Lt. Worf, son of MoghBrevity is the soul of wit
Xylight (Photon dev)Alright, are you calling English simple?
sabreW4K3Oh, trust me, we are đ
If the teacup fits.
There are parts of English that are simple and there are parts that are complex. Same as any language! The cool thing about linguistics is learning about the neat features of some languages. For example, Chinese doesnât use articles!
Are articels useful at all?
Whatâs the advantage of having a female /male table?
they can create tablets
I'm still smiling at this.
Gendered articles probably not but having âaâ vs âtheâ removes the need for additional cases (eg. I/me/my). Latin and Russian donât have articles but they have more cases which have different suffixes that have to be applied to all nouns. Usually simplifying one part of language makes another part more complex. English has a very simple case structure but the word order is much more strict
I remember a study that articles slightly increase understandibility among native speakers.
Gendered articles, like all things relating to grammatical gender, can be useful to reduce ambiguity and therefore increase information density/redundancy. Theyâre basically the Roman languagesâ way of retaining the usefulness of Latin cases without actual grammatical cases.
âAmiâ and âamieâ are homophones in French (with some accents you might see /ami/ vs /ami:/, but in casual speech youâd likely miss it anyway). However âun amiâ is different from âune amieâ.
So in French youâd say âhier je suis sorti avec une amieâ which, to convey the same level of detail in English, requires a translation like âyesterday I went out with a female friendâ.
Thatâs very reasonable. We need gender articles for humans. why for things?
Because sometimes the same word can mean different things.
German has âDer Seeâ and âdie Seeâ (the lake and the sea) Or even more extreme: âBandâ can describe a music group, a book or a tape.
You just reduce the need for context
âDie Seeâ is only an exception. Itâs origins are in the Platt languages bordering belgium and the netherlands iirc.
Donât we talk about the usefulness of gender articles? There are some outliers. Adding gender articles increases the vocabularies by a factor of two but at what cost and whatâs the real advantage? You can simply invent a new word for one of the âBandsâ to reduce ambiguity in order to decrease the complexity of the language. I think you can compare it to irregular verbs. Those are just there for historic reasons, they donât really serve a real purpose. Du/Sie is another example. It may be useful in some cases to maintain distance. Moreover we should get rid of the corner case âroyal weâ asap! Etc. The sooner we start the better.
Simplicity isnât the goal of languages, but communication. England historically had a lot of different languages and dialects that tried communicating with each other, so the language got simpler to speak and understand.
German, Russian, Italian, etc. all existed in relatively homogenous so information density was far more important. Some languages use gendered articles, which also increases understandibility (if someone is mumbling a word you can still guess it).
Sie is actually a really interesting case, because it shifted meaning over time, from being a sign of respect, to being an indicator of closeness, but it still carries information.
"Lassen Sie mich in ruheâ
and
"Lass mich in Ruheâ
both translate to âleave me aloneâ, but the first one carries the information that these people donât know each other and it might make sense to interfere.
And most importantly: your comparison to irregular verbs and idea to just change the word doesnât make any sense. Gender is part of the word, so creating a new word would just be a waste of time, so itâs the same thing as just learning a new verb. Irregular verbs are a completely different thing since they donât follow the rules of the language, so you have to learn two extra words, instead of just learning one and following the rules.
Neither does Russian, Ukrainian, and Iâm guessing, many other Slav languages.
CookieJarObserverIts the language equivalent to a brickâŚ
I love it
sure, how complex is: their, there, theyâre. sure, they sound the same but there is no reason theyâre difficult to use in their intended purpose.
RQGEnglish grammar is alright as far as languages are concerned. There is some bs but nothing exceptional.
Pronounciation in the English language on the other hand is absolute insanity. If there are any rules besides grouped up exceptions then let me know.
And reusing the same word to mean a plethora of completely unrelated things lol.
EG:
Jam = a fruit preserve, to play music, stopped traffic, a door thatâs held open, to cram something into something else
Set = a collection of something, to change an option on a device, when something gelatinous becomes more solid, when the sun goes down, a stage or movie background, a list of songs at a concert, to put something down, and about 50 other things
Run = to move quickly, to enter a contest (ie run for President), to have something turned on (is that computer running, running a tap), to be a certain length (this films run time is 90 minutes), to be behind (this bus is running late), to be in charge of something (Iâm running this place), a hand in poker, to be liquid (this egg is runny), a tear in a pair of tights
fristislurperGerman also does this. I think a good 20% of all verbs are just variations of âziehenâ (to pull).
