# Complex morphological structure of IE languages in comparison to other language families



## Johnnyjohn

*Moderator note: Split from the quoted thread.
*


girailmondogira said:


> For example:when I read the Vulgate it's simpler and more straightforward(like it has more regular word order relative to English).Why is this?



The other question is why Latin (and Ancient Greek as well) grew far more redundant, complicated, and heavily irregular compared to Proto-Indo-European at its earliest stages. Why would it be strange for things to trim when too many branches cluster? Could you believe the leaves may have actually been fewer before?

It isn't hard to notice conservative IE languages and those heavily influenced by them tend to have more redundancy and difficulty (and a unique type of irregularity) than any other language family in the rest of the world. Yes, more than Zulu, Navajo, etc. the whole exotic roster.


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## Hulalessar

Johnnyjohn said:


> The other question is why Latin (and Ancient Greek as well) grew far more redundant, complicated, and heavily irregular compared to Proto-Indo-European at its earliest stages. Why would it be strange for things to trim when too many branches cluster? Could you believe the leaves may have actually been fewer before?
> 
> It isn't hard to notice conservative IE languages and those heavily influenced by them tend to have more redundancy and difficulty (and a unique type of irregularity) than any other language family in the rest of the world. Yes, more than Zulu, Navajo, etc. the whole exotic roster.



All languages have "redundant" features and are more or less equally complex. To an Ancient Roman the redundancies and complexities of Modern English include:

· An obsession with specifying the definiteness of nouns.

· The not entirely straightforward way questions and negative statements are formed.

· The continuous and affirmative forms of verbs.

· The abundance of phrasal verbs whose meaning cannot always be guessed from their components.

· The need to get words in the right order to convey meaning.

· The inability to convey degrees of emphasis by word order.

· A general feeling that the language lacks precision and leaves too much to context.


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## Gavril

Hulalessar said:


> · The inability to convey degrees of emphasis by word order.



I'm not sure that English speakers are unable to do this; it may just not be normal/fashionable to do so right now. Variation of word order would probably (at least in some cases) have to be accompanied by different intonation in order to maintain clarity, but are we sure that variations in Latin word order were not accompanied by changes in intonation?


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## Hulalessar

Gavril said:


> I'm not sure that English speakers are unable to do this; it may just not be normal/fashionable to do so right now. Variation of word order would probably (at least in some cases) have to be accompanied by different intonation in order to maintain clarity, but are we sure that variations in Latin word order were not accompanied by changes in intonation?



The point is though that with changes from standard word order rather more possibilities are available in Latin than in English. This means that in writing Latin does not have to add extra words or use italics. What Latin can do sometimes has to be left unexpressed in English. Equally of course what English can do sometimes has to be left unexpressed in Latin.


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## Gavril

Hulalessar said:


> The point is though that with changes from standard word order rather more possibilities are available in Latin than in English.



I agree with you if we replace "more possibilities are available" with "more possibilities are typically exploited".



> This means that in writing Latin does not have to add extra words or use italics.



Italics only seem necessary in cases where the subject and object of the verb have to be disambiguated. This problem arises in Latin as well, with neuter nouns.


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## Hulalessar

Gavril said:


> I agree with you if we replace "more possibilities are available" with "more possibilities are typically exploited".



In a simple Latin sentence with one verb, a subject consisting of a noun qualified by one adjective and an object consisting of a noun qualified by one adjective, the possibilities include:

(1) S+A O+A V

(2) A+S O+A V

(3) S+A A+O V

(4) V S+A O+A

(5) A+O A+S V

If the subject is "the happy king", the verb "loves" and the object "the sad queen" and (1) is equivalent to a mere stating of the fact that the happy king loves the sad queen (i.e. is the "standard"), what English translations do you propose for (2), (3), (4) and (5)?


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## Gavril

Hulalessar said:


> In a simple Latin sentence with one verb, a subject consisting of a noun qualified by one adjective and an object consisting of a noun qualified by one adjective, the possibilities include:
> 
> (1) S+A O+A V
> 
> (2) A+S O+A V
> 
> (3) S+A A+O V
> 
> (4) V S+A O+A
> 
> (5) A+O A+S V
> 
> If the subject is "the happy king", the verb "loves" and the object "the sad queen" and (1) is equivalent to a mere stating of the fact that the happy king loves the sad queen (i.e. is the "standard"), what English translations do you propose for (2), (3), (4) and (5)?



I think all these word orders are possible in English within what we now call "poetic" syntax, but I admit that you might need further context to be sure who the subjects and objects are. 

Also, some adverbial expression seems necessary at the beginning of #4 to produce that word order (e.g., "Now loves the king ...")


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## francisgranada

girailmondogira said:


> For example:when I read the Vulgate it's simpler and more straightforward ...


 I think there are two things to be taken in consideration: the (1) grammar and the (2) style.

1. From the grammatical point of view, it's hard to say which language is "objectively" simpler. An example showing two "extremes" (meaning "_podría escribir a su padre"_ in Spanish): 

Hungarian: _írhatna apjának
_(*ír*: write, -*hat*: can, -*n-*: conditional, -*a*: 3.pers.sg.;   *ap-*: father, -*ja*: his/her, -*nak*: to)

English: _he/she/it would be able to write to his father
_ 
Now, which is simpler or more straightforward ? ...

2. From the stylistical point of view, it is possible to write grammatically correct but hardly understandable texts both in Latin and in modern languages, including English, Spanish or Hungarian (see the burocratic language, for example). So texts  written in classical Latin do not necessarily reflect the way how Vergil, Caesar, Cicero etc... really spoke at home or in a pub )) ...


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## Johnnyjohn

francisgranada said:


> I think there are two things to be taken in consideration: the (1) grammar and the (2) style.
> 
> 1. From the grammatical point of view, it's hard to say which language is "objectively" simpler. An example showing two "extremes" (meaning "_podría escribir a su padre"_ in Spanish):
> 
> Hungarian: _írhatna apjának
> _(*ír*: write, -*hat*: can, -*n-*: conditional, -*a*: 3.pers.sg.;   *ap-*: father, -*ja*: his/her, -*nak*: to)
> 
> English: _he/she/it would be able to write to his father
> _
> Now, which is simpler or more straightforward ? ...
> 
> 2. From the stylistical point of view, it is possible to write grammatically correct but hardly understandable texts both in Latin and in modern languages, including English, Spanish or Hungarian (see the burocratic language, for example). So texts  written in classical Latin do not necessarily reflect the way how Vergil, Caesar, Cicero etc... really spoke at home or in a pub )) ...



It still doesn't change the irregularity of Latin, Ancient Greek, and modern ones like Russian. Even looking at English we see strong verbs and a leftover conjugation ending along with pronoun case. Nowhere else in the world do languages often have so many decaying and confused ugly paradigms that an Indo European or Indo European influenced language has nor useless features such as adjective inflections, Finnish only inflects adjectives due to IE influence, nowhere else in the world inflects adjectives for case, number, and gender in confusing ways. Yet people think languages like English that do not inflect them are the weird ones.


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## Ben Jamin

Johnnyjohn said:


> It still doesn't change the irregularity of Latin, Ancient Greek, and modern ones like Russian. Even looking at English we see strong verbs and a leftover conjugation ending along with pronoun case. Nowhere else in the world do languages often have so many decaying and confused ugly paradigms that an Indo European or Indo European influenced language has nor useless features such as adjective inflections, Finnish only inflects adjectives due to IE influence, nowhere else in the world inflects adjectives for case, number, and gender in confusing ways. Yet people think languages like English that do not inflect them are the weird ones.


It seems that the problem here is your taste, so it is not a linguistic problem.


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## berndf

Johnnyjohn said:


> Nowhere else in the world do languages often have ... useless features such as adjective inflections...


I am not sure where you got this information from but it is certainly false. Off the top of my head, I can name you two large language groups where adjective agreement is a regular feature: Afro-Asiatic and Bantu.


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## Nino83

Johnnyjohn said:


> The other question is why Latin (and Ancient Greek as well) grew far more redundant, complicated, and heavily irregular compared to Proto-Indo-European at its earliest stages.



I don't think so. 

Look at adjective declension system. Which is more complicated? 

English: of that good girl; to that good girl; of/to good girl 
Latin: ill*ius* bon*ae* puell*ae*; ill*i* bon*ae* puell*ae*; bon*ae* puell*ae 
*Romance: de ill*a* bon*a* puell*a*; a(d) ill*a* bon*a* puell*a*; de/ad bon*a* puell*a* 
Icelandic: þeir*ri* góð*u* stelp*u*; þeir*rar* góð*u* stelp*u*; góð*ri*/góð*rar* stelp*u*

Germanic strong/weak (and mixed, in German) declension system is far more complicated than Latin and Greek ones (where adjectives have the same endings of nouns).


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## Giorgio Spizzi

Hullo, Johnny.

Just a couple of things:

1. I do not think English is weird.

2. As you _cannot_ not know Italian, Spanish, French, Catalan, Portuguese, Ladin, and the rest of Romania's languages inflect adjectives for number and gender in a not so confusing way. Russian inflects its adjectives—including numerals— for number, gender _and_ case.

GS 

(Ciao, Nino!)


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## francisgranada

Johnnyjohn said:


> ...  Yet people think languages like English that do not inflect them are the weird ones.


I don't know if people really think so, but if yes, then the explanation may be that modern English seems to violate the "Indo-Eupean logic", i.e in case of an IE language one would "naturally" expect the adjective agreement. However, putting an "s" at the end of adjectives and articles in plural (e.g._ *thes nices girls_) would be even more "weird" or at least "unnatural" at the moment, as the ending _-s_ was not a general plural marker in the past. Instead, each noun, adjective etc. followed it's declension pattern. All in all, the absence of the adjective agreement seems to me a quite "straightforward"  consequence of the evolution of the English language.

A different logic takes place in some agglutinative languages (e.g. the Uralic), where there is no agreement. But it's important to take in consideration that the "quasi" case endings and the plural marker in these languages are paradigm-independent, i.e. they always maintain their form and unique meaning. So the functionality of the "case endings" _grosso modo_ corresponds rather to the IE prepositions than to  the IE  grammatical cases. An example: 

_Hungarian_:  szép magas házak*ba
*_English:  _*into* nice high houses

(szép=nice, magas=high, ház=house; -ba=into, -k=general plural marker)


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## Hulalessar

If we are into weirdness then all languages are equally weird - except to their native speakers.


