Is English the most logical language?

danlightbulb said:
Any tips for me? Ive started with duolingo but I don't really want to pay for a subscription just yet.
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I never tried anything structured, just picking things up when on family holidays to Poland, being in groups with her friends, were a fair amount of Polish at work as well a few years back. Mainly just exposure to the language. It's a cliché but I do speak better Polish when i've had a few vodka's, I think the self conscious element vanishes and you just become more organic with putting words together and suddenly realise you know more than you thought you did.

I can't openly converse in Polish but I can understand most of any conversation happening within earshot.
 
SixTwoSix said:
It's a cliché but I do speak better Polish when i've had a few vodkas, I think the self conscious element vanishes and you just become more organic with putting words together and suddenly realise you know more than you thought you did.

I can't openly converse in Polish but I can understand most of any conversation happening within earshot.
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You might have something with the booze and speaking more of the language.
When I first found out that I had distant relatives in France, via a French great-great grandma, I could already speak the language reasonably well, and I tried to keep up when over there for weddings etc.
One day a distant cousin announced to the company, “Plus de vin, (more wine).
“plus il boit de vin, plus il parle français, (the more wine he drinks, the more French he speaks!)
 
The English language is terrible on many counts.

I appreciate it's an amalgamation of many languages and dialects and has evolved through history.

With 'gender-neutralisation', I wonder how masculine and feminine can last in other languages.


How many times on the phone do you have to clarify a letter you're telling someone using the phoentic alphabet. Did you say M or N?

Phone. Why? We have an F that gives the same sound as 'f'
Q? Can't this be dropped and just use a 'k'.

"A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough"
 
Raymond Lin said:
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.
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Total tangent from the discussion, but if you were trying to find 我 in a dictionary, you'd find it from the radical 戈 + 3 strokes - 我 itself isn't a radical. It is a component of various other characters though, like 鵝 (goose), 俄 (as in Russia) or 義 (righteousness/justice).

Personally my favourite bit of Chinese grammar is not having to change verbs at all, regardless of person or tense - I yesterday go, they next year go, you evening go and so on :)

As for English, I spent six years teaching it to non native speakers (adults, to clarify, so people who would stop mid article and just ask "but... Why!?" with an exasperated look, as they tried to find equivalents in their own language), so have great sympathy for anyone trying to learn it. They're are loads of examples, but for a grammar/structure perspective, I quite like "she said that she loved him", then put the word "only" anywhere in the sentence.
 
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English is hard, not as hard as Finnish but harder than most.

Esperanto is the easiest most logical language ;)
 
danlightbulb said:
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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You think they are different because you speak English. It's a terrible language to learn apparently.
 
GR63 said:
English is hard, not as hard as Finnish but harder than most.

Esperanto is the easiest most logical language ;)
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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..
 
It's one of the few languages without genders for nouns. Did French and German up to GCSE level and found it funny that female articles of clothing like bra, undies were of masculine gender and men clothes like tie was female.

Then don't start me on the French on numbers. Why on earth is 99 said in English four twenty ten nine
(quatre-vingt-dix-neuf)? Another example is 70 which is said as sixty ten soixante dix. French for 7 is sept. Would a French person understand if someone said septante for 70 instead of soixante dix?
 
danlightbulb said:
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.
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isn't Afrikaans or something like that the easiest.
apparently you can just build sentences like lego bricks.

English obviously seems more natural to you because it's the language you heard your whole life.

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

"feel the bass" is it a guitar or a fish?
 
cheesefest said:
I had a German exchange student and she hated our silent letters. Why not nee? Not k-nee.
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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.


arknor said:
other languages are better imo, I like how precise German language is, but the sentence structure just feels wrong as an native English speaker
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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 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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There are loads of examples. Take pronounciation for example. If you're from up north, you'll pronounce castle, bath, path etc with a short a. Down south you use a long a. But say plastic or psychopath for example.

What about the rule "I before E except after C". It just isn't true. Why does it even change?

I'm not going to go on about it for ages, but the rules are all over the place.

When I was studying French, there were rarely any discrepencies about that kind of thing. I was relatively fluent. At the very least, the discrepency was contained within another rule. Like the 13 verbs for which the past tense didn't follow the usual rules. That's 13 out of thousands! You definitely couldn't say that for English.

In English lessons in school, we barely even learned about tenses. Maybe the past, present, and future. What about the conditional? The past perfect? I hadn't even heard of those until I studied French.
 
@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.

dirtychinchilla said:
What about the conditional? The past perfect?
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Do we need more than three tenses? Let me go and find out what those other two are.
 
dirtychinchilla said:
In English lessons in school, we barely even learned about tenses. Maybe the past, present, and future. What about the conditional? The past perfect? I hadn't even heard of those until I studied French.
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You haven't lived until you've taught the past/future perfect continuous to a group of students who don't even use verb tenses :p

In all seriousness though you're completely correct, I had no idea about any of these things until I did a CELTA course, at which point I finally got an appreciation for how awkward English can be.
 
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 said:
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.
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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?

English is good in a sense that it is easily adaptable, but from a Non-English speaker there are a LOT of rules and exceptions which are complicated.
 
Raymond Lin said:
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?
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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?


Feek said:
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.
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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?
 
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