Whenever I need to explain why English sometimes doesn't obey its own rules, I always start by reminding a non-native speaker that this is normal English behavior. English usually doesn't obey its own rules. It seems to me that the only reason English can be said to have rules is so that it can come up with exceptions to those rules. I try to put the non-native speaker at ease by assuring them the failure is not theirs; it's the languages. English is weird. Even German, which is Englishes closest living relative, is vastly more logical than English. German has its rules and obeys them. English is an outlaw. It LOVES to break the rules. English delights in lulling the non-native speaker into a false sense of security by pretending to behave logically, and then BAM!!!! For no apparent reason, the rule does not apply.

This wasn't done on purpose. English is like that because it is a creole. English is what happens when 90% of the population speaks Anglo-Saxon, but when they go up to "the big house," they're expected to speak French without having any formal instruction in French. English is perfectly normal when you compare it to other creole languages.

English is crazy because it is ambivolent towards itself. It wants to take a French vocabulary, which is inflected (is that the right word? I think it is.) and combine it with a German syntactical structure. An inflected vocab means that words have endings that tell the hearer what part of speech that word serves. There are noun endings and verb endings and adjective endings, etc. But a Germanic syntax is based on word order. The order inwhich words are spoken gives the meaning. These elements come into conflict in English quite often, and that's why English seems to disagree with itself so often. Combine that with the last four hundred years of linguistic evolution and Englishes love of word-borrowing, and its a pretty hard language to learn if you didn't take it with your mother's milk. Non-native speakers who learn a second language rely heavily on logical behavior, and English is an illogical language.

I hope this little explanation is at least mostly true. This is essentially how it was explained to me by Tom Mathews. I usually don't mind spreading lies on the internet, but I at least want to know I'm doing it. If anyone knows something specific that I'm screwing up, please feel free to correct me.

Adrian