Top Enigmas of the English Language

[Comte Arnau]

The vowel /y/ existed in Old English, apparently. And some OE dialects also had an ø.

[Graham]

This?
French has three front, rounded vowels: /y/ as in "vu", /ø/ as in "deux", and /œ/ as in "soeur".

Well the Deux sound is the same sound as our 'oo' 'ou' 'ui' sound. Or even 'ee' in my accent slightly.

If that is the front rounded vowels.


Kind of how the names Andrew, Mulgrew & Pettigrew would rhyme with Deux

[Onur]

Well the Deux sound is the same sound as our 'oo' 'ou' 'ui' sound. Or even 'ee' in my accent slightly.

If that is the front rounded vowels.

Kind of how the names Andrew, Mulgrew & Pettigrew would rhyme with Deux

Yes these are the front vovels but none of the examples you gave has the same sound as the French "deux".

"Andrew, Mulgrew" can only rhyme with the pronunciation of the French word "doux" but not "deux". Just watch the video, English simply doesnt have these 3 sounds.

[Comte Arnau]

I don't know about Scottish accents but apparently some accents in southern Southern English transform the sound in book, foot, goose... in the near-front rounded vowel /ʏ/, similar to the sound in Swedish ut.

[Arthur Scharrenhans]

Native English speakers generally aren't aware of some amazing peculiarities that put their language apart.

First of all, the absence of front rounded wovels — you know, those pesky French "u-" and "eu-"sounds (or German "ü" and "ö", Danish "y" and "ø") that are so challenging for the majority of people on Earth.

All Germanic languages have them. Old English had them. French and Danish, that were so heavily influential in the development of Middle English, have them too. Even Cornish does have them! (unless the ones who revived Modern Cornish decided that it should sound like Bretion, and thus imported French-influenced phonological features of Modern Breton).

I don't this is a 'mystery'; Old English did have front rounded vowels, they were simply unrounded later. And some dialects of present day English are developing them again. You don't have to have front rounded vowels to be a true Germanic language; Gothic for example didn't have them (yet), while on the other hand several non-Germanic languages (in Europe and around the world) have them. In Europe it could be considered a sort of areal feature, considering their presence in Gallo-Romance and Ugro-Finnic.

Then, the overabundance of words for which no etymology is ascertained. Look, those words are among the most typically English ones, short, expressive and percussive, and the best known worldwide — some examples:
. bad
. dog
. big
. pig
. black
. boy
. girl
. pink
etc.

Some dictionaries propose unconvincing or downright fishy etymologies, but quite often they admit that they are "of unknown origin". Which is absolutely unique. In all languages I know, words of unknown genealogy are utterly rare or absent. There is virtually not a single orphan word in French or German, even in their regional slangs.

This is indeed a problem that puzzles me to some extent. I don't know about 'orphan' words in other languages (every language has its fair share of unknown etymologies), but the strange thing is that all those words are neither Romance loans, as often is the case when English deviates from other Germanic languages, nor shared with Germanic. And all of them are from very basic and everyday vocabulary.

[MST3K]

Some words in Welsh match with French and English in pronunciation, for example;

eglwys - église
pont - pont
ffenestr - fenêtre

afel - apple
castell - castle

The word "Tor" is interesting.
Welsh = hill
German = gate or goal
Latin = tower..........turris
English = dialect for hill