Saluton, miaj geamikoj!

I haven't been learning languages for very long. I just started on German, oh, fifteen months ago and since then I've picked up on studying Esperanto and Latin. I intend to get started on Spanish and Arabic soon. Since Esperanto requires far less time than ethnic languages and Latin is simply a casual hobby, I think I should be able to manage with some help.

*gets back on track*

I met a German exchange student shortly after I started learning German, and she eventually became a close friend of mine. I had just started to realize that German, with grammatical gender (which I still find to be pointless), million adjective endings, and thousands of pointless rules is much more complex than English.

I asked Patricia one day if she thought English was a simplistic, stupid language. She said no, but she loves English so I feel that she was likely biased.

I was reading through the forums a little and found something on Japanese. It seems to be incredibly more complex than English. In fact, most languages seem incredibly more complex than English.

So my questions to this forum, for my own curiosity and because many of you (I haven't been here long, so I won't say most) seem to be knowledgeable language lovers are these: Is English a simple language? Does it fall flat on its face trying to express complex or subtle ideas? Are English speakers at an intellectual disadvantage because of the simplicity of their native tongue?

Farikos:Saluton, miaj geamikoj!
Is English a simple language? Does it fall flat on its face trying to express complex or subtle ideas? Are English speakers at an intellectual disadvantage because of the simplicity of their native tongue?

Nah.
All languages are capable of expressing all things.

Some are more efficient in certain areas then others. But it tends to balance out.

English has way more words (by a couple hundred thousand) then any other tongue on earth, which means speakers can be very precise, subtle, or just plain vague. Imagine if all those gender rules and endings had to apply to all those words... yuck. The rules English applies to them is enough if ya ask me.

English uses a bunch of little words on verbs to shuffle the meaning around. I`m sure this is fun for newcomers: 'turn on', 'turn off', 'turn over', 'turn in', 'turn up', 'turn out', 'turn down'. Now try that with the verb 'to run'.

And why do you call your car a she?

It`s up to the speaker to express. Not the language.

Farikos:Does it fall flat on its face trying to express complex or subtle ideas? Are English speakers at an intellectual disadvantage because of the simplicity of their native tongue?

I think you are making an incorrect connection between simplicity of grammar and the ability to express complex ideas.

A language with a completely regular grammar is potentially just as expressive as a language with a completely irregular grammar, while at the same time being simpler by many orders of magnitude. Irregularities add complexity to a languages structure, but don't necessarily add anything to its ability to transmit information.

A language like Esperanto, for example, has an extremely regular system of conjugating verbs, which can be learned in a few minutes at most. Compare this to a language whose verbs are different for every tense, and for every subject, where something like "I am, you are, he is, I was, they were, etc.) is extended to every verb in the language, without any discernible pattern. The second language is MUCH more complex than the first, yet that complexity doesn't add anything at all to the ideas being expressed.

Of the natural languages, English is one of the simpler ones, due to its relative regularity[1], yet that doesn't have any impact on its ability to express complex (or subtle) ideas. Esperanto is even simpler than English, and yet there is nothing you can express in English (or Japanese, or Finnish, or Czech - all quite complex languages) that you can't express equally well in Esperanto. Simple and simplistic are not the same thing.

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[1] And I mean RELATIVE. English is still horribly irregular - just less so than many other languages.

Apparently, according to a Germanic linguist of a time gone by, almost the entirety of Georgian verbs were irregular - this is coming from a speaker of a Germanic language, where we have our own class of irregular verbs (Strong verbs, is that because they never change even when the rest of the language is??)

English isn't simple, nor weak. Because, when there isn't a direct translation for something, there's often a round about way of doing it. Which is good. If a language was completely unable to express something, then we might as well not learn it. (not entirely true, but it kinda defeats the point of language if you can't communicate with it )

English isn't a strongly inflected language, i.e. endings of words seldom change, but the word order is quite important and I think the use of prepositions is fairly unpredictable.

All languages can express ideas, it's how languages evolve. When a new idea comes around, we name it. If you can't express something, you find a way to, you know?

FYI English also has strong and weak verbs.