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## Ben Jamin

francisgranada said:


> I don't know if people really think so, but if yes, then the explanation may be that modern English seems to violate the "Indo-Eupean logic", i.e in case of an IE language one would "naturally" expect the adjective agreement. However, putting an "s" at the end of adjectives and articles in plural (e.g._ *thes nices girls_) would be even more "weird" or at least "unnatural" at the moment, as the ending _-s_ was not a general plural marker in the past. Instead, each noun, adjective etc. followed it's declension pattern. All in all, the absence of the adjective agreement seems to me a quite "straightforward"  consequence of the evolution of the English language.
> 
> A different logic takes place in some agglutinative languages (e.g. the Uralic), where there is no agreement. But it's important to take in consideration that the "quasi" case endings and the plural marker in these languages are paradigm-independent, i.e. they always maintain their form and unique meaning. So the functionality of the "case endings" _grosso modo_ corresponds rather to the IE prepositions than to  the IE  grammatical cases. An example:
> 
> _Hungarian_:  szép magas házak*ba
> 
> *_English:  _*into* nice high houses
> 
> (szép=nice, magas=high, ház=house; -ba=into, -k=general plural marker)


But an agglutinative language like Finnish has inflected adjectives that agree with nouns.


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## Nino83

francisgranada said:


> So the functionality of the "case endings" _grosso modo_ corresponds rather to the IE prepositions than to  the IE  grammatical cases.



Ciao Francis. 
I've some question on that matter. 
It's true that in IE languages often case endings are introduced by a preposition so, except for Nominative, Genitive, Dative and Accusative, one can't say that the case ending replaces the preposition and vice-versa (but in Latin the use of preposition was so generalized that also Genitive and Dative were replaced by a prepositional construction). 

I've no problems to think that the *-ba* ending works like a preposition but it's hard for me to assimilate the plural marker as if it were a preposition. 

Also English has a (almost) general plural marker but this is due to the fact that the other weak(er) declension classes (the n-type, like "childr*en*", the umlaut-type, like "f*ee*t" and feminine and neuter nouns) gradually passed to the strong masculine declension class, so the general *-s* is the consequence of the single declension class (or, in other words, of the single gender). 

Now, it's clear that in languages which lack gender distinction, there's no reason to make adjectives agree with nouns in gender (which is one). 

Said that, what makes me think that the plural marker doesn't work as a preposition is the fact that in Finnish it isn't always the same. 
For example: 
talo (house) 
talo*t *(houses, nominative plural) 
talo*ssa *(in the house) 
talo*i*ssa (in the houses) 

For this reason, I find hard to say that the plural marker is, in Finnish similar to a preposition. 

I think that Finnish inflection are always equals because there is only one gender (and consequently one declension class). 

How is the situation in Hungarian? The plural marker is always the same?


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## Hulalessar

I think it is important not to think of there being a hard and fast distinction between fusional and agglutinative languages. Typically, an inflection in a fusional language indicates more than one thing whilst in an agglutinative language each thing has its own element. Further, one can ask at what point we can distinguish between an inflection and a preposition/postposition. So, in a language like Finnish we can say that each element added does something and asking whether a plural marker is similar to a preposition is not really a question which is appropriate for Finnish. It is just a language which marks different things in the same way. This also applies to Latin except that it fuses the elements. _Domino_ means "by the lord" whilst _dominis _means "by the lords". <-o> marks both ablative and singular, whilst<-is> marks both ablative and plural.


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## Ben Jamin

Nino83 said:


> (but in Latin the use of preposition was so generalized that also Genitive and Dative were replaced by a prepositional construction.



1. Are you speaking about Latin, or about Romance languages?
2. Can you give any examples for this?



Romani ite domum!


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## Nino83

Ben Jamin said:


> 1. Are you speaking about Latin, or about Romance languages?
> 2. Can you give any examples for this?



"The genitive case died out around the 3rd century AD, according to Meyer-Lübke, and began to be replaced by de + noun as early as the 2nd century BC." 
"The dative case lasted longer than the genitive, even though Plautus, in the 2nd century BC, already shows some instances of substitution by the construction ad + accusative. For example, ad carnuficem dabo." 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin#Loss_of_oblique_cases 



Hulalessar said:


> It is just a language which marks different things in the same way. This also applies to Latin except that it fuses the elements. _Domino_ means "by the lord" whilst _dominis _means "by the lords". <-o> marks both ablative and singular, whilst<-is> marks both ablative and plural.



I was saying that in Finnish we have a "-t" for the nominative plural and an "-i" for other plurals, so it is more similar to an inflection than to a postposition.


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## francisgranada

Nino83 said:


> ... I've no problems to think that the *-ba* ending works like a preposition but it's hard for me to assimilate the plural marker as if it were a preposition.


Ciao Nino! I haven't said that the plural marker works like a preposition. However, while in the IE languages there is no "separate" plural marker (the various case endings express the gender, case and number at the same time), in Hungarian and - as far as know - also in Finnish the plural markers (-k, -t, -i ...) maintain the same form and function for all nouns (or adjectives) regardless of the stem. So in Hungarian it is "enough" to mark the plural only once, at the end of the last word (noun) the same way as the case endings (suffixes) or postpositions. For example:

ház - house
háza*k* - houses
magas - high
magasa*k* - high _in plural_ (sp. altos)

But:
magas ház - high house 
magas háza*k* - high houses 
három magas ház  - three high houses (_no plural marker, because "three" is a priori plural_)


> ...I think that Finnish inflection are always equals because there is only one gender (and consequently one declension class).


 This is not necessarily true. The difference in the IE declension types depends (originally) rather on the stem and not on the gender (_poeta>poetae, puella>puellae_ but _pater>patres, mater>matres_). The Finnish, Hungarian etc. declension is always equal because the "case" endings and the plural markers are not (yet) fused among them and with the stem of the noun (adjective). However, there are tendencies towards this direction, perhaps more in Finnish than in Hungarian.


> How is the situation in Hungarian? The plural marker is always the same?


The plural marker is always the same in the _same situation/function_, regardless of the noun, but it doesn't mean that only _one _plural marker exists. So in Hungarian we also have the *-i-* plural marker like in Finnish, however it's used in different situations, for example: 

házam - my house
háza*i*m - my house*s

*P.S. Unlike in English, in Hungarian an _adjective _can bear a plural marker and/or a "case" ending if it is not followed by a noun. Thus the substance is not the "indeclinability" of the adjectives, but the fact that the grammatical markers/cases are expressed only once (no agreement). For example:

A háza*k* magasa*k* - The house*s* (are) high


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## berndf

Nino83 said:


> Ben Jamin said:
> 
> 
> 
> 1. Are you speaking about Latin, or about Romance languages?
> 2. Can you give any examples for this?
> 
> 
> 
> "The genitive case died out around the 3rd century AD, according to Meyer-Lübke, and began to be replaced by de + noun as early as the 2nd century BC."
> "The dative case lasted longer than the genitive, even though Plautus, in the 2nd century BC, already shows some instances of substitution by the construction ad + accusative. For example, ad carnuficem dabo."
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgar_Latin#Loss_of_oblique_cases
Click to expand...

By convention the term "Latin" refers to the standard register of the language. This is about the colloquial register which by convention is called "Vulgar Latin" or, if referring to later stages, "Proto Romance". To avoid further confusion, I suggest we stick to that convention.


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## Gavril

Ben Jamin said:


> But an agglutinative language like Finnish has inflected adjectives that agree with nouns.



As Johnnyjohn mentioned earlier, this feature of Finnic languages is probably due to IE influence.

Even if adjectives are inflected to agree with nouns, it is still possible to compare agglutinative affixes to pre-/postpositions: for example,

_I slept in the smaller bed _--> with "case agreement", this becomes: _I slept *in* the bed, *in* the smaller one._



Hulalessar said:


> Typically, an inflection in a fusional language indicates more than one thing whilst in an agglutinative language each thing has its own element. Further, one can ask at what point we can distinguish between an inflection and a preposition/postposition. So, in a language like Finnish we can say that each element added does something and asking whether a plural marker is similar to a preposition is not really a question which is appropriate for Finnish. It is just a language which marks different things in the same way.



I might be misunderstanding you, but it seems quite relevant to ask whether (or to what extent) agglutinative affixes overlap with adpositions, in terms of how they are perceived and used by speakers.

E.g., a preposition like _to_ in English is automatically associated with a certain meaning: it is not selected based on the specific noun that follows it. The same would seem to apply to agglutinative affixes such as Hungarian -_ba_. Maybe, if different decisions had been made over the history of *written* Hungarian, -_ba_ would be written separately from the corresponding noun stem, and would be labelled a postposition rather than a suffix.


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## francisgranada

Nino83 said:


> ... I was saying that in Finnish we have a "-t" for the nominative plural and an "-i" for other plurals, so it is more similar to an inflection than to a postposition.


 Yes, however it is supposed that in the Proto-Uralic this _-*i*-_ was used in a non final position, i.e. it's usage depended rather on the presence of an other suffix following the plural marker and not directly on the grammatical case.  


Gavril said:


> ... Maybe, if different decisions had been made over the history of *written* Hungarian, -_ba_ would be written separately from the corresponding noun stem, and would be labelled a postposition rather than a suffix.


In fact, the original ("full") form of _-ba_ is _bele _which was a postposition. In the earliest written documents the form _bele_ was used and it was written separetely. However, it's not simply a question of decision or orthography: an agglutinative suffix has typically more forms according to vowel harmony while pospositons do not. For example _ház*ba* _but _kert*be*_.  And more, postpositions can be used in certain cases also separately (without a preceding noun) while the suffixes cannot. We might say that an agglutinative suffix (affix) is a step towards the IE-like case ending (loosing it's adverbial character and becoming more grammaticalized).


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## Nino83

francisgranada said:


> Yes, however it is supposed that in the Proto-Uralic this _-*i*-_ was used in a non final position, i.e. it's usage depended rather on the presence of an other suffix following the plural marker and not directly on the grammatical case.



Yes, but case markers are suffixed in Finnish (and Hungarian) so it's difficult to say what it depends on.


