Is English the most logical language?

[danlightbulb]

My girlfriend is Polish so I have just embarked on trying to learn it.

I am faced with the same illogical grammatical structures that I remember back from school when we were forced to learn French and German.

It begs the question to me whether English is by far the best language, and by 'the best', I mean the most easy to understand and construct.

For example, in Polish and in many other languages they have masculine and feminine terms. For some unknown reason to me, in Polish, a horse is masculine and a cow is feminine. Ive just learned that if I wanted to say 'one horse' I would have to say Jeden kon whereas if I wanted to say 'one cow' I would have to say Jedna krowa. How in any possible logical argument can you say that you need two separate words to say the number 'one'? It simply is an unnecessary addition.

Im sure English has its oddities too but to my mind there is certainly no odd/illogical grammatical behaviour.

 

[danlightbulb]

English is a horrible language to learn as a non-native speaker because it lacks consistent rules and structure

In what way does our language lack consistent rules and structure? Obviously I speak it so Im biased, but to me English structure is highly logical.

There is no logic in an inanimate object being male or female.

 

[danlightbulb]

Wait, aren't cows female in English and bulls male? Like dog and bitch

Thats different. Whilst we can use separate words for some male and female animals, we dont have separate ways of refering to them or counting them. We still say 'one' cow or 'one' bull. And its rare, most animals are simply one word - cat, dog, horse, fish, gerbil.

 

[danlightbulb]

As one example. The letter 'g' is pronounced like, well, g.

As in golf, glue, grate, glee, glib.

Apart from in the word "gent" where it's pronounced as an 'j'.

Apart from in the word "rough" where it's pronounced as an 'f'.

Apart from in the word "light" where it's not pronounced at all.

Ah that is different. Those are separate and independent words, not related to grammar at all. Im referring to how we structure sentences.

 

[danlightbulb]

Oh sorry, you rules and structure, not grammar. But OK.

Yeah sentence structure, rather than spelling and pronunciation.

We have, to my mind, a very logical way of constructing sentences.

No lol. Its as illogical as you can get. If you want something regular and (mostly) logical learn japanese

In what way is it illogical?

 

[danlightbulb]

I see our language as like a set of base lego. Our smallest building block for example is the 1x1 lego piece. However other languages their smallest block might be the 2x4 piece, so they then have to have multiple versions of that word to convey the meaning or they cant disagregate the word further, whereas we can simply use our smaller building blocks to construct the right sentence.

Example in English - He is a man.
In Polish - On jest mężczyzna.

Now 'man' in English is mezczyzna in Polish. But Mezczyzna can also mean 'a man' or 'the man' they don't use the 'a' or 'the'.

How about this:

Mężczyzna je jabłko = A man eats an apple OR A man is eating an apple. Je = eating, eats, is eating.

There is not differentiation between past and present tense.

There is no logic there really.

 

[danlightbulb]

I will read this after I have read the other thread, but I will buy you lunch next time, as you bought it last time.

And that's a really simple example of tense related English stupidity.

But English still works if you get it wrong - whereas other languages simply don't.

"I will read this after I have read(1) the other thread, but I will buy you lunch next time, as you buy(2) it last time.

(1) If you say read as in 'reed' instead of 'red' it still works.
(2) If you say buy instead of bought, the structure still works.

if you were to say certain combinations of words in other languages that were wrong, would they understand you?

 

[danlightbulb]

Past of "Je" is "Zjadl"

Exactly! A completely different word. In English the main bit of the word is still the same we just supplement it.

Eat (the core word)
Eaten - past tense
Eating - present tense


if you learn the word Eat and the endings 'en' and 'ing' you basically can apply that to all sorts of words.

In Polish I will need to learn multiple versions of simple words.


Plurals is no doubt another area to grapple with. I don't know this yet in Polish, but simply adding an 's' to most words has to be the most simple method. I know there are still oddities but still.

 

[danlightbulb]

i eaten a pancake for breakfast

Ah that's different. First person/third person. Yes, difficult, but other languages presumably also have this.

 

[danlightbulb]

This is what the previous post you quoted was trying to say.
The example of 'buy' doesn't fit your rule.

Buy (the core word)
Bought - past tense
Buying - present tense

Fair enough we do have oddities no doubt. But I guess all languages do. The OP question was whether ours is the most logical, Im not saying ours is entirely logical or perfect I suppose, just more logical than others.

 

[danlightbulb]

And dont get me started on accents. Changing the sound of a word with an accent has got to be completely illogical. I cant think that we do that in English, maybe there are a few examples.

Here is one I learn in school.

I before E Except After C.

Yeah I think most people know that rule is a myth though dont they?

 

[danlightbulb]

I've learnt more Polish since my son was born and been learning along with him the last few years than I did in the 10 years with my missus prior to that.

Any tips for me? Ive started with duolingo but I don't really want to pay for a subscription just yet.

 

[danlightbulb]

It's not a myth, it work most of the time, except there are a lot of exceptions. It's not a problem for me because rather than learn to spell, I learn language by memory as a child, it's how you learn Chinese. So I learn how to spell by memory, i don't tend to learn the rules as I just remember them.

