English is weirdly different from other languages
The history described in this article is fascinating, but it does nothing to prove the article&#x27;s thesis that English is uniquely &quot;not normal&quot;.<p>All it does is describe how it&#x27;s different, principally, from continental languages in the German and Latin families. Which, you know, you might expect when it comes from a big island off the coast.<p>Only English has spelling bees? In Chinese you have to memorize thousands of characters -- much, much more work. English has no genders and less present-tense conjugations? Again, Chinese has no genders and <i>no</i> conjugations. English uses a weird word &quot;do&quot;? Chinese has a weird word &quot;le&quot;.<p>I&#x27;m only using Chinese as an example because I took a few semesters of it in college... but the idea that English is somehow an &quot;weird&quot; outlier in the world of languages doesn&#x27;t seem to have a shred of supporting evidence from this particular article.