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## Gavril

francisgranada said:


> However, it's not simply a question of decision or orthography: an agglutinative suffix has typically more forms according to vowel harmony while pospositons do not. For example _ház*ba* _but _kert*be*_.  And more, postpositions can be used in certain cases also separately (without a preceding noun) while the suffixes cannot. We might say that an agglutinative suffix (affix) is a step towards the IE-like case ending (loosing it's adverbial character and becoming more grammaticalized).



You may be right, but I'm not sure that there is a consistent logic to what is called an affix and what is called a pre/postposition, cross-linguistically.

For example,

- Japanese _no_/_de_/_kara_/etc. are considered postpositions or particles rather than suffixes, but as far as I know (correct me if I'm wrong), they are only used after a preceding noun phrase
- In many IE languages, prepositions generally only appear before a noun phrase (just as Hungarian -_ba_ only appears after one), and they can be phonetically adapted to the following noun phrase (e.g., Slovene *k *"to" becomes *h* when the following word begins in _k_- or _g_-), yet they are not called prefixes

What is the deciding factor in calling these elements pre/postpositions, apart from the fact that the writing system (in the case of Japanese, the Romanization of the writing system) happens to represent these elements as separate words?


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## Johnnyjohn

Nino83 said:


> I don't think so.
> 
> Look at adjective declension system. Which is more complicated?
> 
> English: of that good girl; to that good girl; of/to good girl
> Latin: ill*ius* bon*ae* puell*ae*; ill*i* bon*ae* puell*ae*; bon*ae* puell*ae
> *Romance: de ill*a* bon*a* puell*a*; a(d) ill*a* bon*a* puell*a*; de/ad bon*a* puell*a*
> Icelandic: þeir*ri* góð*u* stelp*u*; þeir*rar* góð*u* stelp*u*; góð*ri*/góð*rar* stelp*u*
> 
> Germanic strong/weak (and mixed, in German) declension system is far more complicated than Latin and Greek ones (where adjectives have the same endings of nouns).



You forgot to mention the fact many only have one gender, some have two, and some have all 3 in the third declension, and that all adjectives may have ireggular endings in some cases such as the ablative, and the fact comparative formation is inconsistent and filled with more irregularities.
The rest of the world doesn't inflect adjectives or may not use them (Japanese/Arabic/Korean/Aborginal Languages) at all, the very existence is a fluke in Europe and so are the way verbs and nouns are inflected. Aspect pairs in Slavic are the perfect example (along with the fact that the infinitive and participles used to be separate unpredictable words which left behind irregularities in every conservative IE language), Cantonese just adds to word "zo2" for perfective and Korean "-a/ess" but it is impossible to predict the perfective tense of a slavic verb. IE languages are bizarre  (and some like Chechen which were Russified to death), the rest of the world is normal. Old Finnish/Estonianh  were like English, but not now due to influence, that means 3 extra unpredictable parts to memorize in Estonian. Latin simplifying is not bizarre, it was bizarre to have existed, why wouldn't it become normal like Spanish? Believe me, English is called "the easiest language in the world" because people who are not aware of non-IE languages think English is the odd one out for removing cases, conjugation, and adjective agreement. But it is not the weird one.



berndf said:


> I am not sure where you got this information from but it is certainly false. Off the top of my head, I can name you two large language groups where adjective agreement is a regular feature: Afro-Asiatic and Bantu.



Bantu languages add a gender prefix that is similar to the noun prefix, there are hardly of the hellenic/latinate/balto-slavic nauseating irregularities as well in the rest of the grammar. Afro Asiatic languages (and Australian aborginal ones) do not have true adjectives but "nominals" which cover both nouns and adjectives, a noun is frequently used as an adjective, and an adjective is frequently used as a noun, they also are identically inflected with no weird comparative or inconsistent latin like gender ending rules.
The latin system is not like Spanish, or German (but they are inflected for case, gender, and number while the noun has fewer inflections thus they carry weight for the nouns), maybe the Spanish style of adjective inflections exists, but never the Ancient Greek, modern Slavic, or Latin types and their comparative formation.


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## berndf

Johnnyjohn said:


> The rest of the world doesn't inflect adjectives or may not use them (Japanese/Arabic/Korean/Aborginal Languages) at all


Repeating this claim doesn't make it more true. Of course, Arabic inflects adjectives, together with virtually all other languages of the Afro-Asiatic language group.


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## Nino83

Johnnyjohn said:


> The latin system is not like Spanish, *or German* (but they are inflected for case, gender, and number while the noun has fewer inflections thus they carry weight for the nouns), maybe the Spanish style of adjective inflections exists, but never the Ancient Greek, modern Slavic, or Latin types and their comparative formation.



I don't agree about German. 
Remember that in Latin there were 3 declension patterns (the fourth and fifth declensions were not so productive and were, very early, incorporated in the first and in the second declension patterns while the neuter gender was incorporated in the second declension), they were always recognisable (except for "is", which is both the plural dative/ablative of the first/second declension and the nominative/genitive singular of the third declension, and for "i", both genitive singular and nominative plural of the second declension and dative/ablative singular of the third declension). 

The most striking thing in German is to predict the gender of the noun. There are four steps: 
1) which is the gender of the noun? (it is not predictable) 
2) is there a determiner? no: strong declension pattern, yes: next step 
3) which type of determiner? 
4) mixed or weak declension 

In Latin there are these steps: 
1) which is the gender of the noun? (it is almost always predictable) 
2) now you know how to decline* 

*if the adjective is of the second class ("is, is" instead of "us, a, um"), it is easier to decline it 

EDIT: 

If we highlight the fact that in "spoken" (or Vulgar) Latin, the genitive and the dative case were often replaced by preposition + accusative/ablative, it is clear that the gender of the noun was (almost) always predictable.


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## Gavril

Johnnyjohn said:


> Afro Asiatic languages (and Australian aborginal ones) do not have true adjectives but "nominals" which cover both nouns and adjectives, a noun is frequently used as an adjective, and an adjective is frequently used as a noun, they also are identically inflected with no weird comparative or inconsistent latin like gender ending rules.



I don't understand the distinction you're drawing here. IE adjectives are used as nouns as well: in Latin and Greek (as far as I recall) there are no regular differences in the inflectional endings of adjectives and nouns. The Germanic and Slavic system of having a separate set of endings for adjectives is an innovation.


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## berndf

Yes, in Latin grammar was the same, adjectives were just considered a subclass of nouns. Nomen substantivus and nomen adjectivus.

Among IE languages, it is one of the "oddities" of English, that adjectives are so completely separated from nouns and that sentences "the old told me a story" (_old _used as a noun) are ungrammatical.


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## irinet

Which in my language is grammatically correct. 
But we do possess our oddities, too. One very upsetting would be the assumption that the adjective agrees with the noun in 1.gender, 2.number, and the the annoying one,  3.case which I consider false.


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## berndf

Languages cannot be true or false, only more or less practical.


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## Johnnyjohn

Gavril said:


> I don't understand the distinction you're drawing here. IE adjectives are used as nouns as well: in Latin and Greek (as far as I recall) there are no regular differences in the inflectional endings of adjectives and nouns. The Germanic and Slavic system of having a separate set of endings for adjectives is an innovation.



And were nouns used as adjectives? 
Latin adjectives do not have identical endings for all. 1 gender, 2 genders, 3 gendered 3rd declension variations, more irregularities and suffixe exceptions
comparatives are formed multiple ways with irregularities and a few indeclinable adjectives as well, Afro Asiatic language adjectives are not subject to random gender variations and nouns are used as adjectives, not just the other way 'round, they are frequently identical, if there are irregularities, they are the same as nouns. 

While Germanic languages started using different endings, they were based on the pronoun/demonstrative endings and all of them were inflected regularly for all genders and numbers and German relies on this to indicate case and number. 
Inflecting a regular 1/2 adjective should not be too difficult, but the third declension qualities are nonexistant in the rest of the world.
Adjectives are separate enough that different suffixes were added to derive nouns from adjectives in Latin.

Even if what you said is true, there is so much else to conservative IE that just proves how abnormal the whole family is and how strange features were acquired such as adjective inflection (yay, more irregularity to memorize) to Estonian. Latin was bound to become normal as Spanish is.


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## Gavril

Johnnyjohn said:


> Latin adjectives do not have identical endings or formation in the third declension type
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_declension#Adjectives
> 1 gender, 2 genders, 3 gendered 3rd declension variations, -i ablative, more irregularities
> comparatives are formed multiple ways with irregularities



I wasn't disputing anything about irregularity; I was just responding to your statement that groups such as Afro-Asiatic do not have true adjectives.



> and a few indeclinable adjectives as well, Afro Asiatic language adjectives are not subject to random gender variations and nouns are used as adjectives, not just the other way 'round, they are frequently identical, if there are irregularities, they are the same as nouns.



Afro-Asiatic is a very broad (and even somewhat disputed) linguistic grouping. To be more specific, where in the Semitic languages are nouns freely usable as adjectives?

I have studied a little bit about Semitic, and I've never heard of nouns being used adjectivally *without* any morphological modification (such as the addition of an affix).

English is the only language that I know of where nouns can routinely be used as adjectives (or in adjectival position) without any stem modification: for example, _the printer_ (noun) versus _the printer ribbon_ (adjective).



> Adjectives are separate enough that different suffixes were added to derive nouns from adjectives in Latin.



Are you talking about the formation of abstract nouns such as _pulchritudo_ "beauty" < _pulcher_ "beautiful"? This type of derivation occurs in the Semitic languages as well, through suffixation.

On the other hand, the substantive use of adjectives (like Spanish _el viejo_ "the old (man)") did not require any additional suffixation in Latin as far as I know.


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## irinet

berndf said:


> Languages cannot be true or false, only more or less practical.



Right. Something like 'sermo vulgaris'  versus classical Latin.


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## Johnnyjohn

Gavril said:


> I wasn't disputing anything about irregularity; I was just responding to your statement that groups such as Afro-Asiatic do not have true adjectives.



Very well then, but what is the origin of the big irregularity and differences in Latin adjectives while in Arabic for example adjectives are identical to nouns in formation? Arabic comparative forms and adverbs have a standard regular method but not so in Latin (and Ancient Greek and modern Balto-Slavic languages) where it is random with only tendencies. I have my hypothesis but I would like to hear yours, I also believe Indo European languages are exceptionally irregular and complicated, I've looked at some native American languages and they are far more regular! (And my shot at Estonian would come so much quicker were it not for the 3 extra parts from adjectives, if only they were invariable like those of other Uralic languages!) 

