English language a remarkable, confusing creation

A literal breakdown in communication occurred the other afternoon when my youngest grandson announced that his bicycle was broken. “See,” he said, pressing backward on the pedals; “I brake it. It won’t go.”

It’s no wonder that notion was in his little head. He couldn’t understand the difference in break and brake any better than a computer can distinguish between “time flies like an arrow” and “fruit flies like a banana.”

How can a child learn to speak when the very words we use confuse? Take, for instance, this dialogue:

“Don’t let me interrupt your breakfast, boys. Don’t mind me.”

“But, but” said the oldest, “you said yesterday we had to mind you.”

It’s a mystery how we learn to talk, and it’s amazing that young tykes mimic words and phrases for a while before putting them together in sentence form and then finally comprehending their meanings.

One of my favorite writers, Bill Bryson, says “Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed.” In his book, “The Mother Tongue, English and How It Got That Way,” published in 1990, Bryson explores the remarkable history, eccentricities, resilience and sheer fun of the English language. “From the descent of the larynx into the throat (why you can talk but your dog can’t) to the fine lost art of swearing, Bryson tells the fascinating, often uproarious story of an inadequate second-rate tongue of peasants that developed into one of the world’s largest growth industries,” reads the back cover.

In between the covers, this is what he says:

“All of this is by way of coming around to the somewhat paradoxical observation that we speak with remarkable laxness and imprecision and yet manage to express ourselves with wondrous subtlety – and simply breathtaking speed.”

According to his research, in normal conservation we speak at a rate of about 300 syllables a minute. (Unless you’re a 3-year-old hunting under the seaweed for “trabs” and the rate of syllables doubles.)

“To do this,” Bryson says, “we force air up through the larynx … and, by variously pursing our lips and flapping our tongue around in our mouth rather in the manner of a freshly landed fish, we shape each passing puff of air into a series of loosely differentiated plosives, fricatives, gutturals, and other minor atmospheric disturbances. People don’t talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain.”

Hence our tendency to slur and what starts out as “helped” becomes “helpt.” A child’s “orange juice” turns out “arnjoos,” and our repeated question when someone comes into the house: “Jeetjet?”