I am fascinated by the subject of languages. And every chance I get, I try to learn all I can about a foreign or classic language.
That is how I found out. English has to be the simplest language there is.
We have no grammatical gender. Very little in the way of declension and conjugation. Our verbs only only take four endings, -(e)s, -ed, -ing and rarely -en. Everything else is done with auxiliary verbs. Need I go on?
Why is English so simple? What is the historical reason for this? And why do English people put on airs of being so intellectual (sorry but it’s true:))? I mean, their language certainly isn’t. Think about it.
It isn’t simple, at least not overall. It’s simple in the way you’re looking at, but in other ways, it’s complex. In fact, most natural languages have roughly the same amount of complexity, but they exhibit it in different ways. Complex inflections are just one of those ways. Strict word order is another such way, one which English has.
An example of English complexity is the phrasal verb, where a phrase combining a verb with one or two particles makes a new verb with a distinct meaning. The particles are words that are normally either prepositions or adverbs. Few languages have phrasal verbs. Examples: break down, stand by, live up. And exactly where in the sentence the particle goes is an example of the strict word order English has. Sometimes it follows immediately after the verb, sometimes other words are in between. Put the particles in the wrong place and it either changes the meaning or is incorrect.
Another strict order is that of adjectives. As someone pointed out in a recent thread, they have to be in opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose order. If they’re not in that order, the same thing, it will either change the meaning or be incorrect.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that English has surprisingly many irregular verbs, with past-tense forms not ending in -ed.
One of the most basic verbs in any language, “to be”, is one of the most irregular of all in English.
ETA: I assume this happens mainly because English has absorbed so many words from other languages, and many of those words never got fully regularized in English.
Actually, a lot of the irregular verbs have to do with English once upon a time having different classes of “strong” verbs with different conjugations more than borrowed verbs. Verbs imported into English almost always become “weak” regular, weak verbs. The irregulars tend to be older words that have been in the language since it was proto-Germanic.
As I understand it (perhaps incorrectly), part of the streamlining was because the Anglo-Normans and the Anglo-Vikings were trying to communicate with each other. Kind of like a pidjin language being created?
I know six year olds, with apologies to their parents, who are not the sharpest pencils in the packet, who are adequately fluent in Russian (considered with Hungarian to be one of the toughest European languages) and others in Chinese. So there!
Flippant, yes, but while English has a lack of those language rules, it also has inconsistent grammatical rules which must vex those learning it. If you are surrounded by a language and your brain is still a bit malleable you’ll pick up a language, seemingly any language on Earth (even the click and signing ones and probably Klingon). Toughness should be measured with adult learning, and a language which sticks to its fairly strict rules should be easier than one which just makes it up every second sentence.
For some of us, an additional penalty was a fashion to not teach grammar as much in previous years in the school syllabus. I’m okay with not knowing my adverbs, but its a real hindrance in trying to learn other languages. If we share a cohort, that might colour your perception.
As mentioned, English is plenty complicated in many ways. We don’t even have a complete grammar of English, after decades of work. However, if inflection is your criterion for complexity, surely Chinese is simpler than English. No inflection of pronouns like he/him, she/her. No conjugation of verbs at all: go/goes/went are all the same. Zero verb endings rather than four. Why do you conclude that English is simpler than Chinese?
English’s system of auxilliary verbs is immensely complicated and is one of the things that causes great difficulties for foreigners learning the language.
While the merger did simplify some grammar, my understanding is that speakers of Norsified Old English (or Anglicized Old Norse in some views!) from the East Midlands were motivated to unite politically and linguistically with Southern Old English speakers as a result of the Norman invasion. (My enemy’s enemy is my friend. And of course there was no “pidgin” given the closeness of Old Norse to Old English.) French influence came later, after Norman landowners switched to English.
This claim is frequently made. I wonder if there are papers demonstrating it quantitatively.
The US foreign service has a list that ranks the difficulty of each language to learn (for English speakers).