Why is Latin (and Ancient Greek, Russian, Lithuanian conservative types except for Sanskrit which is extremely regular for some reason) so irregular, redundant, and exception riddled? It is not found elsewhere really. Why would Spanish not exist?


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## Gavril

Johnnyjohn said:


> Very well then, but what is the origin of the big irregularity and differences in Latin adjectives while in Arabic for example adjectives are identical to nouns in formation? Arabic comparative forms and adverbs have a standard regular method but not so in Latin (and Ancient Greek and modern Balto-Slavic languages) where it is random with only tendencies.



I thought that comparatives and adverbs were fairly regular in Latin and Greek, except for a few core adjectives (like _good_ : _well_ : _better_ : _best _and _much : more : most  _in English; "good" and "much" are irregular in some non-IE languages as well). What irregularities were you thinking of?

I know that some Slavic adjectives have a different way of forming the comparative stem than others (e.g. Slovene _redek _"rare" : _redkejši_ "rarer", but _globok_ "deep" : _globlji_ "deeper"), but I'm not sure what the situation is in Baltic.



> I have my hypothesis but I would like to hear yours, I also believe Indo European languages are exceptionally irregular and complicated, I've looked at some native American languages and they are far more regular! (And my shot at Estonian would come so much quicker were it not for the 3 extra parts from adjectives, if only they were invariable like those of other Uralic languages!)
> 
> Why is Latin (and Ancient Greek, Russian, Lithuanian conservative types except for Sanskrit which is extremely regular for some reason) so irregular, redundant, and exception riddled? It is not found elsewhere really. Why would Spanish not exist?



If the morphology of older IE languages is uniquely irregular -- which could be true, but I would need to look at a lot more data before concluding so -- then perhaps (this is just a guess on my part) it is due to the coinciding of several different developments: mobile stress patterns, ablaut (which developed alongside mobile stress), the emergence of a gender system that is independent of noun semantics, and so on. Once the "initial" irregularities developed in the early Indo-European dialects, they would have spread into daughter languages like Greek/Latin/etc., where they would develop in further directions.

Also, if IE is unique in its irregularity, it wouldn't be the only language group with unique morphological properties whose origins we can't fully explain: for example, Semitic ablaut (and infixation) is far more intricate than any ablaut system I know of in other language families (including IE).


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## irinet

The American languages...? You mean South American languages,  right?
The British irregular verbs,  plural,  comparatives... ., and many other exceptions of the rules,  Johnny, also  constantly puzzle me.


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## Nino83

I didn't understand which irregularities Latin adjectival declension had. 
The first class ("us, a, um") is equal to the first and second declension while the second class (is, is) is equal to the third declension. 
Which irregularities are you speaking about?


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## Johnnyjohn

irinet said:


> The American languages...? You mean South American languages,  right?
> The British irregular verbs,  plural,  comparatives... ., and many other exceptions of the rules,  Johnny, also  constantly puzzle me.



South American languages are quite simplified like Quecha, but even the most irregular Northern ones are regular in a unique way. Navajo is thought of as being a language where every verb is supposedly irregular, but :http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Navajo_Verb_System.html?id=3wv_Q7RM2NEC

There are about 5-7 parts to memorize but verbs and adjectives are identical and there are only 550 roots while nouns are even simpler than English. Compare that to Russian where every verb has a perfective part that can never be predicted, verbs are an open class with at least 2000 roots, the infinitive is also unpredictable, and a nominal system that is full of differing suffixes, mobile stress, and the redundancy of both cases and prepositions often not functioning without each other, a person is in for a lot more. It is not just irregularity but how many types of irregularities and how much redundancy there is! A language like Georgian may have very irregular verbs but nouns are genderless and straightforward, conservative IE tries does it all.


I would learn Navajo faster and more smoothly than anything like Ancient Greek were I an Alien forced to pick between two foreign languages, the unique irregularities of IE are not due to sound change only, differing cases and inflections in conservative IE (except for classical Sanskrit which was made very very regular deliberately) are practically different words altogether. The sad thing is that people who only know about IE languages tend to put English on the spot for lacking these supposedly "universal" features. Linguistic ignorance is some of the highest amongst native IE speakers nowadays, the mantra "We use English because it is the easiest" being repeated far too often.



Nino83 said:


> I didn't understand which irregularities Latin adjectival declension had.
> The first class ("us, a, um") is equal to the first and second declension while the second class (is, is) is equal to the third declension.
> Which irregularities are you speaking about?



Third declension adjectives have different endings, have different gender distinctions, and more. Do you know much about non-IE languages? 
It is obvious all of them lack IE irregularities.


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## Angelo di fuoco

First: mobile stress in Russian is rather predictable. What is really unpredictable (and which is a point even native speakers get wrong) is the basic stress of a word.
The "unpredictability" of a perfective complementary verb to a imperfective verb is roughly the same as the meaning of the phrasal verbs in English. Or maybe you haven't yet found a book that explain the "derivational levels" of Russian, so you don't see the logic behind it like you see it in Navajo? 
If English lacks modifying suffixes, it's not Russian that's "redundant", it's English that is underdeveloped.
Cases and prepositions in Russian are not redundant, they have different functions. What is really redundant is the obsession of, among others, Germanic and Romance languages with determiners like articles and the (in)definiteness of a noun.
You see, it's only a matter of perspective and I really don't see why yours should be any more objective than the ones you are lashing out against.

Sorry, but your permanent speaking of "normal", "abnormal", "redundant" and so on is really annoying. Can you please try to be more objective and less prejudiced in your own particular way?


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## Johnnyjohn

Angelo di fuoco said:


> .....



How do you predict the stress of the singular non-nominative, plural nominative/accusative, and other plural cases?
The conditioning behind this mobile stress is not plain ol' sound change but goes back to how haphazardly declension were suddenly created and meshed together.

No such thing has ever happened in Korea for example: 
Perfective is -ess- always over there and case suffixes are the same no matter the noun and the few cases there are only used with no prepositions, there are some irregular nouns and verbs from sound change but not utter random suppletion of the very word to its core. 

What non-IE languages have you studied? I can contrast Arabic and Latin too. The only non-IE language that approaches some of the named qualities of IE I have brought up that I can name is Chechen/Ingush, but what else except for Russification could have caused that? Estonian and Chechen though are still nowhere near the likes of Russian/Lithuanian/Ancient Greek.

English is an exception in not having features like Russian (but it is not semantically less complex, just more regular and less stuffed), 
why else is it called "grammar-less" "the easiest" when it is not exceptionally simple, it looks like a regular average language to the rest of the world. Like a 5 '8' man being called a dwarf by an island of 9 foot tall people in the middle of thousands of islands where everyone is normally 5 '7'-6'1' ish. And I guess some 5 '8' ones live on that island too but are thinner and look taller because of that who join in on picking on the 5 '8' guy who is not so thin.


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## berndf

Johnnyjohn said:


> Bantu languages add a gender prefix that is similar to the noun prefix, there are hardly of the hellenic/latinate/balto-slavic nauseating irregularities as well in the rest of the grammar. Afro Asiatic languages (and Australian aborginal ones) do not have true adjectives but "nominals" which cover both nouns and adjectives, a noun is frequently used as an adjective, and an adjective is frequently used as a noun, they also are identically inflected with no weird comparative or inconsistent latin like gender ending rules.


So you don't deny that Arabic adjectives are inflected. You are saying IE languages as special in having _special_ adjective inflection schemes. You are right there with regards to Arabic but not with regard to Japanese. Japanese (native) adjectives work quite differently than IE adjectives and they may not be declined but they are conjugated.

The declension paradigms of Semitic languages are indeed generally simpler than those of IE languages, though Arabic has these notorious broken plurals. Semitic conjugation paradigms on the other hand are much more complex than those of IE languages. Hebrew has seven paradigms, one might compare them to modes, each of them having two finite tenses a declined participle (one of the modes has two) and two infinitives. Then this has to be multiplied by nine as there are eight classes of "irregular" roots. Arabic is even a bit more complicated.

Qualifications like _weird _or _abnormal _really have no place in a modern linguistic discussion. _Weirdness _is in the eye of the beholder and languages are normally considered _weird _only from the outside. Languages do not normally develop to suit the needs of not native speakers. Two notable exceptions are Vulgar Latin and Middle English. This is probably why these two languages saw the most drastic simplifications of their inflection system precisely during these development stages.


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## Angelo di fuoco

Johnnyjohn said:


> How do you predict the stress of the singular non-nominative, plural nominative/accusative, and other plural cases?
> The conditioning behind this mobile stress is not plain ol' sound change but goes back to how haphazardly declension were suddenly created and meshed together.
> 
> No such thing has ever happened in Korea for example:
> Perfective is -ess- always over there and case suffixes are the same no matter the noun and the few cases there are only used with no prepositions, there are some irregular nouns and verbs from sound change but not utter random suppletion of the very word to its core.
> 
> What non-IE languages have you studied? I can contrast Arabic and Latin too. The only non-IE language that approaches some of the named qualities of IE I have brought up that I can name is Chechen/Ingush, but what else except for Russification could have caused that? Estonian and Chechen though are still nowhere near the likes of Russian/Lithuanian/Ancient Greek.
> 
> English is an exception in not having features like Russian (but it is not semantically less complex, just more regular and less stuffed),
> why else is it called "grammar-less" "the easiest" when it is not exceptionally simple, it looks like a regular average language to the rest of the world. Like a 5 '8' man being called a dwarf by an island of 9 foot tall people in the middle of thousands of islands where everyone is normally 5 '7'-6'1' ish. And I guess some 5 '8' ones live on that island too but are thinner and look taller because of that who join in on picking on the 5 '8' guy who is not so thin.



The problem is: where you see "irregular" features and don't know the logic behind them, you say it was all created "suddenly" and "haphazardly". Yet you don't develop a conjugation system with several cases, numbers & genders at one go. The modern nominal and verbal inflexion systems of Russian are the result of a long historical process (I'd say a coupla thousands years or so) and the overlapping of several paradigms, some of which are productive, some are not, and of some of which only traces remain. The existence of various paradigms doesn't come out of nowhere: usually there are semantic reasons behind it. The change of paradigms is usually brought about either by changes in semantics (because people like you fail to see the logic behind the distinctions or because that logic becomes irrelevant) or by changes in phonetics, or by linguistic contact etc..

