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Languages ranked based on irregularities? | ||
Tags: Foreign Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| aquablue Senior Member United States Joined 6383 days ago 150 posts - 172 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 1 of 29 08 June 2012 at 4:15am | IP Logged |
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Given the following languages, would anybody care to take a shot at ranking them in
terms of the quantity of irregularities that occur (i.e, elements of grammar or vocab that are exceptions to the general pattern and must be memorized). This does not include gender, idioms or slang of course which are irregular by nature. French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Hindi, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, German, Arabic. Edited by aquablue on 08 June 2012 at 4:17am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Kevin Hsu Triglot Groupie Canada Joined 4739 days ago 60 posts - 94 votes Speaks: English, Mandarin*, Korean Studies: German | Message 2 of 29 08 June 2012 at 4:34am | IP Logged |
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Chinese would be either last, or very close to being the last.
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| aquablue Senior Member United States Joined 6383 days ago 150 posts - 172 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 3 of 29 08 June 2012 at 6:35am | IP Logged |
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Good to know.
I'm guessing #1 would be a euro language. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4669 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 4 of 29 08 June 2012 at 7:13am | IP Logged |
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It depends how you count irregularities.
Many Spanish grammarians consider verbs like DEFENDER regular although they have a diphthong in the present tense (which you cannot predict from the infinitive, thus, you must memorize the present form along with the infinitive: DEFENDER:DEFIENDO). In Portuguese DEFENDER is conjugated like DEPENDER: eu defendo, eu dependo, it's 100% regular. In Spanish, 40% of verbs are affected by the ''diphthong change'', in Portuguese, there are less than 5 % of changes (when they do occur, they are more predictable. in the 1st person singular, -eXir and -oXir verbs have I and U respectively: minto, tusso; X stands for any group of consonants). So, keep it in mind. Irregularity is a relative concept. Many Germanologists object to ''English irregular verbs'', because within the scope of Germanistics, verbs like ''spring sprang sprung'' follow the regular pattern, and in old English all verbs were like this. The pattern ''jump jumped jumped'' developed/came later. So, they should be called ''stem vowel changing'' or ''strong'' verbs instead. Edited by Medulin on 08 June 2012 at 7:36am 8 persons have voted this message useful | |
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4623 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 5 of 29 08 June 2012 at 10:39am | IP Logged |
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German has many irregular verbs, but nearly all of them fall into one of three classes which have predictable outcomes. So we have some regularity within the irregularity.
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| sipes23 Diglot Senior Member United States pluteopleno.com/wprs Joined 4871 days ago 134 posts - 235 votes Speaks: English*, Latin Studies: Spanish, Ancient Greek, Persian | Message 6 of 29 09 June 2012 at 3:42am | IP Logged |
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I'm half of the opinion that irregularities—particularly in morphology—are not as common as we want them to be.
And I know I'm going to get whipped for this. Even principal parts. Sing, sang, sung isn't irregular. It follows, as Medulin notes, traditional Germanic strong verb patterns. Nothing to see here. Same, again as Medulin notes, with verbs like the Spanish pensar (pienso < ie for e in stressed syllables). There are lots of them. If there are too many irregularities, the natives can't easily learn it. Remember: infants are learning these (and yes, I know it takes a few years to iron out such infelicities as "Charlie gived me a present"). Irregular? Go, went, gone. Fero, ferre, tuli, latum. A whole fleet of Ancient Greek verbs chock a block with suppletive forms like the first two verbs I mentioned, but that just doesn't seem bad. Suppletion seems like an odd strategy, but it does seem to show up here and there. Irregular to me would be something like 3rd person singular present inflects with an -s on the root of the verb (like English), except for find. It is he findr. Oh, and run. It is she runc. Or better, he runs, she runc, it runs and he findr, she finds, it findr. That's irregular. I am highly suspicious that what we think of irregularities are patterns that aren't readily apparent to learners. (I'm wondering if anyone has done any processing speed studies of "irregular" language items on native speakers to see if our brains consider these to be irregular.) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6950 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 7 of 29 09 June 2012 at 7:37am | IP Logged |
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Japan has very few morphological irregularities. There are about 4 irregular verbs that
have to be memorized as-is （行く、来る、する、ある・である）, a very small list of verbs that look like る verbs but conjugate like う verbs, and at least one word （綺麗） that looks like a い adjective but conjugates like a な adjective in certain dialects. These are all pretty easy to get the hang of even as a beginner. The most irregular thing about Japanese is probably the kanji readings, especially in people and place names. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5179 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi | Message 8 of 29 09 June 2012 at 12:44pm | IP Logged |
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My random guess:
Chinese -> Japanese -> Hindi -> French -> Italian -> Spanish -> Portuguese ->Arabic -> German -> Russian but why exclude gender? in Italian it's mostly regular, in German you have to learn it by heart. Chinese on the other hand does not have any gender. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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