# Language with the most complete grammar



## WannaBFluent

What is, according to you, the language with the most complete grammar, having the most grammar features?

Even if you don't have a name in mind, feel free to post rare and useful grammatical features in a language.


----------



## Riverplatense

I think it's impossible to give a good answer to this question. One problem is that, when looked at them more carefully, many «exotic» aspects turn out to be more common than expected. A second one is the base one starts from. If you have grown up with an analytic language, you might find nominal and verbal inflection a strange and extremely difficult way of organizing a language, while for most European languages it's the regular case.

However, I think Basque is a good example. Many aspects of Basque are not this particular, I think (the cases are not very much, for instance), but the verbal morphology is special indeed, I think, for the reason that trivalent verbs can assume an incredible number of forms, because they don't agree only with the subject, but also with the object(s). Of course, the suffixes repeat and nobody could learn so many forms if they were isolated, but still it's impressive in my eyes.


----------



## Stoggler

An impossible question to answer I'd have thought.  I seriously doubt you'd be able to get anything close to an agreement on what a complete grammar is.


----------



## PersoLatin

WannaBFluent said:


> What is, according to you, the language with the most complete grammar, having the most grammar features?
> 
> Even if you don't have a name in mind, feel free to post rare and useful grammatical features in a language.


Maybe grammatical aspects of different languages that are seen as 'more complete', can be listed, and then a language with more incidents of 'more complete' aspects can be selected as one with 'most complete grammar', all subjective I suppose.

But a language with least incidents of 'more complete' aspects, won't be a lesser one, will it?


----------



## WannaBFluent

I know it's a question with multiple answers but you can definitely say, for example, that Tamil has a more complete grammar than French.


----------



## Riverplatense

As the term _complete _is concerned, actually I'd say that every language is as complete as any other one. This might not go for the lexicon, but does for the grammar. Otherwise speakers of an «incomplete» or «less complete» grammar would naturally «invent» mechanisms to close the gap. For instance, English has incomparably less forms than Latin or Sanskrit, but still you can translate everything from Latin to English. You will need more words, but no grammatical feature is as such not translatable. 

The only thing I would doubt now is the case of aspects, which are more or less absent in my own mother tongue, German. I find the distinction between perfective/imperfective tenses/verbs fascinating, but I don't think that something really gets lost when you translate from Italian to German, for instance. Besides, also German has ways to express the aspect; thanks to Aktionsart, for instance.



WannaBFluent said:


> [...] Tamil has a more complete grammar than French



Why do you think so?


----------



## WannaBFluent

Riverplatense said:


> As the term _complete _is concerned, actually I'd say that every language is as complete as any other one. This might not go for the lexicon, but does for the grammar. Otherwise speakers of an «incomplete» or «less complete» grammar would naturally «invent» mechanisms to close the gap. For instance, English has incomparably less forms than Latin or Sanskrit, but still you can translate everything from Latin to English. You will need more words, but no grammatical feature is as such not translatable.
> 
> The only thing I would doubt now is the case of aspects, which are more or less absent in my own mother tongue, German. I find the distinction between perfective/imperfective tenses/verbs fascinating, but I don't think that something really gets lost when you translate from Italian to German, for instance. Besides, also German has ways to express the aspect; thanks to Aktionsart, for instance.
> 
> 
> 
> Why do you think so?


Precisely because of verbal aspects, also called vector aspects in some languages like Sri Lankan Malay.
For example in Tamil, you have a suffix that you add to a verb want you want to say that the action was done maliciously. You have another one to say that the action was done for the benefit of the doer, etc.

Of course, you can render these meanings in French or German, but you'll have to adapt the way of saying it in accordance with the verb, which is not the case with the verbal suffixes.

For example, if I want to say that you put something in order to trap someone.
I will say in English: "I put the keys behind the wallet so that he thinks he has lost them."
While in Tamil, I'll just say: "I put+MALICIOUS.SUFFIX the keys behind the wallet" and you'll immediately understand that I did it in order to make troubles.

Now if I change the verb, I'll have to change the clause in English because "so that he thinks he has lost them" can only refer to something that I hide!
While I can still use the Tamilian suffix.

Thus, maybe I asked my question in the wrong way. I should have been more precise.
What language has detailed the most aspects of verbs? (even if aspects are not the only criteria of a 'complete' grammar).


----------



## Nino83

Riverplatense said:


> trivalent verbs can assume an incredible number of forms, because they don't agree only with the subject, but also with the object(s)


Interesting. I've just read the paper of Peter Bakker (1984) "the order of the affixes in the Basque synthetic verb".

Da-kar-ki-o-t
it-bring-to-him-I
I bring it to him

As far as I know in Swahili only one object affix is allowed and the human object is preferred to the inanimate object.
In some polysynthetic languages of the Americas you can have an incorporated direct object plus an indirect object suffix like in Mohawk (example from Baker (1996), of parameters of polysynthesis):

ni-mic-tomi-maka
1sS-2sO-money-give
‘I’ll give you money’

But I don't know if there are other languages allowing at the same time three suffixes representing three different arguments (subject, direct object and indirect object) in the same verb, or if Basque is an exception.


