Isn't English odd?

English is normal, right? It's all those other languages that are weird, isn't it? Well, it's an easy thing to think, as you've been speaking English from a very young age. I usually think that too, but there are moments when I think, hang on, it's the other way round - English is the odd language. I suppose all languages have their oddities, but I think English has some particularly odd ones. Here are three that I've noticed:

The Great English Vowel Shift

In English we call the letter A “ey”, we call E “ee”, I “eye”, O “oh” and U “you”. And in words, when a vowel is long, it is usually also pronounced like this, as in name (“neym”), spider (“spy-der”), seed, etc. In all other languages that I know of which use the Latin alphabet this is not the case, unless the word is borrowed from English. For example, the Italian town Pisa is not “Pie-za” but “Pee-za”, and the Dutch word for father, vader is pronounced roughly as “faa-der”, not as in the name of the character in Star Wars. It wasn't always this way - about 500 years ago, as Middle English was evolving into early Modern English, the shift to our modern pronunciation of long vowels was underway. Before that English long vowels are thought to have been pronounced in a more European way. I sometimes like to pronounce English in that way - “Ee am not very gohd at speyking, boot ee leek it”.

Silent consonants

*If you carry a k-nife you need p-sychological help.

Of all the languages I know how to pronounce, English seems peculiar in one respect; at the beginning of a word (or morpheme) consonant clusters such as kn, pn, gn, ps and pt are not pronounced as if they were two sounds - for example knight sounds like like night, pneumonia is pronounced "neumonia" and similarly xenon is pronounced "zenon". English-speakers seem to think some clusters are impossible to say.  While I can see that pt is pretty awkward to say as two sounds, speakers of other languages, like German and Greek, have no problems saying the k in Knopf or the p in psychologia.  However, I'm not going to start going round saying "he's a p-sycho", because then I would sound like the one with psychological problems.

'Do' linked to a verb

It's really old-fashioned to ask "Have we any bread?". It's pretty standard to say "Do we have any bread?". And nobody ever asks "Need you any help?" - they say "Do you need any help?". This construction with do and a verb is a distinctly English thing, which foreigners often struggle with when things get complicated, like when it is used in the past tense. In German, for example, they ask "Haben wir Brot?" and "Brauchst du Hilfe?" In the German past tense these would be "Hatten wir Brot?" and "Brauchtest du Hilfe?", and in other languages I know of it is the verbs have and need that are put in the past tense, rather than the do, because there is no do. But often foreigners get confused in English and they put all the verbs in the past tense and come up with "Did we had bread?" and "Did you needed help?". This is wrong, foreigners! You put ONLY the do in the past tense - "Did we have bread?" and "Did you need help?".