We are, of course, a Germanic language. The difference is that our strong verbs now far outnumber our weak verbs. Therefore, our strong verbs tend to be referred to as "irregular", although many of them are not actually irregular, they are simply regular strong verbs, under the more complicated grammatical system of Old English.

Our "regular" verbs, or weak verbs, receive the -ed ending in the past tense. Load -> loaded. Strong verbs go into the past tense by modifying a vowel in the middle of the word. Swim -> swam.

Some formerly weak verbs have become strong, and today, have two alternate forms, a strong and a weak. This is interesting because in some cases the older form is now considered wrong. "Dive" should properly be a weak verb, with the past tense "dived", but the strong form "dove" is now common. Similarly, "sneak" is properly a weak verb with the past tense "sneaked", but "snuck" is common now.

It's worth pointing out that the terms "weak" and "strong" with relation to verbs were introduced by Jacob Grimm (the linguist and folktale collector). It now seems like a judgmental choice of words to describe value-neutral linguistic phenomena.

I agree with a point made upthread -- irregularity adds complexity without contributing much usefulness to a language. When you have two means of indicating the person of a verb -- the subject pronoun and the verb ending -- you have redundancy that doesn't really gain you anything, other than the ability to correct for gaps when you fail to hear individual words in a sentence (and an unsettled feeling when speakers fail to make their subjects and verbs agree!). And since English hasn't entirely eliminated verb morphology even in regular "weak" verbs -- there's still the third-person-singular "s" in the present -- verb agreement still requires some mental energy. If English went that last step, as Esperanto has, things would be much easier.

But it's also worth pointing out that while English is simpler in the area of morphology, it's more complicated than other languages in some other respects. For instance, English distinguishes between "I walk", "I am walking", and "I do walk", while some other European languages (and Esperanto) tend to use the simple present to cover all these meanings, with the distinctions made in other ways (for instance, by using adverbs).

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?

RiotNrrd:A language with a completely regular grammar is potentially just as expressive as a language with a completely irregular grammar, while at the same time being simpler by many orders of magnitude. Irregularities add complexity to a languages structure, but don't necessarily add anything to its ability to transmit information.

I mostly agree. But I would even go further as to say: a simpler language with regular grammar is not just as expressive as a natural language, it is in fact more expressive. Regularity enables generalization. It allows to apply the same principles everywhere, sometimes in surprising ways, making the language richer and more creative as a result. For example, the fact that in Esperanto, adding the -e ending makes the adverb from any root word is a mighty powerful rule, which makes Esperanto more flexible than English, while being an order of magnitude easier to learn than English. I can often say in one single Esperanto word, what would requires several words in English (or French, Spanish, German...). Another example: the fact that adding the prefix mal- gives the opposite for every root words (wherever it makes sense of course) can be used in surprising and fun ways such as: "mi malsekvas la sagon" (= I follow the arrow in the opposite direction). Translating the word "malsekvas" here requires several words in English.

Simple is beautiful. The Occam's razor princible which states "entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem" (= entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity) applies wonderfully to Esperanto.

However, a sprinkle of irregularities can be useful too, without overdoing it. Esperanto is mostly regular, but not completely. In my opinion, a language should apply the same principle as Huffman encoding in data encoding theory, whereby frequent values are encoded in fewer bits than rare values. How does this Huffman encoding thing apply to languages? Frequent words should be short for conciseness, even if it means breaking regularity. Shorter is better. Esperanto does a bit that. Esperanto has the word "jes" (for English "yes"), and the prefix "mal-" for creating the opposite, so why don't we use "maljes" for the English "no"? One reason is that it would be too long I think for such a frequent word as "no". A second reasons, could be that in a noisy environment, it would be awfully ambiguous. That's also why "liva" (for "left") is accepted in Esperanto instead of "maldekstra". In the Perl programing language, laziness is a virtue, so the language promotes conciseness, at the cost of being far less regular than other programing languages such as Python, Tcl, etc. A few irregularities are fine in my opinion, as long as they don't grow (i.e. closed system, like the few limited masculine & feminine words in Esperanto) and as long as they have a strong reason, such as making a frequent word short, or reducing ambiguity in noisy environment. The problem with natural languages is the sheer number of absurd irregularities for no good reasons most of the time.