----------



## Riverplatense

Okay, so if I got it right actually the question is how much information can be given synthetically (and, consequently, maybe also «elegantly»). But wouldn't also an adverb do the same job in English? In my eyes (and I know nothing about Tamil) it's similar to some agglutinating languages with many cases, just that here the nominal morphology is concerned. So you can render the relationship either with preposition + (declined or not) noun or with noun + suffix. 

And as aspects are concerned, I think also Slavic languages are interesting, for they combine (perfective/imperfective) aspect and Aktionsart, so that you can have
_сказать _‹to say; perfective›
_говорить _‹to say, to talk; imperfective›
_заговорить _‹to start talking; perfective, inchoative›
_заговаривать _‹to start talking, imperfective, inchoative›
etc.


----------



## Nino83

Riverplatense said:


> But wouldn't also an adverb do the same job in English?


Yes, I think it does, like in Italian. "Ha messo *apposta/appositamente* le chiavi dietro il portafogli".

And what one expresses with affixes or inflections can be expressed with nouns or pronouns in other languages.


----------



## WannaBFluent

Riverplatense said:


> Okay, so if I got it right actually the question is how much information can be given synthetically (and, consequently, maybe also «elegantly»). But wouldn't also an adverb do the same job in English? In my eyes (and I know nothing about Tamil) it's similar to some agglutinating languages with many cases, just that here the nominal morphology is concerned. So you can render the relationship either with preposition + (declined or not) noun or with noun + suffix.
> 
> And as aspects are concerned, I think also Slavic languages are interesting, for they combine (perfective/imperfective) aspect and Aktionsart, so that you can have
> _сказать _‹to say; perfective›
> _говорить _‹to say, to talk; imperfective›
> _заговорить _‹to start talking; perfective, inchoative›
> _заговаривать _‹to start talking, imperfective, inchoative›
> etc.


Well an adverb would do a similar job, but definitely not the same. First, you'll have to adjust the adverb to the context, for example, an action done with malicious intent will have the same ending in Tamil whatever the verb is, while in English, using and adverb, you'll have to change the adverb according to the actual verb.

The other difference is interpretation. Using aspects, it lets way more interpretation to the listener/reader than when you'll add an adverb in English.


----------



## Ben Jamin

WannaBFluent said:


> What is, according to you, the language with the most complete grammar, having the most grammar features?
> 
> Even if you don't have a name in mind, feel free to post rare and useful grammatical features in a language.


Do you mean the most complicated?


----------



## Nino83

verb agreement vs. pronouns => no real difference
case system vs. adpositions => no real difference
presence vs. absence of plural markers => the presence of plural markers allows you to specificate if you're speaking about a single or more objects without using any demonstrative adjective/pronoun but, at the end of the game, there is no real difference because there's always a way to make things clear
tense/mood/aspect => even Mandarin, which doesn't have tenses, has a perfective marker 了 (le); even though a language didn't have a perfective marker, people should use a construction like _to finish to do something_ or an adverb (for example _often_ for imperfective)
presence vs. absence of grammatical gender => every language has specific nouns for people, animals and other things having a different sex, and one could say that grammatical gender and gender agreement are redundant features, they add nothing to accuracy
presence vs. absence of sortal quantifier => it adds nothing important to the object we're speaking of, if I say _two cars_ it's not important to specify that cars are machines, but in most East and Southeast Asian languages they do (like in Japanese, 彼は車が二台あります,_kare wa kuruma ga ni dai arimasu_, _he car two machines has_)
inclusive and exclusive first plural person pronouns => it could be useful in some situations but every language can encode this info with two pronouns or with an adverb and a pronoun (you and me, just us)
politeness => every language can express it

I took these properties from WALS Online -             Chapters


----------



## Riverplatense

WannaBFluent said:


> The other difference is interpretation. Using aspects, it lets way more interpretation to the listener/reader than when you'll add an adverb in English.



But wouldn't a «complete» grammar reduce situations where interpretation is required (for grammatical reasons, not literary or something)? Let's compare it with this:



Nino83 said:


> grammatical gender and gender agreement are redundant features



I basically agree with all the features Nino mentioned, but still there are situations in which one might miss a gender mark in English _friend_ or Basque _lagun_. So when there is no lexical distinction and neither a grammatical one, you could say that, if you accept the term, those languages are somehow «less complete» than languages where you have _amico _and _amica_, _Freund _and _Freundin _etc. And then it is because in English and Basque you need interpretation, so I think this cannot be a valid argument to proof the «completeness» of Tamil.


----------



## Ben Jamin

What is "complete grammar"?


----------



## Dib

Nino83 said:


> ni-mic-tomi-maka
> 1sS-2sO-money-give
> ‘I’ll give you money’
> 
> But I don't know if there are other languages allowing at the same time three suffixes representing three different arguments (subject, direct object and indirect object) in the same verb, or if Basque is an exception.



According to Dr. Wiki, Abaza marks up to 4 arguments on some verbs using pronominal prefixes:
Valency (linguistics) - Wikipedia


----------



## Nino83

Thanks for the correction (affixes) and for the info, Dib.  

I've found the sentence here (Dixon, Where have All the Adjectives Gone?: And Other Essays in Semantics and Syntax, p. 161) 

y-gˠ-y-z-d-m-l-r-ə́txd 
it-not-he-could-them-not-her-make-give 
he couldn't make them give her it back


----------

