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Is English a weak, simple language?

Farikos-tól, 2009. január 9.

Hozzászólások: 43

Nyelv: English

ceigered (Profil megtekintése) 2009. január 10. 15:39:19

andogigi:
AlanF:
I agree with a point made upthread -- irregularity adds complexity without contributing much usefulness to a language.
If we confined our morphology debate strictly to the subject of verbs, I might have a tendency to agree with you. However, consider the Slavic languages where you frequently find 6-7 noun cases. Couldn't these declensions, although admittedly increasing complexity, be considered a way to avoid ambiguity in the language?
I would have said that the case declension system would have been a leftover from an agglutinative feature like Finnish where the declension is actually the equivalent of a prepositional word.

For instance in the Aussie aboriginal language Kaurna, -ingga and -illa = 'at' etc

For instance a suburb in South Australia called 'tatachilla' which more or less means 'at Tatachi' (however, despite functioning like a declension, I've never seen this referred to as a declension).

Anyway my speculation aside, I would love to see the origins of the Germanic Strong verb class, I'm sure it would make one sit back and go 'man I understand my own language all of a sudden' rido.gif

erinja (Profil megtekintése) 2009. január 11. 7:05:13

ceigered, take a look at Old English (also known as Anglo-Saxon). There are lots of good websites that have grammatical overviews. Even a brief study of Old English makes it easier to see the Germanic roots of English, and you gain a better understanding of where some of our vocabulary comes from, and why our verbs work the way they do. I only studied Old English very briefly (excellent book: First Steps in Old English) but even in that short time, I had some moments when I really said "Ohhhh, that makes more sense now".

One of these was when I learned the verb "sweorcan", which means "to grow dark". You can see the links between this word and the modern German "schwarz", and the modern English word "swarthy". I never thought to link "swarthy" and "schwarz" before, but "sweorcan" drew the link for me.

There is even an old English verb conjugator online, so you can see how the verbs conjugated out.

Who needs foreign languages for amusement? We have our very own, buried in the basement of our own language. It looks and sounds somewhat like Icelandic (also an old Germanic language, though from another branch than ours), which is cool.

ceigered (Profil megtekintése) 2009. január 11. 8:07:11

Thanks Erinja, I had no idea there was an old English conjugator, I occasionally make use of a dictionary on the net though.

I would have to say that one of my favourite languages is Ealde Englisc ridulo.gif

Actually on this note, Middle English, while more similar to that of late modern English, is still nice to learn.

alexbeard (Profil megtekintése) 2009. január 11. 10:25:01

What type of english was Romeo and Juliet written it?

Edit:
And about the links between languages...Lately in school I've been working on my vocabulary. It's a literature class and we have a lot of vocabulary we do. Every 9 days we have a vocab test on 20 or so words...
But, through this I realized Spanish and French are almost the same as English when you get high in the vocabulary.
For example, the french word for green is vert, spanish, verde, and in english you can say verdant to mean green

Miland (Profil megtekintése) 2009. január 11. 12:28:53

alexbeard:What type of english was Romeo and Juliet written it?
Early Modern English. Here is an interesting wiki article. And here is a website with sound files for the "great vowel shift".

alexbeard (Profil megtekintése) 2009. január 11. 16:59:19

Miland:
alexbeard:What type of english was Romeo and Juliet written it?
Early Modern English. Here is an interesting wiki article. And here is a website with sound files for the "great vowel shift".
Thank you, I'll look into that, my class is just about to do Romeo and Juliet.

vejktoro (Profil megtekintése) 2009. január 12. 0:23:39

alexbeard:
And about the links between languages...Lately in school I've been working on my vocabulary. It's a literature class and we have a lot of vocabulary we do. Every 9 days we have a vocab test on 20 or so words...
But, through this I realized Spanish and French are almost the same as English when you get high in the vocabulary.
For example, the french word for green is vert, spanish, verde, and in english you can say verdant to mean green
Blame 1066.

alexbeard (Profil megtekintése) 2009. január 12. 0:51:45

vejktoro:
alexbeard:
And about the links between languages...Lately in school I've been working on my vocabulary. It's a literature class and we have a lot of vocabulary we do. Every 9 days we have a vocab test on 20 or so words...
But, through this I realized Spanish and French are almost the same as English when you get high in the vocabulary.
For example, the french word for green is vert, spanish, verde, and in english you can say verdant to mean green
Blame 1066.
1066? What's that?

vejktoro (Profil megtekintése) 2009. január 12. 0:55:30

alexbeard:
vejktoro:
alexbeard:
And about the links between languages...Lately in school I've been working on my vocabulary. It's a literature class and we have a lot of vocabulary we do. Every 9 days we have a vocab test on 20 or so words...
But, through this I realized Spanish and French are almost the same as English when you get high in the vocabulary.
For example, the french word for green is vert, spanish, verde, and in english you can say verdant to mean green
Blame 1066.
1066? What's that?
Battle of Hastings.

The day Old English died.

erinja (Profil megtekintése) 2009. január 12. 1:35:30

I have always felt a bit cross about 1066, actually.

I feel that we, as English speakers, sort of miss out on something. If you speak Italian, you can understand written Spanish and French, at least 70% or so. Lots of languages have some degree of intelligibility with other related languages. But since we were torn from our roots in 1066, we lost our moorings. We used to be part of a family of local languages. Old English had a high degree of intelligibility with other languages of the region. But that's gone now. We lost many of our Germanic roots, but we are not Romance either. We are in a weird no-man's land on the family tree of languages. We are close family to no-one, and the weird distant cousin that no one really likes very much to everyone.

It's not the fault of today's French people, but I wish you guys could go back in time and tell the Normans not to invade ridulo.gif

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