language spoken around the world.
Every irregular verb is a little piece of history. Every borrowed word tells a story. Every exception is evidence of the countless interactions, exchanges, migrations, and encounters that shaped the language over time.
English may be inconsistent, contradictory, and occasionally infuriating. But that's also what makes it fascinating.
Its quirks remind us that languages aren't designed. They evolve. And every time English breaks one of its own rules, it's usually because history had other plans.
If English can survive rough, through, thought, and thorough (all casualties of the Great Vowel Shift, the wholesale change in English long vowels that ran from roughly the 15th to the 18th century and left our spelling stranded a few centuries behind our pronunciation - see Encyclopædia Britannica), I think there's hope for the rest of us. 💌
The International Center for Language Studies helps learners and organizations navigate exactly these challenges.
By Karen Decker, President of the International Center for Language Studies
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