Mine is people who separate words when they write. I’m Norwegian, and we can string together words indefinetly to make a new word. The never ending word may not make any sense, but it is gramatically correct
Still, people write words the wrong way by separating them.
Examples:
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“Ananas ringer” means “the pineapple is calling” when written the wrong way. The correct way is “ananasringer” and it means “pineapple rings” (from a tin).
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“Prinsesse pult i vinkel” means “a princess fucked at an angle”. The correct way to write it is “prinsessepult i vinkel”, and it means “an angeled princess desk” (a desk for children, obviously)
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“Koke bøker” means “to cook books”. The correct way is “kokebøker” and means “cookbooks”
I see these kinds of mistakes everywhere!
It’s not so much a feature of English as it is a recurring bug in the way people use the language…
If you write “of” instead of “have” or “'ve” you need to be taken out back and beaten with a dictionary, preferably until you can apologize to your ancestors in person for the effort they wasted in passing down the English language to you.
Incidentally, when did people start saying “on accident”? It’s by accident! Has been for ages! Why this? Why now? I hate it.
With that out of the way… English isn’t a language, it’s five dialects in a trenchcoat mugging other languages in a dark alley for their loose grammar.
Edit: With regards to OP, “a cookbook” and “to cook the books” are similar phrases in English, too, but have, eh, wildly different meanings. XD
“of” in place of “have” certainly had to come from people mishearing/misunderstanding “ve.” There’s no other explanation.
The accident one is funny. I had to really think about when I’d use “on”, and it’s when I say something like: “he did it on accident.” Which is wrong when I think about it, but I know I’ve said this countless times. I can only guess it grew from “an accident” like “it was an accident.”
Even though "on"and “by” are the same length, “by” sounds like it takes too much effort to say. How weird.
Prepositions are so arbitrary. So it’s really stupid to be so angry about “on accident”. But I can’t help it.
Ambiguously used words like “biweekly”. Does it mean twice per week? Every other week? Business meeting calendar scheduling terminology is especially bad with this.
Odd phrases like you can chop the tree down. Then but then you proceed to chop that same tree up.
Parking in a driveway and driving in a parkway is also a good one.
After your alarm goes off… You turn it off.
(American) English: Inflammable vs flammable vs non-flammable.
Not my native language, but the one I speak the most is (American) English.
So many homophones-words that sound the same but are different in meaning or spelling such as knight/night, altar/alter, ail/ale, isle/aisle/I’ll.
Also homographs-words with same spelling but different meaning and/or pronunciation like minute, bass, capital, wind, moped.
So confusing for people trying to learn English and also for people that actually speak it
I can’t speak for all native English speakers, but in my experience we’re very accepting of imperfect grammar from non-native speakers because we know how crazy this language is.
Hebrew. I hate how everything is gendered. You cant communicate with a person without assuming his/her gender. You cant ask “how are you?” or “what is your name?” without using the other person’s gender. Its worse than spanish/italian. We have genders for verbs, our “you” is gendered, heck, NUMBERS have genders (two girls, two boys - you use a different word for two).
Have you ever spoken to a person and werent sure about their gender? In hebrew you would be screwed.
You can kind of get around the gendered stuff sometimes.
‘How are you’ can be מה נשמע
What’s your name can be איך השם
How numbers are pronounced.
In German the number 185 is pronounced as “hundred-five-and-eighty” (hundertfünfundachtzig), the digits are not spoken in order of their magnitude.
Not terrible, not great.Same thing for Dutch. For example, when we see 74 we pronounce it as four and seventy (vierenzeventig) and it makes no sense.
I guess it’s a Germanic language thing.
This is the same in Danish, but weirdly not in Swedish.
We say four-seventy for 74, and hundred-four-seventy for 174. But the swedes does it like the English. Don’t know about Norwegian though. Maybe OP can provide me with some new knowledge.
I remember reading that one of the Scandinavian languages had a specific (successful) governmental policy to change from German-like numbers to English-like ones. I don’t remember which of them it was.
It is true, at least here in Norway: https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Den_nye_tellemåten (“The new way of counting”).
Our parliament deceided in 1949 that 21 should not be pronounced as “one-and-twenty”, but as “twenty-one”. It was because new phone numbers got introduced, and the new way gave a lot less errors when spoken to the “sentralbordamer” (switch operator ladies).