Umziehen - to change clothes, to move to a new home
aufziehen - to tease or ridicule someone, to wind up a clockwork, to raise kids
abziehen - to leave, to scam someone, to pull something off something else
herziehen - to gossip about someone
Anziehen - to attract something, to put on clothes
Yeah there are some of these for ziehen. You might be on to something. But for many generic verbs there are many variants with vastly different meanings. Like Machen - to make, or tun - to do, gehen - to go.
The real kicker is phrasal verbs. You can have alright conversational English without needing most of these âadvancedâ grammatical features, which is a big part of why English has a reputation of being easier to learn in school than other European languages like German or Dutch.
Itâs when youâre faced with a vocabulary list like âget upâ, âget onâ/âget offâ, âget inâ/âget outâ, âget throughâ, âget onâ/âget alongâ, âget byâ, âget acrossâ, âget away withâ, âget backâ, and a myriad of other which in your native language each get a dedicated verb that you realize that English is not simpler, the complexity is just further up the road.
Also fun fact, if your native language is French, you can cheat and never use most of those, while accidentally using a much more formal/elevated register, because English has a habit of stealing French words when it wants to sound fancy.
âGet inâ = enter (entrer), âGet throughâ = traverse (traverser), âGet byâ = survive (survivre), âget acrossâ ~ communicate (communiquer), âget backâ = return (retourner).
samus12345This is not unique to English.
I Cast FistI wonder how much of that is due to french and how much from german/saxon dialects. French love mute consonants and wildly different vowel sounds.
Itâs all of the above and then some. A good read on the subject is John McWhorterâs âOur Magnificent Bastard Tongue.â Itâs intended for a non-technical/popular audience and doesnât get too deep into the weeds so you donât need a degree in linguistics to follow it.
WirrvogelIf there are any rules
As far as I know the only rule is, that I (German) pronounce it always wrong.
I have the same rule for Gaelic.
A lot of the problem is that we use Middle English spellings for a lot of words, but the pronunciation continued to change after the spellings were standardized.
I guess you havenât seen polish then.
Oh I have, itâs not sane either.
Squirrel
Thought
Though
Cough
Through
Rough, plough
Japanese: wtf are you talking about?
Iâm still learning but what about wa (ă)? Itâs used to signify the subject of a sentence I think.
Goddard GuryonI thought thatâs the is/am/are (I forgot the term for these)
olsonexiThe word youâre looking for is âcopulaâ, and itâs actually ăă§ăă(desu)
orăă or some other ones, but yes.
Wat just signifies the subject (The translation would be âas for âŚâ)
Itâs actually ăăŻă, and⌠kind of. It marks the topic, which is sort of the thing the conversation is generally about, which typically is the subject of each sentence, but not necessarily. Itâs kinda hard to explain it well since it doesnât really map cleanly onto any grammatical feature in english.
Well the âhaâ (ăŻ) pronounced âwaâ is basically like a pointer to the word before it. Like smb. comments âTHISâ after it.
The âwaâ (ă) character on the other hand is used as a letter in a word. It wonât usually stand alone in a sentence (which is a bit weird since the japanese usually donât use spaces so you just have to guess/know)
The 㯠is also used in words so have fun knowing when it is a particle and when not.
I am just a beginner on japanese.
Yeah, donât confuse people if you donât know anything about a language.
Thatâs like saying âI was so confused what an atre is, until I realized itâs not the atre but theatre!â
㯠and ă are something you can call âsubject markersâ, just like ă is an object marker. They come after words to describe their position in a sentence. The same way you have Kasus/Fälle in German.
Finnish: No, seriously, what are they talking about?
Marxism-FennekinismChinese too
Portuguese: append âsâ. O, os; a, as;
hexaflexagonbear [he/him]
TigbittiesYeah, but what comes after gets messy
All languages are like that. If you donât do something one way, you have to do it another. Basically if you sacrifice complexity in grammar, you have to make up for it in other ways through things like case, word-order, tone and register, etc. Itâs a popular myth that languages can be more or less complex than one another.
French had a golden oportunity for changing this during french revolution. A unecessary complex language is not reasonable
Just remember they decided to count by multiplying 20
Oiseau, quoique, aujourdâhui: try guessing the correct pronunciation of these words
Wasoh, kwak, a jour-d-oui? Writing pronunciation is difficult
It wazo, kwa-keu, o-jour-dwi (alternatively doui is correct if you meant the french pronunciation of oui.)
alternatively doui is correct if you meant the french pronunciation of oui.
Yeah I did, I think I did pretty well there. I guess those 3 years of french in school actually did something
âTheâ but sometimes itâs pronounced âtheeâ just for fun ir vowels or whatever.