“Pointless things” in the English language:
– Grammatical plural
– Articles
– Ridiculous numbers of vowels
– Irregular verbs
– Some rare sounds, such as “th”
Every language has arbitrariness to it, structural items that seem totally useless to outsiders. That’s one of the features of natural human languages. You’re wrong if you think English is immune to it, as has been pointed out.
That’s why any question of the sort, “Why does language X have such-and-such strange feature” are impossible to answer. It evolved naturally is the best we can say. A lot of people seem to think that language is, or at least should be, based on logic. It isn’t.
Are you talking about measure words for counting? There are a bunch, but your examples are incorrect.
Whales are given the same counter word 頭 tou as large animals. It’s not squires but rabbits which are counted as birds, and while some people say that it’s because of the prohibition of Buddhist monks on meat, others have pointed out that the prohibition was for all meat, including birds. I wouldn’t be surprised if that explanation was created afterward to explain something which is really just – yet another – illogical exception to a rule, something languages love.
Another linguistic term for counter or measure words is classifiers:
Having studied Russian, Spanish, and especially French, my “ideal” language would omit:
–the subjunctive
–any and all declensions (cases)
–articles
–present tense of “to be”
–gender
Are there any widely spoken languages that fit this wishlist, anyone know?
That is what I was thinking. Why do languages have to be so damned unnecessarily difficult?
For no particularly good reason?
If I were starting a language I would not even consider putting useless stuff in there.
Were our ancestors just plain bored during the long winters and needed something to do to keep their minds active?
Nobody “started” any language. It’s all arbitrary. Linguistic evolution is just like regular evolution. There’s no rhyme or reason, things just happen and some things stick. Now, there are common elements to languages that have to do with the human brain, but nobody sat down as said “new thing called language need subjunctive, Thog!”
Haven’t you been reading the thread? Grammatical gender does not assign a sex to an object. This is a common misconception by speakers of languages without grammatical gender. You should get that out of your head.
I think that Chinese fits your wish list, and it’s definitely widely spoken. Of course, you pay a price – you have to learn thousands of characters, and you have to learn how tones work.
These are similar to the classifiers I described for Thai. Letting ‘cylinder’ denote the classifier for ‘pencil,’ Thai says
I have pencil three cylinder
or
I have pencil red three cylinder
or
I have pencil cylinder red
(The classifier can take a non-counting adjective if no counting adjective is present.)
In practice, many Thais forget the more obscure classifiers. Generic classifiers meaning “piece” or “thing” are in wide use.
Malay/Indonesian is an example that fits all your criteria.
Well, Guy Deutscher in Through the Language Glass has this to say:
I’m not really sure I’m convinced but then, it’s not really up to me anyway.
Is it also free of the painful elements of Chinese that Giles pointed out? Oh, and I thought of another criterion: phonetic spelling (like in Russian for the most part). English is truly awful in that regard.
As for the point about language not being “thought up” by anyone, that’s obviously true (well, except for Esperanto, Klingon, Dothraki, etc.). But my expectation would be that as it evolves, language would tend to shake off unwieldy and unnecessary elements just as a matter of course. Young people would notice they can still communicate the same thing without all of that, and at first it would be “slang” that the older crowd would cluck their tongues at, but eventually it would be standard.
It seems rather obvious to me that the complex grammatical idiosyncrasies of language developed as an aid to clarity. If someone is talking to you and for some reason you lose part of their utterance, the “arbitrary irregularities” of whatever your language make it easier for you to reconstruct what they were saying. I think this is prettymuch true for most or all spoken languages. The thing I have noticed about spoken English, as I know it, is it can be a rather musical language, with intonation carrying a much more significant linguistic load than is commonly attested to. I can utter a sentence that would be all but incoherent to anyone but a regional native speaker, but the musical pattern of tone and rhythm makes the sentence resolvable.
When you only see a language in print, its oddities are much more evident and superfluous than when you hear it used in speaking.
The flip side would be that kids like to play with things, and language would be one of their toys. Older people are generally not whence originate memes.
As does Thai. (To be is not always omitted; sometimes เป็น (‘pen’) – an overworked verb also meaning to be able to – is used.)
Huh? Russian has not the greatest fit between spelling and pronunciation. Malay and Indonesian are much better in that regard. The only problem in the unified orthography they adopted in 1972 is they dropped the distinction between /ə/ and /e/, which are both written with plain <e>, so that you have to memorize which of the two vowels goes in which word.
They use numeric classifiers too, like in Japanese, Korean, Thai, Burmese, and I think also Mongolian. Malay has about 10 or so in common use. It seems that any country doing business with China adapted to using numeric classifiers. Even Turkish and Persian, via the Silk Road in the steppes of Central Asia, use numeric classifiers, only much simplified. In Persian they have only two: one for persons (nafar) and one for everything else: tā, which simply means ‘item(s)’.
Likewise, in Malay & Indonesian, while the verb ada ‘be’ is often omitted, it’s also pressed into service to mean ‘have’.
Yeah, as I’ve said in other threads, in Spanish for example and until the very recent Ley de Violencia de Género (law about gender violence), living beings including people did not have a género, they had a sexo - género equaled gender when talking about words or art, but not about living beings. At the same time, words don’t have sex unless it’s in a surrealist painting. Same thing in French, Italian, German… they’re just two completely different concepts.
When language shake off certain “unnecessary” elements, they tend to gain others. For example, English no longer has noun case endings, but instead we now have a fairly strict word order. Other languages are much more free with word order, since the endings indicate which nouns are the subject and object.
Or, another example: In English we always have to use the pronoun subject with any verb, because the verb change in the present is minimal. If I said just “read”, that’s not a complete sentence. You wouldn’t know if I meant “I read”, “You read”, “We read”, or “They read”. There are many languages where a sentence like this would just require the verb, because the pronoun would be implied by the verb ending.