I didn’t say English “to be” was more irregular than other languages’ versions of “to be”. I said it was more irregular than most other English irregular verbs.
A noticeably simple aspect of English is that verbs don’t have to agree (much) with their subject nouns in person, number, or the occasional gender. The only regular case is with third-person singular present tense, which adds “s” at the end. (Irregular verbs, of course, have their own rules that are particular to each word.)
Furthermore, adjectives are not inflected to agree with their subjects.
It has been noted that nouns have very few inflections, but that this then requires stricter word-order rules to indicate cases and avoid ambiguities.
Does it create ambiguities that verbs and adjectives don’t agree (much) with their subjects? If so, what does English do to resolve that?
English uses adjunct nouns extensively, in which one noun functions as an adjective to modify another noun, sometimes creating idiomatic phrases. This creates all kinds of ambiguities. What is a “big garage sale”? Is it a big sale of garages? (How many varieties of garages are on sale? How many acres of land does it cover?) Or a sale of big garages? (No thanks, my garage is big enough.)
As best I know, Spanish doesn’t use adjunct nouns (although they have crept into Spanglish) and those kinds of ambiguities don’t exist.
Hebrew uses nouns to modify other nouns extensively, and even has an inflection for it – but the noun that is modified is inflected, not the modifying noun. This is used to create possessive forms, and also to create idiomatic phrases, for example “book house” means “school”.
Nope. Translating Northern Piper’s list into Mandarin, we get:
I am - 我是
You are - 你是
He/she is - 他/她是
We are - 我们是
You are - 你们是
They are. - 他/她们是
And note that phrases like “I am hungry” don’t use the verb “to be” at all; you can directly say “I hungry”. (The phrase “It is raining” also does not include “to be”, but I think that one is more common to lots of languages i.e. “it is raining” is something of an English quirk, IIRC).
For this reason, many Chinese will say, as a point of pride, that Chinese doesn’t have grammar at all. But of course, in reality, you can’t have a language without grammar and Mandarin definitely has its own difficult or idiosyncratic areas.
More about adjunct nouns in English and lack thereof in Spanish:
I worked on an application program of early 1990’s vintage, in the days before graphic user interfaces were common. Our application had primitive (sort of) dialog boxes, but we called them “entry forms”.
One entry form in the system configuration was called “[Product] user data configuration options entry form”. (Got all that?)
At the end of the dialog it said “End of [Product] user data configuration options entry form”
Our Spanish-speaking employee helped us write a Spanish version of the product. These lines looked like this (using the Spanish words, of course):
“Form of entry of options of configuration of data of user of [Product]”
“End of form of entry of options of configuration of data of user of [Product]”
(I sometimes wondered if our Spanish translator was being a bit too literal with things like that. His native language was Brazilian Portuguese. Could it have been phrased a bit more colloquially?) In particular, I didn’t think “data of user of [Product]” really says the same thing as “[Product] user data”.
“It is raining” is indeed something of an English quirk, but not in the way you say. You seem to suggest that it is quirky of English to include the verb “is” in that sentence.
The actual quirk is including the meaningless pronoun “It” in the sentence. That happens because English sentences simply MUST have a subject, so “It” is thrown in to give it one.
(Disclaimer: Yes, some sentences don’t have an explicit subject. The second-person imperative, e.g., “Eat your dinner!” has an unspoken implied subject: “[You] eat your dinner!” – I learned that in 8th grade English when we were diagramming sentences. )
In Hebrew, the present tense “David is hungry” would simply be “David hungry”. But the Hebrew verb “to be” is actually used in all other tenses and structures other than the present tense, and AAUI is otherwise a quite regular verb. (Is that right, Alessan?)
In so far as I have been able to check by reading a number of online accounts and some books on language, English is definitely not one of the hardest languages to learn for speakers of other languages. I know that someone who looks just at the irregularities in English might think that it is therefore the hardest. The problem is that every language has irregularities. Those irregularities are different in each language. The ones of English aren’t harder than those of all other languages.
In fact, English apparently has less irregularities than many other languages. The reason is that it has had contact with the speakers of other languages for a long time. The rule of thumb is that prolonged contact with other languages tends to slowly decrease the number of irregularities. So what languages are actually the hardest to learn for speakers of other languages? It’s probably the languages which have the least speakers.
There are 7,111 languages spoken at the present time. 1,514 have less than a thousand speakers, 467 have less than a hundred speakers, and 151 have less than ten speakers. (These numbers are taken from the website Ethnologue, which lists all known languages in the world. Yeah, yeah, I know that there’s another such website called Glottolog which lists all the languages in the world. Go ahead and use it to look up the same numbers if you wish.) Almost certainly you don’t know the names of virtually all those languages.
As I said in a previous post, contact with other languages files off the edges of a language. These little-known languages have weird irregularities that you have never encountered even if you speak a number of well-known languages. I realize it’s hard to defend this statement unless you have studied some of those languages with very few speakers.
Which brings us to another problem - the way that words can change their meanings, sometimes quite radically, over time. To a teenager, “sick” and “ill” don’t have the same meaning at all.
Well they still have the same meaning, just they have acquired additional slang meanings.
Once again, going back to my second language of Mandarin…
Yes, words have of course shifted in meaning over time, but also, a more specific yes, that many of the most common words for “cool” or “impressive” had the original meaning of “fierce” or “terrifying”. So negative words wrapping around and becoming positive is not just an English thing.
I have taught English to latinos for fifteen years. English ain’t easy to master. Most students are concerned about their accent, I tell them to not worry about that. Your accent is beautiful. The main thing is that you are understood.
I am trilingual. I speak English, Maya Yucateca, and Spanish. Thirteen percent of the world’s population are trilingual. So it is no big deal.
As far as complexity, Maya is a very descriptive language. For example, when the Spanish came they had bicycles. The Maya had no word for bicycle. So they described the action of the feet moving the round. And with ten tenses for future actions it is complicated. Has fifty adjectives for size. But, doesn’t use articles, which I find refreshing.
That’s only one metric, so it isn’t that simple. I learned Walpiri in 6 months because it only has a tiny lexicon of a few hundred words (aglutinative). English is difficult because it has more than (from memory) two million words (if you include scientific nomenclature).
I’m an ESL teacher in Korea. Kids’ biggest complaints are (1) English spelling isn’t phonetic, like Hangul (written Korean), and (2) there is no comprehensible rule for ie and ei. My responses are as follows:
English steals its words from other languages. We even steal a few from Korean, mostly food-related. Whenever possible, we keep the original spelling, plurals and grammar, unless we don’t. Why does that shock you? WE STEAL!
The two languages we steal from the most are French and German. England has, in its history, been invaded by every civilization that has boats, and they all left their marks, but most profoundly by the Saxons (German) and the Normans (French). If a word has German roots, it’s probably IE (Die Wulkyrie). If it has French roots, it could go either way, but mostly ei (le Seine, le droit seigneur,et Marseilles, but also la vie et brie ). Best just to memorize them.
English is full of linguistic contradictions because it developed from several different languages. Greek and Latin had the dominant influence, but others played a part as well. If you want a really beautiful and harmonious language, try classical Greek.
To be fair, neither did Spanish, taking bicicleta (or bici) from French bicyclette. But the fact that Mayan invented an entirely new word rather than adopting a foreign one is interesting.
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