The same is valid both for Classical & Vulgar Latin - and the maddeningly irregular and unpredictable English spelling & pronunciation rules. You know, after 9 years of English at school and 10 years of linguistic contact on my own (mainly through literature), I still get surprises when, in a piece of music, a film, in conversation or on the TV, I hear the real pronunciation of a word I had been reading in a certain way for years.

If you talk about Chechen, you should have in mind that linguistic contact with Russian is really not that long (mutual raids since roughly 1720, Chechnya became part of Russia only about 1820), that Chechen is surrounded by a hotchpotch of different languages (neighbouring Dagestan has about a dozen (!) official languages) and that, like almost every language, Chechen has a very long history of its own.

I know a bunch of Romance languages (so I have a good perspective of how a more or less uniform language developed into several divergent languages with varying degrees and kinds ob both regularisation and deregularisation), I have a smattering of Latin and minor Italian varieties. Amongst non-IE languages I have studied Chinese with some success and looked into manuals of Japanese, Hungarian and Turkic languages.

By the way, here in the Vulgar vs. Classical Latin topic, you are fighting against the phantoms of your own mind, a subjectively perceived discrimination of English. Now you are trying to compensate by discriminating against other IE languages.


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## Nino83

Johnnyjohn said:


> Third declension adjectives have different endings, have different gender distinctions, and more.



The endings are the same of the third declension of nouns. 
Only nominative and accusative have different endings (for each gender). 
I want to remind you that the Latin third declension groups nouns that in Old High German have different declension patterns ("i" and "u" declension and "strong consonantal declension", like "monosyllabic", "r", "nd" and "z" declension). German has also a "weak" declension. So, there is one Latin third declension but 7 Old High German declensions in comparison. 

It seems that Latin isn't the IE having more declension patterns.


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## Johnnyjohn

berndf said:


> The declension paradigms of Semitic languages are indeed generally simpler than those of IE languages, though Arabic has these notorious broken plurals. Semitic conjugation paradigms on the other hand are much more complex than those of IE languages. Hebrew has seven paradigms, one might compare them to modes, each of them having two finite tenses a declined participle (one of the modes has two) and two infinitives. Then this has to be multiplied by nine as there are eight classes of "irregular" roots. Arabic is even a bit more complicated.



Okay, Well they may be in distinctions and syntactical use but they are not as irregular and inconsistent as Latin's or Russian's. Semitic's irregularities are from sound change mostly not something equivalent to the cow-gil rix system that PIE dreamt up that would leave scars even in English to this day.



Angelo di fuoco said:


> The problem is: where you see "irregular" features and don't know the logic behind them, you say it was all created "suddenly" and "haphazardly". Yet you don't develop a conjugation system with several cases, numbers & genders at one go. The modern nominal and verbal inflexion systems of Russian are the result of a long historical process (I'd say a coupla thousands years or so) and the overlapping of several paradigms, some of which are productive, some are not, and of some of which only traces remain. The existence of various paradigms doesn't come out of nowhere: usually there are semantic reasons behind it. The change of paradigms is usually brought about either by changes in semantics (because people like you fail to see the logic behind the distinctions or because that logic becomes irrelevant) or by changes in phonetics, or by linguistic contact etc..



Yes, there is a logic to how they came to be, but this process hasn't happened elsewhere at all to the same degree. Observe Ojibwe and then compare it to proto-Algonquin, one won't see so many random changes and a turbulent history. Compare proto Semitic to Hebrew, compare proto Uralic to Hungarian, proto Sino Tibetan to Tibetan, there is barely any deposing of features, inconsistent syntax (the locative for 150 nouns in Russian for example), nor mass confusion among native speakers so that mergers and splits occur willy nilly hither and thither.



Nino83 said:


> The endings are the same of the third declension of nouns.
> Only nominative and accusative have different endings (for each gender).
> I want to remind you that the Latin third declension groups nouns that in Old High German have different declension patterns ("i" and "u" declension and "strong consonantal declension", like "monosyllabic", "r", "nd" and "z" declension). German has also a "weak" declension. So, there is one Latin third declension but 7 Old High German declensions in comparison.



Well thank goodness modern Germanis a language that could easily blend in with the rest of the world, it has systemized further over its history. The Latin 3rd declension's irregularities are not from sound change but from speakers randomly exchanging suffixes with other nouns back and forth, this is how the 4th and 5th declensions got started (and all 5 really from the 2 declension pattern types from Old Italic), suffixes were mixed and matched until more combinations emerged. If the verbal system was regularizing into conjugation classes, something else had to jumble up! The adjectives were always there though. I am not being politically correct when I say things tend to go smoothly in the rest of the world.

That is all.


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## Nino83

Johnnyjohn said:


> Well thank goodness modern Germanis a language that could easily blend in with the rest of the world, it has systemized further over its history.



Why are you comparing Classical Latin with Modern High German? 
One has to compare Modern High German with French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician, Romanian and, if one compares these languages, High German has (by far) the most complicated adjectival declension system. 

So, I still don't agree with this statement: 


Johnnyjohn said:


> The other question is why Latin (and Ancient Greek as well) grew far more redundant, complicated, and heavily irregular compared to Proto-Indo-European at its earliest stages.



Latin is not more complicated than Old High German.


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## berndf

Johnnyjohn said:


> Semitic's irregularities are from sound change mostly


Where do you think the the so-called "irregular" forms in IE languages come from?


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## Johnnyjohn

Nino83 said:


> One has to compare Modern High German with French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, Galician, Romanian and, if one compares these languages, High German has (by far) the most complicated adjectival declension system.


Well both underwent trimming. Modern German adjective inflection is the most complex but it is consistent in gender, case, and number! Lithuanian still is an example of a language like Ancient Greek and Latin where adjective inflection is so inconsistent and mixed and matched. 



berndf said:


> Where do you think the the so-called "irregular" forms in IE languages come from?


It is not sound change when the infinitive and participles can be formed with multiple unpredictable suffixes, it is not sound change when adjectives in latin have inconsistent gender agreement, it is not sound change when suffixes once used for creating new words are used to form plurals unpredictably, it is not sound change when there are dozens of ways to form a perfective tense in Russian, it is not sound change when 2 cases such as the instrumental and prepositional cannot operate with prepositions and are thus redundant (many languages only have cases and prepositions actually but use cases exclusively for syntactical purposes), it is not sound change when new declensions are made by mixing already existing declension and using new suffixes arbitrarily, 

It is not sound change when some adjectives and nouns are indeclinable for no reason, it is not sound change when a language creates and creates without any regard to its structure, it is not sound change when a language suddenly switches to a new method of creating verbs overnight while having hundreds of unproductive stems. The rest of the world was never so confused. I've yet to see an Athabaskan language in north America that has hundreds of competing methods and decaying paradigms.

You've mentioned hebrew and Arabic, their verb paradigms have irregular forms but are overall consistent with "regularities within the irregularities" the same way a navajo verb has, each of the modes imparts a different meaning and should not be thought of as some irregular conjugation of the first mode but rather its own word type with unique regularities within its own irregularities. Even then, Arabic is lenient in other areas of its grammar and irregularities are mostly reducible to principal parts with the exception of some verb types, and only 3 or so modes have unpredictable verbal nouns, and even if it was as difficult as Russian there are compensations in other parts of the grammar. The verbs have very transparent methods of derivation, nouns are simpler as been mentioned too, and the adjectival formation and comparatives are more straightforward. 

Its not all verb forms, I would rather a language with 300 verb forms but only 3 principal parts are needed for some verbs rather than one with 10 forms where each is never predictable. This thread is getting very off topic as you said, so wrap up your questions to me soon, I give lengthy replies.


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## Angelo di fuoco

Johnnyjohn said:


> Well both underwent trimming. Modern German adjective inflection is the most complex but it is consistent in gender, case, and number! Lithuanian still is an example of a language like Ancient Greek and Latin where adjective inflection is so inconsistent and mixed and matched.



No, it isn't, notably in the genitive case.



Johnnyjohn said:


> It is not sound change when the infinitive and participles can be formed with multiple unpredictable suffixes, it is not sound change when adjectives in latin have inconsistent gender agreement, it is not sound change when suffixes once used for creating new words are used to form plurals unpredictably, it is not sound change when there are dozens of ways to form a perfective tense in Russian, it is not sound change when 2 cases such as the instrumental and prepositional cannot operate with prepositions and are thus redundant (many languages only have cases and prepositions actually but use cases exclusively for syntactical purposes), it is not sound change when new declensions are made by mixing already existing declension and using new suffixes arbitrarily



First, the instrumental case is very well used without prepositions in Russian, in several ways. After all, it's the prepositive case that's called prepositive, not the two of them. The prepositive case, though, did once operate without prepositions, as locative case. And since it has semantic functions that it shares with no other case, it's not redundant.
The perfective forms in Russian are formed accordingly to semantic and grammatical criteria, not "arbitrarily" or "unpredictably", as you put that. If you had no teacher or textbook to explain that to you, it's a pity, but that still gives you no right to put forward arbitrary and insubstantial claims and at the same time to tell us there are "regularities within irregularities" in Navajo conjugation. You contradict yourself.



Johnnyjohn said:


> It is not sound change when some adjectives and nouns are indeclinable for no reason, it is not sound change when a language creates and creates without any regard to its structure, it is not sound change when a language suddenly switches to a new method of creating verbs overnight while having hundreds of unproductive stems. The rest of the world was never so confused. I've yet to see an Athabaskan language in north America that has hundreds of competing methods and decaying paradigms.



"Overnight", "suddenly"? Be more explicit, please.
Where, please, are some adjectives and nouns indeclinable for no reason?



Johnnyjohn said:


> Its not all verb forms, I would rather a language with 300 verb forms but only 3 principal parts are needed for some verbs rather than one with 10 forms where each is never predictable. This thread is getting very off topic as you said, so wrap up your questions to me soon, I give lengthy replies.



Feel free to open a new thread, then. Or the mods can split this one in two.


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## Nino83

Johnnyjohn said:


> Well both underwent trimming. Modern German adjective inflection is the most complex but it is consistent in gender, case, and number! Lithuanian still is an example of a language like Ancient Greek and Latin where adjective inflection is so inconsistent and mixed and matched.



