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Irregularity distribution/cause/thoughts | ||
Tags: Morphology | Learning Difficulty | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Papashaw1 Newbie Australia Joined 4033 days ago 30 posts - 35 votes | Message 1 of 1 13 February 2014 at 4:38am | IP Logged |
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For a strong example of irregular, take Ancient Greek, the nouns come in 23+ declensions, the verbs are very hard
to pull apart with numerous suppletive verbs and many more irregulars, vowel and consonant changes, and it even has a definite article. A person learning Ancient greek often buries their head in charts. Something like Russian is stuck between in a certain way, it has the complexities of prepositional phrases and verbs with prepositions, the complexity of cases and verbs taking cases or constructions, or even both combined which multiply eachother. It also is very irregular as I have read on this forum, causing so much trouble due to its verbs. A person learning Lao or Thai won't exactly be burying their heads in charts as a student of ancient Greek, Icelandic, or Russian. One remarkable thing is how many redundancies western languages have compared to many isolating Asian ones. There are often multiple ways that compete with each other for things such as possession, modality, cases and prepositions or both, word order inversion or question tags etc. Thai for example is quite "just what it needs" too. Also both are regular and have no irregularities that need to be memorized, and often fewer exceptions too that morphology brings (Verbs taking cases, suppletion, irregular forms, exceptions) which Lao lacks despite being as conservative as Polish historically. But many of these languages have had the same time to "stuff up" as well and are equally as isolated. But they don't have the irregular vowel changes in comparatives or irregular plurals of something like German or Icelandic, nor did their ancestors function like Ancient greek. But shouldn't many others also have their frustrations since they have been around just as long? I question why Basque and Hungarian are so regular and straightforward in inflection despite not being worldwide languages, same with Austronesian languages too. The Turkic languages too, and isolating analytical languages in Asia. Are fusional languages the most complicated in irregularity? Even I ponder when looking at Caucasian languages on why some have noun classes while their immediate relative a few kilometers away has 6 classes to worry about. I mostly think of Ancient Greek and how it was. Even Sanskrit and Latin look far more regular and straightforward when compared. What is the cause? Edited by Papashaw1 on 13 February 2014 at 5:56am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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