I would say that there is a probable equivalence of difficulty in the reverse direction for each pair. So that Korean Speakers might find English particularly hard and vice versa. Not sure if it makes sense to say that one is harder that another, Although I do think that kids in China and Japan spend more time learning characters than kids from Alphabet-using countries do. So there is a big time-sink involved in character-based language learning.
Not to mention the numerous homonyms (waste and waist) and strange pronunciations.
People learn suite and then pronounce suitable like suite-able. Why should an e at the end of a word change the pronunciation? [Acceptable answer: That’s how it is.]
English is easy to learn, almost impossible to perfect as it is full of exceptions (i before e except after c is just wierd) and much more flexible. Even most native speakers make numerous spelling and speaking errors.
There’s a reason why every single post which is written to correct someone else’s grammatical error contains its own error. It’s inevitable.
And yet we still manage to understand one another.
There is a theory that the simplilfied verb endings in, eg a regular verb’s present tense, came from contact with old Welsh which has the same feature. I don’t know how well this theory stands up to scrutiny.
Right, English has been partly creolized several times. This basically means invading/immigrating men marrying local women, the couple speaking a slightly simplified form of English to each other, and the children learning those simplifications as the correct way to speak.
Linguists debate this, but the most important such episode was probably when Danish (Norse) speakers invaded/moved to parts of England in the 800s. Both are Germanic.
A previous episode was also probably influential in this way, but not as much: Saxons (Germanic) marrying Celtic (British, related to Welsh) in the 500s.
Someone mentioned the Norman French (Romance, but with some Germanic) episode of the 1000s. That was hugely influential, but AFAIK not in a semi creolization-simplification kind of way.
The only other Germanic language that has undergone this so much is Afrikaans.
The language learning measured there includes learning the written language. Whether a language uses the Roman alphabet is surely a big factor in those rankings.
Am I wrong, or do linguists usually focus almost exclusively on spoken language? I think literacy in Old (or even Middle) English, for example, was quite low. (Those who read and wrote usually used Latin, or later, French.)
Similarly the claim “… most natural languages have roughly the same amount of complexity, but they exhibit it in different ways…” is surely intended to apply to spoken languages.
This is a different issue. “Genetic” distance between any two languages is certainly the main factor in how easily speakers of one can learn the other.
The OP was asking about absolute complexity. This concept is itself debated among linguists — as others noted, all languages have their simplicities and complications — but most agree that languages basically fall into four groups: 1. Small-scale, “indigenous” languages, with high complexity; 2. Large-scale, “national” languages that haven’t undergone much creolization (less complexity); 3. Large-scale ones that have (even less); 4. True creoles —languages that were just pidgins (which aren’t fully “languages” by most definitions) a generation ago (simplest of all…but already getting complicated — we humans can’t help ourselves!).
One might ask the OP - “Which English?” American English - but that is far from homogenous. British English? - many dialects remain, some of which are unintelligible to non-locals.
That’s just the two countries where English is the most common language. If one includes countries like India, where English is more widely spoken than any of the hundreds of local languages, the picture becomes even more cloudy.
The OP doesn’t choose to reveal his country of origin, but I suspect that what he sees as “airs of being so intellectual” is more to do with his own attitudes that the English speakers he meets.
This is partly repeating what’s already been pointed out here, but the linguistics professor John McWhorter believes that languages with lots of speakers tend to have less oddball complexities than languages with few speakers. This is because over their history the commonly-used languages have had lots of interactions with speakers of other languages. In particular, speakers of those other languages have had to learn to speak the commonly-used language. In the process, they have simplified the language and this simplification has spread to those who already speak the language.
Languages with few speakers are often ones which have little contact with other languages. They tend to keep their oddball complexities. In effect then, contact with other languages tends to file off the oddball features of languages.
But, Jim B., you should realize that English does have some odd features that other languages don’t have.
It starts at Proto Indo-European and moves forward from there tracing the development of English words and grammar through various languages and times. I’m 93 episodes in and we’re just putting Prince John and the Angevins to bed and moving through the middle ages.
He often recites passages in old or middle English while reading the same passage in modern English. It’s been interesting to hear how much more understandable the old languages are getting as they get closer to the present.