I repeat. 
The language called Old High German is that spoken from 500 to 1050 AD. 
One has to compare:
a) Classical Latin with pre-Old High German, which have "i-stem" and "u-stem" adjectives. (before 500 AD) 
b) Vulgar Latin/Romance languages with Old High German. Vulgar Latin (from 500 AD on) lost cases (except Old French), so we have "bono/bona" and "forte", while Old High German has cases and a lot of declesion patterns for nouns (nine, more or less). 
c) Romance languages with Modern High German. The former haven't cases, the latter has three types of adjectival declension (strong/mixed/weak). Yes, there are no (great) differences between nouns but the loss of final vowels made unpredictable the gender of nouns. 
In Romance languages (except French, which had the most Germanic influence) if the last vowel of a word is an "a", the name is feminine, if it's an "o" it is masculine (if it's an "e" or a "consonant", it is unpredictable). 
In German, one can't say which is the gender of a noun looking at the final vowel. 

Regarding constistency in Romance laguages (except Germanic influenced French): 
- adjective of the first class: "a" with words ending in "a", "o" with words ending in "o", "a" or "o" with words ending in "e" or "consonant" 
- adjective of the second class: always "e" or "consonant" (it is always the same). 

But, if you think that it's easier for an English speaker to learn German declension than Spanish/Portuguese/Italian/Catalan/Galician declension, I respect your opinion but I don't agree on it.


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## Johnnyjohn

Nino83 said:


> But, if you think that it's easier for an English speaker to learn German declension than Spanish/Portuguese/Italian/Catalan/Galician declension, I respect your opinion but I don't agree on it.



I didn't say that, if I said something that gave off that idea then I must of written the statement improperly. German declension is harder, but Lithuanian for example is much harder due to the irregularities.



Angelo di fuoco said:


> No, it isn't, notably in the genitive case.
> 
> First, the instrumental case is very well used without prepositions in Russian, in several ways. After all, it's the prepositive case that's called prepositive, not the two of them. The prepositive case, though, did once operate without prepositions, as locative case. And since it has semantic functions that it shares with no other case, it's not redundant. The perfective forms in Russian are formed accordingly to semantic and grammatical criteria, not "arbitrarily" or "unpredictably", as you put that. If you had no teacher or textbook to explain that to you, it's a pity, but that still gives you no right to put forward arbitrary and insubstantial claims and at the same time to tell us there are "regularities within irregularities" in Navajo conjugation. You contradict yourself. "Overnight", "suddenly"? Be more explicit, please.
> Where, please, are some adjectives and nouns indeclinable for no reason?
> Feel free to open a new thread, then. Or the mods can split this one in two.



German adjectives have the same endings, an adjective always can be declined for the feminine. 
Latin has a few indeclinable adjectives and so are larger numbers, seems it could get by fine with declension but nope! 
A Russian verb also has a big discrepancy between the infinitive and present at times too, the aspect pairs have suppletive ones, they are not fully regular, the "rules" are mere tendencies for narrowing down what the other member of a pair may be but there are enough exceptions to not make them systematic rules. Even if the verb system is supposedly not irregular, the rest of the language is irregular and redundant as heck. 

Many languages can have a irregular part, but I know no language with complicated nominals, complicated verbs, complicated everything outside of IE and those influenced by them(Finnic/Chechen). I know a person who studied both Georgian and Russian and he found Georgian easier, Georgian verbs are irregular enough to compete with Russian's but the nominals are simple and genderless and so are the numerals, stress is fixed, etc. 

By "Overnight", I was referring to the shift from strong to weak verbs in germanic. Some big shift like this has seldom if never occurred outside Europe in such a fast manner. No language is like Russian outside of Europe. I can compare Russian or Latin to Korean or Arabic if you want. Maybe I am mistaken, maybe all those webpages on Latin and Russian are incorrect, maybe they are not redundant or irregular and they're just pulling my leg when it shows exceptions and frustrating features in every single area, is that so? English is in a tough spot, English is not "primitive" "used because it is the easiest" "A monkey can learn English in 2 weeks", those who make such claims have come to see Russian as the default when it is not.


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## Gavril

Johnnyjohn said:


> Latin has a few indeclinable adjectives and so are larger numbers, seems it could get by fine with declension but nope!



Finnish also has undeclinable adjectives (or at least, undeclinable words that appear in attributive position) alongside declinable ones.



> A Russian verb also has a big discrepancy between the infinitive and present at times too,



How often is "at times"?



> the aspect pairs have suppletive ones, they are not fully regular, the "rules" are mere tendencies for narrowing down what the other member of a pair may be but there are enough exceptions to not make them systematic rules.


 
Is the perfective/imperfective pattern in Slavic a *morphological* pattern at all, or is it more of a lexical one? (By "lexical" I mean a pattern that happens to describe some groups of words, but is not generally applicable to all of them.)

As I understand it, not every perfective verb in Slavic has an imperfective counterpart, nor vice versa. And, at least in some cases, it seems a bit artificial to call one verb the precise "counterpart" of another: for example, Slovene _preživeti_ is sometimes called the "perfective form" of _živeti_ "to live", which seems somewhat like saying that English _survive_ or _spend _(as in_ spend time, _etc.) are the "perfective forms" of _live_.



> Many languages can have a irregular part, but I know no language with complicated nominals, complicated verbs, complicated everything outside of IE and those influenced by them(Finnic/Chechen).



Angelo said in post #54 that extensive Russian-Chechen contacts only go back about 300 years. While Finnic languages have certainly been influenced by IE languages (and vice versa in some cases), it seems very difficult to prove that a feature as broad as (e.g.) the fusional morphology of Estonian is a result of IE influence, as opposed to simply a by-product of final syllable loss.



> I know a person who studied both Georgian and Russian and he found Georgian easier,



This is not directly related to your point, but did this person find the whole Georgian *language* easier to master than Russian (i.e., the vocabulary and the grammar), or just certain aspects of the grammar? Vocabulary is a huge part (arguably the bulk) of learning any language. Also, how many languages had he studied when he began studying Russian and Georgian, respectively?



> By "Overnight", I was referring to the shift from strong to weak verbs in germanic. Some big shift like this has seldom if never occurred outside Europe in such a fast manner.



How do we know how quickly this shift occurred?

Overall, this is an interesting discussion, but it would be helpful if you provided more specific details to back up your claims.


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## Angelo di fuoco

I think that it s exaggerated to speak of 300 hundred years of EXTENSIVE Russian-Chechen linguistic contacts. 100 years of raids surely don't count as extensive, do they? 200 years or so is enough, and even so: the Russian population in Chechnya has always been a minority.


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## berndf

*Moderator note: This discussion was been separated from here and is now back online. Please remember at least to try to maintain a somewhat scientific point of view. Terms like inconsistent need to be properly defined and not just used in the sense having a (subjectively) unappealing logic. And subjective terms like weird are best avoided altogether. For a meaningful comparison, the structure of each language should be evaluated in its own logic to determine its consistency.

I wish us an interesting in insightful **discussion.*


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## arielipi

Swooping in, since I live in Israel and I know many people from many countries around Europe, there are certain characteristics to people's abilities of mastering Hebrew affected where they originated from. In short, people from the Latin-related languages (England, France and such) have extreme difficulty understanding which binyan to use, and how to flex it with tenses (not mentioning the infinite number of mishqalim), and of course the gender affiliation of everything. They do find however the use letters (berndf, a bit of help here please, whats it called?) pretty easy.

People from Slavic languages (Russia, Ukraine and such) on the other hand are the exact opposite - and I worked with Russians one summer vacation and learnt Russian since its so - Russian has a flexive verb system that resembles Hebrew, though they do not have use letters and simply most of them never learn how to use it correctly.

So when speaking of complexity, you should add to who.


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## francisgranada

Gavril said:


> ... Is the perfective/imperfective pattern in Slavic a *morphological* pattern at all, or is it more of a lexical one? (By "lexical" I mean a pattern that happens to describe some groups of words, but is not generally applicable to all of them.) ...


In general, verbal prefixes make the verb perfective. However, the prefixes also modify the "neutral" meaning of the original verb, so they do not represent a "symmetrical" perfective counterpart of a verb. Even more, the concrete prefix is often unpredictable, i.e. one cannot automatically "guess" which prefix to use. There are also differences among Slavic languages, i.e. sometimes different prefixes are  used to express the same idea.

For comparison, the Hungarian has a quite similar prefix system as the Slavic languages, with the following main differences: 
- the prefixes are separable from the verb and they maintain their original (adverbial) meaning and function to a high degree (not "absolutely", of course)
- there exists a "general" prefix _meg-_ which makes the verb perfective without modifying it's original meaning (again, perhaps not "absolutely", but to a high degree)

An example, to give an idea:

Slovak:
*písať *(_to write, _imperfective)
napísať (approx. _to write down_, perfective); na- is a prefix, but also a preposition meaning "on" 
spísať (literaly  _"to write together" = to make a list of_, perfective); s- is a prefix, but also a preposition meaning "with" 
vypísať (_to write out, to type out, to list ..._, perfective); vy- is a prefix that expresses the idea of "out, ex-", the corresponding preposition is "z, zo" 

Hungarian:
*írni *(_to write, _imperfective or "neutral")
leírni (approx. _to write down_, perfective); le- is a prefix, but also an adverb meaning "down (direction)" 
összeírni (literaly  _"to write together" = to make a list of_, perfective); össze- is a prefix, but also an adverb meaning approx. "together"
kiírni (_to write out, to type out, to list ..._, perfective); ki- is a prefix, but also an adverb meaning "out (direction)"
_________________
megírni (_to write_, perfective); meg- is a prefix that makes the verb perfective (it has no translatable meaning)


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## fdb

Johnnyjohn said:


> The other question is why Latin (and Ancient Greek as well) grew far more redundant, complicated, and heavily irregular compared to Proto-Indo-European at its earliest stages.



Since the contribution from which I have extracted this sentence has now found its way to the head of the thread we might as well start here. First of all, I do not really know what is meant by “Proto-Indo-European at its earliest stages”. “Proto-Indo-European” is by definition the (hypothetical) ancestor of the attested IE languages immediately before its break-up into the daughter languages. To go any further back than this cannot be more than pure speculation. There are no “earlier stages” about which we can hope to have any knowledge.

