What characteristics are unique to English (or at least rare among language as a whole)?

Question

After wondering about this today at work, I turned to the Internet.

A short piece that focuses on pronunciation points toward "none". I've scoured ELU and Google (perhaps not as thoroughly or effectively as some others might), but cannot find an answer specific to this question.

I realize this may be considered a broad question, though, so let me clarify what I mean by "unique". I am not referring to words that only occur in English or one-off exceptions to grammatical rules, i.e. trivial language-specific features (that are innumerable and don't belong here anyway). I'd like to see something more along the lines of what is presented in this paper on unique features of Lithuanian.

The author gives nine unique traits to Lithuanian (I list some with my comments in parentheses):

1. frequentative past tense
2. 13 participles in active use (more than other languages?)
3. four functional locative cases (more than others?)
4. no irregular, or suppletive forms in the comparative and superlative forms in adjective and adverbial systems
5. uniform stressed syllable intonation
6. preserved several words or forms exactly as they are reconstructed for the distant proto-language (PIE)
7. all the basic possessive adjectives and possessive pronouns are expressed by genitive form

I'm not sure if #2 and #3 are unique in the sense that English could also claim X participles where only the number is significant, not the existence of certain participles unique to the language.

I am not looking for a thesis, but perhaps a short list along the same lines as the paper above. In short, what does English do that no other language does?

Edit 1: For anyone voting to close, perhaps you can help me rephrase my question or so that it's in line with the kind of succinct answer I'm hoping for (e.g. some "unique features of Lithuanian"). Comments/critiques are welcome.

Edit 2: John Lawler mentioned WALS, and it is the kind of features cataloged that I'm after. For instance, double-headed relative clauses or optional triple negation are only found in a few languages. Again, it may be the case that English is too "mixed" with cross-linguistic features for it to have any unique quality.

Answer 1

English commonly resorts to post-auxiliary ellipsis as in

(1) They arrived late, as I thought they would.

This is already pretty rare among the world languages. But, as far as I know, English is unique in the variety of constructions where ellipsis is tolerated. For instance, it tolerates voice mismatch as in

(2) This problem was to have been looked into, but obviously nobody did.

or even non-verbal antecedent as in:

(3) Mubarak’s survival is impossible to predict and, even if he does [survive], his plan to make his son his heir apparent is now in serious jeopardy.

I have never heard of another language tolerating constructions like (2) and (3).

Answer 2

R-coloured vowels seem to be a pretty unique trait of English phonology. I don't know of any other language that has the vowel [ɝ] as in General American pronunciation of "work". The only major language, other than English, that has this type of vowels is Mandarin, but it doesn't have this particular one.

Answer 3

If expletive infixation isn't unique to English, what about recursive expletive infixation, however impractical it may be.

Ex:

"Holy mother-mother-fucking-fuck!"

Answer 4

While it is not clear to me what should be considered as "unique" to a language, since all the languages are different, so also unique in many ways, but they also share many basic features and principles. One can rather look for some typological rarities in English. A typological rarity is a feature that goes against some commonly recognised linguistic universal. The Universals Archive is a fascinating online database of such universals. It contains a special section with a small collection of rarities. If you search for results that are attested in English the databases finds 9 features (including one from "Old English", one from an "English-based creole", and one from "Germanic languages other than English"). These are exactly what you can consider true rarities specific of English (either mostly or exclusively).

The entries specific to modern English include the following. It is extremely rare for a language to have:

1. verb inflection with non-zero exponent for 3rd person (subject or object agreement/cross-reference), but zero for all other persons
2. independent personal pronouns for 1st and 3rd (animate) person inflecting for both number and case, but that for 2nd person inflecting for neither category (defectiveness of 2nd person pronouns in number alone being more common)
3. endoclitics occurring not only inside morphologically complex words, but even within monomorphemic words, with the positioning of the clitic (a) regulated by one general phonological rule, (b) not regulated by a general phonological rule, although when endoclitic to simple verbs, the clitic always comes before the last segment of the verb stem (subject person-number markers are cliticized to constituents in focus, being always enclitic with arguments in focus, but en- or endo-clitic with verbs in focus) (e.g., "un-fucking-believable")
4. (finite) verb-second word order in main declarative clauses only if the first constituent is an adverbial with strong negative force (such as never before, hardly ever)
5. relative pronoun as the only target for agreement in animacy (human: who; non-human: which)
6. a definite article formally distinct from (one form or another of) any kind of pronoun – demonstrative, personal (free, clitic, or bound), possessive, relative, interrogative

Answer 5

John McWhorter recently explained some. I'll add to that here. English has a number of features that, while not absolutely unique to English, just rare in the world, are unique to English as a collection:

• th- (interdental fricative) is rare among world languages. Icelandic, Arabic, and some Northwest Indian languages have it. Everybody has problems saying that when learning English.

• spelling/orthography - English is special in having a particularly idiosyncratic spelling to pronunciation map, primarily produced by major sound changes (the Great Vowel Shift) after some solidification of spelling norms had happened, but then fluid spelling norms throughout time, and lots of foreign word influences. This is of course not necessarily about English (spelling is not language), but is strongly associated with English speaking culture.

