Is English the most logical language?

One good thing about English is "the" - gender neutral sentences are far easier to construct than languages which have gendered nouns.
 
danlightbulb said:
Ah that is different. Those are separate and independent words, not related to grammar at all. Im referring to how we structure sentences.
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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.
 
Dolph said:
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.
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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 said:
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.
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That's exactly why English isn't logical. :P There's past, present and future, no one really needs 12 tenses. Past of "Je" is "Zjadl"
 
bayo000 said:
Past of "Je" is "Zjadl"
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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 said:
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.
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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
 
touch said:
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
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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 said:
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.
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Here is one I learn in school.

I before E Except After C.








Unless your neighbour tells you otherwise.
 
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.
 
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.


Raymond Lin said:
Here is one I learn in school.

I before E Except After C.
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Yeah I think most people know that rule is a myth though dont they?
 
danlightbulb said:
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.




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

Question, do you speak another language? Like Fluently.
 
Raymond Lin said:
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.
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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 said:
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.
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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
 
danlightbulb said:
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?
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Chinese has no alpabet, it has "roots" to build a word, each of these roots evolved from say a drawing. So the word for water is 水, that's 3 vertical lines, and imagine a water flowing down and you draw them. It came from that. When you write it, there is an order, you write the left, then middle and right.

F9LAt95.png


Mountain is 山, see how the middle line is the tallest of the 3? Like a peak.

Those are words on their own but they are also a building block into more complicated words. There are hundreds if not thousands of roots and then build into tens and thousands of words.

The Chinese word for Me (there is no I), I/Me is 我, none of the parts that makes this word is a root on its own. Notice they all intersect with each other?

我 may also be a root, but i honestly do not know of another word that has that as part of the root...it's a bit complicated already on its own. There may be, but i don't know all the words in Chinese so i can't rule it out.

But all these are SINGLE word, and sometimes, it doesn't make sense on its own because some actual word requires 2 or 3 or more of these words.

For example, the word for Dumpling is 饺子. That's 2 words. The left one has 2 roots. 2nd one is on its own.
 
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danlightbulb said:
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.
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I can empathise with you, I lived with a Polish girl for eight years, and although I never tried to learn the language, I nailed down all the polite stuff; please, thank you, hello, goodbye, good day, good night, and other words, like good, bad, bread, vodka, beer, butter, big, small, Mr., Mrs., Miss, etc etc.
For her 21st birthday I had a gold necklace made, with the words, Je cię kocham strung together, her younger brother assured me that this was how to say “I love you”.
When I gave it to her she was overjoyed, she said that she loved it and would always wear it, but that I’d got it slightly grammatically wrong, it should have read Khocham cię.
Incensed, I went to her parents house, intent on strangling her kid brother, (incidentally the Polish word for brother is brat).
He wasn’t home, but his father said, “Anything I can help you with Jean?”
I told him the story through gritted teeth, and he smiled broadly, “You can say it either way in Polish, it means exactly the same, Jadwiga loves the necklace, and her mother wants one now!”
 
touch said:
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
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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.
 
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