Proto-IE is a regular and uncomplicated language for exactly the same reason that Esperanto is a regular and uncomplicated language: both are invented languages, in fact languages that were invented precisely to be regular and uncomplicated. Proto-IE was invented so as to explain away the irregularities of the historically attested ancient IE languages.

If we did not know Latin, we would have had to reconstruct Latin from the known Romance languages. In that case no one would have guessed that Latin had six cases, as none of the Romance languages has anywhere near as many cases. If we did not know Old Indian (Vedic and Sanskrit), we would have had to reconstruct it from the known modern Indian languages. In that case no would have been able to guess that Old Indian had such an elaborate and irregular morphological system. Why should it be different with proto-IE?


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## Johnnyjohn

fdb said:


> Since the contribution from which I have extracted this sentence has now found its way to the head of the thread we might as well start here. First of all, I do not really know what is meant by “Proto-Indo-European at its earliest stages”. “Proto-Indo-European” is by definition the (hypothetical) ancestor of the attested IE languages immediately before its break-up into the daughter languages. To go any further back than this cannot be more than pure speculation. There are no “earlier stages” about which we can hope to have any knowledge.
> 
> Proto-IE is a regular and uncomplicated language for exactly the same reason that Esperanto is a regular and uncomplicated language: both are invented languages, in fact languages that were invented precisely to be regular and uncomplicated. Proto-IE was invented so as to explain away the irregularities of the historically attested ancient IE languages.
> 
> If we did not know Latin, we would have had to reconstruct Latin from the known Romance languages. In that case no one would have guessed that Latin had six cases, as none of the Romance languages has anywhere near as many cases. If we did not know Old Indian (Vedic and Sanskrit), we would have had to reconstruct it from the known modern Indian languages. In that case no would have been able to guess that Old Indian had such an elaborate and irregular morphological system. Why should it be different with proto-IE?



I see what you mean but it is very possible that a language could be regular and uncomplicated but suddenly complexity can grow to far far more than the older stages. It seems to me some can only imagine the opposite, simplification, is the only direction a languages goes and if that happens then the languages will never be able to become as complex (or just plain irregular) as it used to be. There are only two cases where this supposedly has happened:

In languages that were once pidgins/creoles which regained complexity and continue to this day to gain complexity until they may reach their previous more complex state (Almost all East Asian isolating languages such as Chinese/Vietnamese/Thai/Hmong etc, nearly all Austronesian languages, very likely Japanese,maybe Korean)

Modern IE languages which went from a language of average complexity and overclocked everything into Ancient Greek/Russian/Latin which carried on their tendencies for irregularity and redundancy to nearby languages such as Estonian and indirectly to Caucasian languages and more.


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## Gavril

francisgranada said:


> In general, verbal prefixes make the verb perfective. However, the prefixes also modify the "neutral" meaning of the original verb, so they do not represent a "symmetrical" perfective counterpart of a verb.



Right, and that is why I doubt that perfective/imperfective in Slavic verbs is really an "alternation" in the way that past/present is for English verbs.

I suspect (though there might be evidence otherwise) that descriptions of Slavic grammar have been influenced by descriptions of Latin or Greek grammar, where there is a fairly predictable morphological alternation between "perfect" and "imperfect" verb forms. Even though this alternation does not fully apply to many or most Slavic languages, it has been assigned a central (perhaps artificially central) role in the standard grammatical descriptions of these languages.


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## fdb

Johnnyjohn said:


> In languages that were once pidgins/creoles which regained complexity and continue to this day to gain complexity until they may reach their previous more complex state (Almost all East Asian isolating languages such as Chinese/Vietnamese/Thai/Hmong etc, nearly all Austronesian languages, very likely Japanese,maybe Korean)



Sorry, I am lost. Are you saying that Chinese etc. "were once pidgins/creoles"?


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## berndf

Johnnyjohn said:


> Modern IE languages which went from a language of average complexity and overclocked everything into Ancient Greek/Russian/Latin which carried on their tendencies for irregularity and redundancy to nearby languages such as Estonian and indirectly to Caucasian languages and more.


What do you mean by "reduncancy"? Could you explain in which way Latin was more "redundant" than, say, modern English.


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## francisgranada

Gavril said:


> ...  I suspect (though there might be evidence otherwise) that descriptions of Slavic grammar have been influenced by descriptions of Latin or Greek grammar ...


This may be true (not only in case of Slavic languages). However, it is not incorrect to say that the Slavic prefixed verbs have (in general - there are some few exceptions) a perfective aspect.


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## Ben Jamin

It seems that this thread has been started with the following assumptions:
- living languages can be divided into modern (highly developed) and old fashioned ones (retarded)
- the more analytic langauges are more modern and more developed than the synthetic languages 
- English is most developed of all languages on Earth
- English is simple, congruent and without any important irregularities 
- the morphological structure of a language (mostly declension and conjugation) is the most important feature that makes a language easy or complicated.

All of these assumptions are highly arguable, to put it mildly.


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## fdb

Well said, Ben Jamin.


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## Hulalessar

We had an interesting discussion on redundancy here: http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1545283

I think that Johnnyjohn assumes that complexity is a question of inflectional morphological and therefore considers synthetic languages to be more complex than analytical languages. There are though other aspects to complexity. It has been discussed in many threads such as this one: http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1215025

EDIT: The above typed before seeing post 65.


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## Gavril

Hulalessar said:


> I think that Johnnyjohn assumes that complexity is a question of inflectional morphological and therefore considers synthetic languages to be more complex than analytical languages.



This may be a minor point, but I think the thread has been more about fusional vs. agglutinative/isolating than about analytic vs. synthetic.


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## Johnnyjohn

Gavril said:


> This may be a minor point, but I think the thread has been more about fusional vs. agglutinative/isolating than about analytic vs. synthetic.



No, not fusional vs agglutinative. And its not about being analytic either. Arabic is fusional while Georgian is agglutinating yet Georgian verbs are much more irregular. I have mentioned that the common IE irregularities don't originate from sound change. The Asian languages I have mentioned are not just analytical but extremely transparent and bare boned, and so was Hittite (which is fusional) and modern day ones like non-Finnic Uralic (agglutinative).

Secondly the title of this thread is inaccurate. Russian, Ancient Greek, Lithuanian, Latin etc. are not complex because of their morphology.

The Chinese writing system is not complex, it is very difficult, there are some tendencies such as phonetic components or etymology but the general idea is that one must plain memorize each new character they come across by heart, while the Thai writing system is not as hard as Chinese but very complicated as different combinations of phonetic components must be created to indicate tone, consonants, and vowels.

Russian, Ancient Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, etc the whole roster, they are irregular. A person will need to memorize by heart almost many new word forms since there is little predictability in many areas. Sanskrit would be complex yet it is easier for me overall due to its extreme regularity than Russian. 
It makes me cringe when I hear someone claim Russian is so beautiful and complex due to its lack of predictability.



fdb said:


> Sorry, I am lost. Are you saying that Chinese etc. "were once pidgins/creoles"?



Old Chinese was definitely a pidgin, it was toneless, numerous word boundaries were missing, and productive derivational methods were non-existent. A case can be made for Hmong and most SE asian languages. Tonality is used as some excuse on why they are somehow complicated in another area,, but tonality is not inversely proportional to grammatical complexity at all. There is Cambodian with no tones and just as simple and bare a grammar with nearly next to no derivation or morphophonemic processes as is in Thai or Chinese, and there is Navajo with tones and numerous verbal aspects, derivational methods, and complicated morphophonemics.




Ben Jamin said:


> It seems that this thread has been started with the following assumptions:
> - living languages can be divided into modern (highly developed) and old fashioned ones (retarded)
> - the more analytic langauges are more modern and more developed than the synthetic languages
> - English is most developed of all languages on Earth
> - English is simple, congruent and without any important irregularities
> - the morphological structure of a language (mostly declension and conjugation) is the most important feature that makes a language easy or complicated.
> 
> All of these assumptions are highly arguable, to put it mildly.



No, I am firmly against the idea that old fashioned languages must be far more complicated than modern day ones. Things haven't been somehow ultra complex until modern man somehow dumbed things down. Where did I say English is the most developed? And where did I say it is somehow so simple? The morphological structure of a language does not make it complicated, what makes it difficult though is inconsistency and redundancy.

We could have an analytical language that used 50 different adverbs meaning "not" that had to be memorized for every adjective and noun, and one would just have to memorize which word uses what, the difference is in the spaces. Ex: "Not tall" "Un big" "Nay short" etc. no predictability, and it would change for plural and degree so each adjective would have as many as 20 potential slots and each adverb used must be memorized by heart.



berndf said:


> What do you mean by "reduncancy"? Could you explain in which way Latin was more "redundant" than, say, modern English.


The syntax of Latin is not redundant unlike modern conservative IE languages, but the morphology is like modern IE languages. 
Berndf, do you think Hittite is potentially what the very earliest Proto-IE stages were like? It seems to fit pretty well into what late PIE (or what we suppose it was like) would have transitioned from.


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## berndf

No, Johnyjohn, you spoke about Latin's "tendency for irregularity and inconsistency". And rather than jump to yet another language (Hittite), please stay concrete and tell me in which way Latin is 1) more irregular and 2) more redundant than modern English, to use a comparison we all know.


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## mexerica feliz

Indoeuropean languages are much less complex morphosyntactically than Dravidian languages and some other languages like Korean.


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## Johnnyjohn

mexerica feliz said:


> Indoeuropean languages are much less complex morphosyntactically than Dravidian languages and some other languages like Korean.



They are much more regular.



berndf said:


> No, Johnyjohn, you spoke about Latin's "tendency for irregularity and inconsistency". And rather than jump to yet another language (Hittite), please stay concrete and tell me in which way Latin is 1) more irregular and 2) more redundant than modern English, to use a comparison we all know.



Okay, Latin is irregular due to these qualities:
Adjectives:
Latin Adjectives take different endings in the third declension for gender and often for the ablative cases=irregular
The third declension does not loan any flexibility to such unlike Arabic adjectives which are consistent for feminine or masculine
Comparatives can be formed multiple ways: http://www.orbilat.com/Languages/Latin/Grammar/Latin-Adjective.html
Just go through this page then compare it to Arabic which is very complex already, Arabic has one comparative form and the rules on whether it takes that form or an adverb is based on what kind of adjective it is (unlike Russian for example where there is barely any way to know how the comparative is formed whether periphrastic or by derivation) But why? Not just sound change but due to the fact the comparative and superlative paradigm did not exist at some point in PIE, the ending probably originated as a way to create intensive adjectives. They are irregular due to being separate lexical words in origin.
Note: many languages do not inflect adjectives to agree, and many don't have comparative or superlative forms either to add, English is not unique.

