The Best Language

I know, you're expecting me to be a homer here -- everyone's looking at this and saying oh, here we go: English.

WRONG!

I'm not picking English as The Best Language. And I'm not doing that primarily because English is a mess -- everyone's wrecking English with the whole "I'll speak however I want to" movement, just inventing words and tacking on endings however they want and using "dis" as a verb.

"Dis," is not even a word and doesn't deserve to be. Let's remember that "dis" is short for "disrespect," which itself is not a word and doesn't deserve to be. (I can back this up, too, through my usual source: the internet. If you look up "disrespect" on Dictionary.com, you get definitions, but not from any reputable dictionary. "Disrespect," then, is short for "disrespectful," which itself has no real pedigree as a word. But "disrespectful" at least has the common sense to be an adverb. That's adverb, not verb, so when you say someone "dissed" someone else, you're being about seventeen degrees of ignorant.

"Dis" and the fact that it's allowed are a primary reason why English isn't The Best Language. Another reason is the existence of the word "commentator," which leads people to think that it is possible to "commentate." But "commentators" don't "commentate," they comment.

It's not okay -- not okay-- to just make up words because you don't know the right word. You can't just throw out the rules without knowing what the rules are in the first place. Once you know the rules, you can decide whether or not to follow them. Let me give you two examples, one of which I've touched on before:

Around our house, the rule is that you have to eat breakfast food -- cereal, waffles, toast-- for breakfast. That's true for all kids, not adults. When the kids sometime complain that I am eating cold pizza for breakfast, I point out to them that I know how to eat properly, which I do most of the time, so that if occasionally I bend the rules by having pizza for breakfast or breakfast for lunch, it's okay because I'm making a conscious choice to have an unhealthy breakfast, which I will make up for later. (In theory. What they don't know is that I'm also typically having pizza for lunch. And for dessert at dinner. I once ate only pizza for 48 hours.)

Or take Ezra Pound. Ezra Pound is a well-known poet who typically writes in free verse. So he writes "poetry" that has no recognizable rhythm or rhyme scheme -- the kind of poetry that makes everyone think they're a poet. But before Pound wrote this:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

He wrote a sonnet a day for a year. Sonnets, you should know, have very specific rhyme schemes and are written, always, in iambic pentameter. Pound did that because he wanted to know how to use rhyme and rhythm so that he could make a conscious choice to discard them.

So when Pound throws out rhyme, when I eat pizza for breakfast, we know the rules and why they should or should not be followed and make specific choices to violate them for specific reasons (poetic license/deliciousness). It's not the same thing when people facing a revocation of their license say they don't want to be "revocated."

That's the main why English can't be The Best Language. But there's another reason, too: Our alphabet. It's boring. The most exciting thing about our alphabet is that Y is sometimes a vowel (mostly in the spelling of childrens' names these days by parents who want to give their child a unique moniker/hide their inability to spell. Think of that the next time you talk to a "Kyler.") Beyond that, our alphabet is just squiggles, barely better than Arabic.

The Best Language has it heads and shoulders over English in both of those categories, and I speak with the wealth of experience I have. The Best Language is Japanese; the wealth of experience that I have is that I studied Japanese for an entire semester in 1993 or 1994 or around there.

As part of my studying Japanese, I had to learn the words and how to pronounce them, and the way Japanese sentences are structured, and the Japanese alphabet. And each of those makes Japanese better than all other languages.

The pronunciation factors in because it's simple: nothing is emphasized, and the words are broken down into simple phonetics. "Tokyo" is "To - kyo," two syllables and no tricks.

The sentence structure is also a factor because it's simple, too: The main verb always goes at the end of the sentence. Nouns have markers on them to tell what they are: subject, direct object, indirect object. Beyond that, there are really no rules.

Finally, the alphabet. I had the best time with the alphabet: learning to write it, learning to read it, copying it on to flash cards, amusing my friends with them. The Japanese alphabet is beautiful:


It looks like modern art, doesn't it?

Sorry, English. You've had a good run. But a language that is easy to learn, with relatively few grammatical rules, and a beautiful alphabet? Japanese deserves to be named The Best Language.
The poem, by the way, is Pound's "In a Station of the Metro."

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