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Languages ranked based on irregularities?

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29 messages over 4 pages: 1 2 3 4  Next >>
aquablue
Senior Member
United States
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 Message 1 of 29
08 June 2012 at 4:15am | IP Logged 
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

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Kevin Hsu
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Groupie
Canada
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 Message 2 of 29
08 June 2012 at 4:34am | IP Logged 
Chinese would be either last, or very close to being the last.

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aquablue
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 Message 3 of 29
08 June 2012 at 6:35am | IP Logged 
Good to know.

I'm guessing #1 would be a euro language.
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Medulin
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 Message 4 of 29
08 June 2012 at 7:13am | IP Logged 
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

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beano
Diglot
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 Message 5 of 29
08 June 2012 at 10:39am | IP Logged 
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
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United States
pluteopleno.com/wprs
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 Message 6 of 29
09 June 2012 at 3:42am | IP Logged 
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.)


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Lucky Charms
Diglot
Senior Member
Japan
lapacifica.net
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 Message 7 of 29
09 June 2012 at 7:37am | IP Logged 
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.
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clumsy
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 Message 8 of 29
09 June 2012 at 12:44pm | IP Logged 
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.



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