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Are some languages more complex? Now/Then | ||
Tags: Linguistics | Grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4071 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 17 of 29 24 October 2013 at 9:47am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think the clauses with the auxiliary "do" in English made the verbal constructions
more difficult than previously. In other Germanic languages like Dutch and German, none of this auxiliary "do" is necessary. Now I think of how everyday I might say, "Did I eat?" instead of, "Ate I?" which would be the simple "At ik?" in Dutch. Also "What do you want" is long and rounded instead of the simple, "What want you?", which Dutch keeps simple with "Wat wil je?". I think this "do" construction is probably what would be more annoying for learners of English, and also I as a native speaker find it quite overcomplicated when it could be simpler. I suppose they said, "What want you?" several centuries ago, but I am not sure why they stopped. The only equivalent I can remember is the "est-ce que" construction in French interrogative clauses, but this is not mandatory due to inversion, etc. Edited by 1e4e6 on 24 October 2013 at 9:49am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4625 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 18 of 29 24 October 2013 at 12:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm afraid this sentence was given to misunderstanding. I wanted to say that there were language families which never had inflection, as opposed to Indo-European. However, I did not mean to say that Indo-European was the only language family with inflection. Edited by Josquin on 24 October 2013 at 2:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Papashaw Newbie Australia Joined 3884 days ago 28 posts - 32 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 19 of 29 24 October 2013 at 4:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Why is it in Latin or Sanskrit, sentence are written without a preposition if the meaning is made known through
case but with modern Polish and Czech, I see prepositions still being used even when the context is apparent. Do modern speakers often drop prepositions if the context makes sense, and if not then why is it they are used so commonly nowadays? Or was it a specific writing style for Latin or Sanskrit that forewent them? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4403 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 20 of 29 25 October 2013 at 12:00am | IP Logged | |||||
Confusingly, English also uses "would" to refer to past events, such as "my car would not start this morning" "Would" is also used to denote recurring events in the past. For example, "We would play football in the streets" Can't be too many other languages doing this. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6690 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 21 of 29 25 October 2013 at 1:11am | IP Logged | |||||
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Wow, even more ways to express a past tense than the handful I mentioned. And Papashaw says that learners tells him that there's only one way to say things in English...
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 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5313 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 22 of 29 25 October 2013 at 2:23am | IP Logged | |||||
And we still haven't talked about past tense forms of is going to, or the weirder compounds that can be constructed if you're willing to push the limits a bit:
Analytic languages are fun. :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Papashaw Newbie Australia Joined 3884 days ago 28 posts - 32 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 23 of 29 25 October 2013 at 6:11am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think I understand guys. But I still am curious why modern synthetic languages like Czech use prepositions far
more often than in something like Latin, even when specifying is not needed. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4034 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 24 of 29 25 October 2013 at 9:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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Because languages vary with the amount of redundance they have. Redundance is anything extra, more than is needed to convey the message. Czech is just currently in a phase of higher redundance in comparison with Latin.
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