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English-like grammar? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| FailArtist Aka ’Akao’ Newbie United States Joined 5310 days ago 34 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 24 09 June 2010 at 6:56am | IP Logged | ||
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Grammar-wise, is there any language exactly like English? Edited by FailArtist on 09 June 2010 at 9:53am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6381 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 24 09 June 2010 at 8:37am | IP Logged | ||
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I changed the thread title to something more descriptive. Edited by newyorkeric on 09 June 2010 at 8:37am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| FailArtist Aka ’Akao’ Newbie United States Joined 5310 days ago 34 posts - 39 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 24 09 June 2010 at 9:52am | IP Logged | ||
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Thanks. I'm surprised I didn't think of that.
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| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5336 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 4 of 24 09 June 2010 at 10:03am | IP Logged | ||
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For a moment there, I felt tempted to say that not even a madman could create a language like English :-)But to be serious, I cannot imagine there are any language that has a grammar which is identical to the English grammar, but the Scandinavian languages and Dutch would come farly close. We have the genders of course, which are only visible in the personal pronouns in English, but other than that I would think they are as close as you get.
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| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6770 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 5 of 24 09 June 2010 at 1:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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Scots is the closest you'll come, followed by Frisian.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Scots#Grammar Edited by Captain Haddock on 09 June 2010 at 1:56pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Declan1991 Tetraglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6441 days ago 233 posts - 359 votes Speaks: English*, German, Irish, French | Message 6 of 24 09 June 2010 at 3:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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Frisian is very similar to Old English. But anything in the Germanic family, Dutch probably, but German too, and the Scandinavian languages.
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6441 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 7 of 24 09 June 2010 at 4:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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German and Dutch noticeably differ from English in word order. The Scandinavian languages are more similar grammatically, but have a few tricks up their sleeves. They do have some things in common, such as Germanic strong verbs (swim/swam/swum, sink/sank/sunk...), where the vowels change in different forms; these verbs are often cognate across the Germanic languages. They're not always, though; one example is the German strong verb 'bitten' ('to request/beg', not 'to bite').
Mandarin Chinese has some striking similarities to English grammatically, though it also has plenty of differences. It has a strict word order which happens to be reminiscent of that of English and no inflection (English has some, though less than most languages). Persian is also reminiscent of English grammatically; it lost most of its inflections quite a few centuries before English did. Like German, it has significant differences from English in word order. The Germanic languages are most similar to English overall, but they're not all that much more similar to it grammatically than some more distant languages are. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5455 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 8 of 24 09 June 2010 at 4:34pm | IP Logged | ||
The Scandinavian languages also differ from English in that they have the typically Germanic "verb second" word order. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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