I'll come back to building blocks again.

I dont know about Chinese but I thought they had a huge alphabet because they use essentially symbols for all sorts of word combinations and phrases?

For example we have in English 'I am', but in Polish its one word 'jestem' (and i think that varies by gender as well possibly). So we can construct more with our two word building blocks without needing more words?

 

[danlightbulb]

No, we don't even bother with accents! We just change the sounds of words based on context, that's surely much more illogical.
Like:
Row
Desert
Refuse
Present
Invalid
Close
Wind
Subject

The way I see it they might be spelled the same but they are not the same word.

Desert (the pudding) is not the same as desert (the sand).
Wind (the air) is not the same as wind (as in to coil up a rope).

So when you describe them as the same word, well they aren't really, they are spelled the same.

I agree that could be confusing when reading English but its not confusing to speak because you would think they are different words.


What Im talking about is actually varying the same word (i.e a word that has the same meaning), by gender or by context.

 

[danlightbulb]

English is hard, not as hard as Finnish but harder than most.

Esperanto is the easiest most logical language

I just took a look at Esperanto and I disagree. It has accents on loads of letters (eg Ĉ is pronounced like English ch in chatting).

Take this example:
My name is Marco. Mia nomo estas Marko

How can a simple 2 letter word 'My' meaning owned or belonging to me, be simpler when made into a 3 letter word? How can a simple 2 letter word 'is', essentially meaning '=', be simpler as a 5 letter word 'estas'?

No, a universal language would need to take the simplest form of the basic building blocks (essentially what we have for common words in English) and use that, and just eliminate all of the complex grammar, gender and accent rules.


You cannot get much simpler, logical and easy to understand and to build a sentence with, than 'My name is XX'. Its essentially [Name]=[XX] in a sentence.

You cannot get much simpler than 'No, Yes, Me, I, My, A, The, Is' etc..

 

[danlightbulb]

I had a German exchange student and she hated our silent letters. Why not nee? Not k-nee.

Its true I agree but spoken, you would not know the difference would you because they would sound the same.

So as far as learning the spoken language goes, I cant see that odd spellings would interfere too much. They wouldn't have to learn gender or any strange accents.

Learning English is pretty much learning the nouns, common linking words, tense modifiers and sentence structure.

other languages are better imo, I like how precise German language is, but the sentence structure just feels wrong as an native English speaker

We are probably closest to German language. Except they have gender in their language, otherwise its probably very similar. And their number structure is OTT - ein und zwanzig for twenty one. Say it the right way round and its simply quicker and simpler. 'One and twenty' - pointless.

 

[danlightbulb]

@dirtychinchilla regional accents are common in all languages, just difficult to detect unless you're fluent in that language.

The I before E rule is so full of holes its pretty useless, I'd argue its not a rule if its got so many exceptions hence my terming it a 'myth' earlier.

What about the conditional? The past perfect?

Do we need more than three tenses? Let me go and find out what those other two are.

 

[danlightbulb]

Ok Ive just looked at what the conditional and past perfect tenses are and I think its really just an academic thing in calling them something that sounds complicated.

I dont think it would make English harder to learn at all, in fact quite the opposite as tenses are normally created using very simple words or word modifiers.

Eg for conditional tense (which sounds mega complicated), from what I can see its just use of the word IF. If you think about it, a simple 2 letter word (cant really get much simpler than that) that simply flags at the outset that you are starting a hypothetical scenario or testing a condition.

God knows what other languages do but you don't really need anything more than to say If X then Y do you? Its like coding. How can you get any simpler or straightforward than that?

It seems to be other languages (perhaps older languages) relish the 'colour' and variety they have, where actually the best language would be the most efficient language, which is English.

 

[danlightbulb]

You say that because your native language is English. No offence but if you are only fluent in English and nothing else then how are you so confident that English is the most logical or efficient?

Because that is the question I am asking here, and I am making a case for why English is logical (using examples). What case has been made (using examples) by anyone else that another language is better?

That's exactly what I said in post #8 which @danlightbulb has conveniently ignored.

Ones native language will always seem easiest, any other language will never be as straightforward/logical.

I haven't ignored it at all. What example of a better / more logical language did you post, to counter my examples of why English is the most logical/efficient?

 

[danlightbulb]

English is the most logical/efficient to you because it's your native language. It's the one you were brought up using and the one that's been drummed into you since birth.

Polish people will think the same thing about their language.
German people will think the same thing about their language.
Spanish people will th....

You get the idea.

Yes I get what you are saying but I am trying to objectively define why English is the more efficient language. Im making a case for it.

For example I have mentioned lack of gender, lack of accents, the use of short connecting word building blocks, all as examples of what the English language has going for it.

Other languages are flawed in this way so harder to learn from a logical perspective. Of course language is learned as a child etc so completely difficult to define one as harder.

But if you were to take an alien who could not speak, which language would be easiest to teach him? Or which language would be easiest to simplify and teach him for basic communication (assuming he wouldn't need to know about little complexities like the I before E rule or whether desert is spelled the same as desert).