• do-support - that's a fancy way of saying that 'do' gets spliced in for negatives and questions. "I know who that is" -> "Do you know who that is?", "I do not know who that is.". The only other languages in the world that does that is Welsh (and supposedly there was some influence one way or the other).

• prepositions isolated at the end (like in phrasal verbs "Let's call the meeting off" "You should think it over". These prepositions don't really introduce a prepositional phrase or indicate direction or anything we normally associate with prepositions except for some vague metaphorical direction (likely to be misdirected). They are 'idiomatic', they mean something much more with the verb than by themselves. Other Germanic languages have this but nowhere else.

• genderlessness (in IE) - You know how French and Spanish have gender, a (grammatical) sex marker for each noun: 'la porte' (the door) but 'le mur' (the wall)? Most Indo-European languages have some sort of gender assignment. This is cheating a bit because in the whole world, having gender is only roughly half and half.

• multiple layers of vocabulary - The British Isles are somewhat isolated, as islands tend to be, but somehow attracted multiple invasions over the centuries. Celts, Saxons, Norse, French, and scholars and engineers with a penchant for Latin and Greek. Most European languages share the latter (modern technical vocabulary) with English, but not all of the previous ones. Oh yeah, lots of words borrowed from indigenous colonialized people. English isn't special in having loan words: Swahili has lots of Arabic, and Mandarin lots of Manchu and Mongolian and so on. But English has multiple different sources.

But given all this, there is one thing that English is not particularly unique in, and that is in being unique. What I mean to say is that though English is certainly special in having all the above rare particular idiosyncrasies all in one place, most languages have a number of similarly idiosyncratic facts about them that distinguish them from all other languages, just not the same ones listed above that are special to English. French has the rare nasal vowels (like Polish) and some adjectives that go before nouns and some after (like Spanish). So English is not unique in being unique.

Answer 6

English is unique for its "hieroglyphic reading" feature. All other languages either use ideograms (hieroglyphs) for writing or use alphabetic/syllabary spelling that can be read following certain rules.

English is unique in that while it uses usual letters, it has no general reading rules that could lead a reader to unambiguous pronunciation. A reader of English reads not single letters or syllables, but the whole words at once: to learn reading in English one has to remember the reading and spelling of the whole words. In this quality English is close to hyerogliphic languages where the reader or writer has to remember pictures for the whole words. Although words in English are formally composed of letters, they do not play a similar role as in other languages, rather they are used as parts of a word's picture which should be remembered as a whole.

Answer 7

I am not a linguist in any sense, but the answer appears to be that English has no unique traits (excluding trivial "features")*. From both a spoken and written perspective, English was formed as a mix of other languages. There is nothing that I'm aware of—grammatically, phonetically, or conceptually—that can be expressed solely in English.

Here are some possibilities that stand out in English (from comments):

• English stands out as one of about a dozen languages to use "we" as "I" (the Royal "we" / Majestic plural), though it's not unique. – Zairja
• Not unique as per comment: I remember that in one of his books (probably « la structure des langues »), Hagège mentioned that constructions à la “Do you know what I'm thinking about?“ with this separation between the preposition and the conjunction were very original. I will try to find what he says exactly and post it as an answer. – JPP
• "Did" at the beginning of this sentence has no meaning. That's a feature caused English being filtered through Celtic language speakers. Their feature came out as a "do" as in "Do you have a car?" which would be rendered as "Vous avez une voiture?" in French, literally "You have a car?" – Nick Anderegg, (Do-support - though there seems to be some controversy between grammarians and linguists)

Additional traits might be gleaned from these published works, but I could only preview some of them (no university access at the moment).

*A trivial feature would be, for example, no language spells "horse" like English.

Answer 8

From an English Syntax course I took several years ago, I understand that this feature is rare among languages, but not unique:

Phrasal Verbs: "I will pick him up at the airport." (in which 'pick up' makes this sentence have a fundamentally different meaning than "I will pick him at the airport" does) I have met some fluent ESL-speakers who simply can't use phrasal verbs correctly.

Answer 9

Terms of venery, collective nouns used for denotating a group of animals, while countables (or, to say it better, measure words) denote a part of a group, an item, a piece, etc.

This, as opposed to the countable words in languages like Chinese/Japanese, might be a unique feature (not mentioning the English spelling).

Answer 10

It may not be a grammatical characteristic of English, but Spelling-bees are unique to English speaking countries. A testament to the crazy spelling of English words. Also according to the article entitled English is not normal, "There is exactly one language [English] on Earth whose present tense requires a special ending only in the third‑person singular. I’m writing in it. I talk, you talk, he/she talk-s "

Answer 11

Freeze's excellent 1992 article "Existentials and other locatives" (Language 68, 553-595) points out that "the English existential is unique even among the truly exceptional existentials of its sister languages" (p. 575).

Answer 12

I wonder if English is the only language where a trailing letter modifies the pronounciation of previous vowels (excluding stress-only changes).

For example, these pairs of words only differ in the trailing E, but previous vowels pronounce differently, even if they spell the same (without the E):

• mad / made
• cut / cute
• bath / bathe
• slid / slide
• breath / breathe

Sometimes even more vowels are affected:

• sever / severe
• (maybe more?)