English adjectives are not made to agree or inflect (something that is frequently pointed out by other IE speakers/learners), comparative forms are a little inconsistent, that's all.

Verbs: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_verbs#Development_of_the_conjugational_system
The whole system still leaves marks in English too, and Slavic languages have returned to this method via aspect pairs. Lexical derivation for basic aspect/tense. A similar thing happened with NE caucasian nouns where unpredictable extensions are randomly added that used to be derivational items.
It explains -io verbs, irregular participles, missing forms, deponent verbs, and unpredictable stems that are not from mere sound change. Verbs in Korean are not the things that fill hundreds of pages the same way. For a more modern example, the perfective in Korean is -a/ess-, aaaannnnd it's what in Russian?

English still has strong verbs sticking around and some irregular verbs, but it's not as unpredictable as Latin

Nouns:
There are 5 declension with different subtypes due to heavy mixing of already existing paradigms to make more. It's not just sound change but mixing and matching.
Multiple suffixes were created in PIE to accommodate the new feminine gender, and plurality may not have existed in inanimate nouns at some point, so suffixes originally used for forming new words were dragged into becoming new case suffixes with inconsistencies therefrom.
Many languages outside of Europe do not have page upon page of different declension irregularities in their cases.


I would like to add:
Prepositions are also used (I am not saying this is a redundancy, but many languages only have cases or only have prepositions)
English only uses prepositions (and it is likely PIE may have only used cases like Japanese does at some early point), but the lack of cases in English is also pointed out along with the lack of adjective agreement and conjugation suffixes.

I can also go on about Lithuanian, Russian, maybe Chechen (but it is the least irregular and exception filled for me overall), Icelandic, etc. 
They are as irregular and complicated in their syntax and morphology as English's script is to other alphabets.
English is considered exceptionally easy if not the easiest by some other IE speakers but it is not. They have come to see the above as things English lacks 
instead of things they have.


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## Gavril

Johnnyjohn said:


> No, not fusional vs agglutinative. And its not about being analytic either. Arabic is fusional while Georgian is agglutinating yet Georgian verbs are much more irregular. I have mentioned that the common IE irregularities don't originate from sound change. The Asian languages I have mentioned are not just analytical but extremely transparent and bare boned, and so was Hittite (which is fusional)



Doesn't fusionality *by definition* reduce a language's morphological transparency?



> Secondly the title of this thread is inaccurate. Russian, Ancient Greek, Lithuanian, Latin etc. are not complex because of their morphology.



I'm confused, then -- what other traits are you talking about? The only thing I recall you discussing besides morphology is the use of pre-/postpositions in tandem with cases.



> The Chinese writing system is not complex, it is very difficult, there are some tendencies such as phonetic components or etymology but the general idea is that one must plain memorize each new character they come across by heart, while the Thai writing system is not as hard as Chinese but very complicated as different combinations of phonetic components must be created to indicate tone, consonants, and vowels.



I'm not sure what you are responding to here. By the way, even if I accepted that Chinese characters are not combinatorically complex (which I don't, since there are many non-transparent combinations of signs, at least in Japanese Kanji), that doesn't take away from the complexity of individual characters. 



> Russian, Ancient Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, etc the whole roster, they are irregular. A person will need to memorize by heart almost many new word forms since there is little predictability in many areas.



At least in the case of Latin, "little predictability" seems like an exaggeration. For example, there are a number of perfective stems that can't be accurately predicted from the present stem, but the number is still quite finite.

Greek is more irregular than Latin, in the sense that it takes more time to memorize the conjugation/declension tables in a typical Greek grammar book than in a Latin one. But these declension tables are guides, extrapolated from Greek texts for the purpose of helping people understand these texts: they do not necessarily represent knowledge that any given Ancient Greek speaker would have had in his head.

For example, if you asked even the most literate Ancient Greek speaker (to say nothing of those that were illiterate), "What is the 2nd person dual aorist passive subjunctive of _baínein_ ('to go')?", you might be surprised at how long it took him to come up with an answer, and that answer wouldn't necessarily correspond to what you see in the tables of a Greek grammar book.

The question is, why did early grammarians of Ancient Greek extrapolate so much irregularity from their source material? (This question applies potentially to other cases besides Ancient Greek.) Is it simply because that irregularity was there to be discovered, or is it also because the grammarians chose to interpret their data in a certain way, in a way that they *might not have done* if they were working in modern times and using a more "modern" methodology?


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## Ben Jamin

I think that johnnyjohn overestimates the weight of morphology in the complete parcel of complexity of a language. I don't know what the actual part of this complexity can be ascribed to morphology, and I don't know if anybody has done any research on this subject, but I know that a 7 years old child speaking any language manages very well with the morphological aspect of the language, even in the most irregular languages. It may suggest, that morphology does not contribute with more than 20% of the total burden of learning a language, the rest being syntax, vocabulary, idioms, usage, register and style. Taking all those aspects into account, any language will represent approximately the same difficulty of learning to a speaker of an unrelated language.


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## arielipi

Ben Jamin said:


> I think that johnnyjohn overestimates the weight of morphology in the complete parcel of complexity of a language. I don't know what the actual part of this complexity can be ascribed to morphology, and I don't know if anybody has done any research on this subject, but I know that a 7 years old child speaking any language manages very well with the morphological aspect of the language, even in the most irregular languages. It may suggest, that morphology does not contribute with more than 20% of the total burden of learning a language, the rest being syntax, vocabulary, idioms, usage, register and style. Taking all those aspects into account, any language will represent approximately the same difficulty of learning to a speaker of an unrelated language.


To be honest, hebrew and probably other semitic languages are not that easy and its not rare to see kids up to the age of 10 misuse words structures (in verbs and mishqalim mostly). Theres a facebook page called "kids are the best scriptwriters in the world" dedicated to such funny sentences.
Its also common for kids to stretch a word's boundaries or put a root in an unfit binyan or mishqal to express something they find hard to otherwise (the best example i can think of in english would be a kid saying badder instead of worse, or worser for worse more than worse)


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## Ben Jamin

arielipi said:


> To be honest, hebrew and probably other semitic languages are not that easy and its not rare to see kids up to the age of 10 misuse words structures (in verbs and mishqalim mostly). Theres a facebook page called "kids are the best scriptwriters in the world" dedicated to such funny sentences.
> Its also common for kids to stretch a word's boundaries or put a root in an unfit binyan or mishqal to express something they find hard to otherwise (the best example i can think of in english would be a kid saying badder instead of worse, or worser for worse more than worse)


It was, of course, a rough approximation, there is a wide range of age at which children master the morphology of their mother tongue, depending also on the mother tongue itself, and individual span of ability and education they get. Children that talk much with adults and can read early will also be fluent in their language at an earlier age.
By the way, there is a rumour that Danish children learn to speak later than children in the neighbouring countries, due to the blurry character of the Danish pronunciation.


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## Nino83

Ben Jamin said:


> By the way, there is a rumour that Danish children learn to speak later than children in the neighbouring countries, due to the blurry character of the Danish pronunciation.



yes, and Danish, according to JohnnyJohn's approach should be the most regular North Germanic language (with more reduced final vowels than Swedish). 
Curiously this study says that Croatian (fusional language with 7 cases) kids understand 150 words while a Danish (with a simplified morphology) child of the same age understands 85 words.


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## francisgranada

An example to illustrate, how various factors, concretely the _spelling system_ may also influence our opinion/impression about the „complicatedness“ of a certain language.  

In English, the plural marker is *-s* for most of the nouns (for higher transparency, I disregard the „irregular“ plurals and other peculiarities): 
Singular: house, garden, cock ...
Plural: house*s*, garden*s*, cock*s*  ...

For comparison,  in Hungarian the plural marker is *–k* for all the nouns, but it is often preceded by an extra vowel (again, I disregard some „exceptions“ etc.):
Singular: ház, kert, kakas ...
Plural: ház*ak*, kert*ek*, kakas*ok*,   ...

Though from the linguistical point of view, the Hungarian plural marker is only –k and the “extra vowels” are (mostly) etymological (formerly they were part of  the noun itself) and _sometimes _predictable (due to the rules of the vowel harmony) , for a  learner/student  there are simply more plural endings to memorize and to choose correctly. At the same time in English there is only one plural ending to memorize and to use, therefore the English is evidently simpler than the Hungarian …  

However, if the English spelling system were “Hungarian-like” (rather phonetical than conservative), then we could have more variants of the plural ending also in English. The above examples could look like this:
Singular: haus, garden, kok ...
Plural: haus*iz*, garden*z*, kok*s*  ...


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## Johnnyjohn

Gavril said:


> Doesn't fusionality *by definition* reduce a language's morphological transparency?
> ...
> For example, if you asked even the most literate Ancient Greek speaker (to say nothing of those that were illiterate), "What is the 2nd person dual aorist passive subjunctive of _baínein_ ('to go')?", you might be surprised at how long it took him to come up with an answer, and that answer wouldn't necessarily correspond to what you see in the tables of a Greek grammar book.
> 
> The question is, why did early grammarians of Ancient Greek extrapolate so much irregularity from their source material? (This question applies potentially to other cases besides Ancient Greek.) Is it simply because that irregularity was there to be discovered, or is it also because the grammarians chose to interpret their data in a certain way, in a way that they *might not have done* if they were working in modern times and using a more "modern" methodology?


 
-I get where you are coming from. Maybe I will look at it differently if they organize it differently, but irregularity is irregularity, a Chechen noun will have an unpredictable extension in the oblique cases and plural that must be memorized by heart, there are far more forms in Latin/Russian/Ancient Greek that must me memorized by heart and are definitely conjugated/declined forms and not separate words (though they are formed as irregularly as derived words)

-Fusionality is not the issue here. Like I said, Hittite is fusional but extremely straightforward if not marvelously simple, while Georgian is agglutinating but has very irregular verbs. I have stressed that the origin of the IE irregularity is not just sound change or its fusionality, its the unpredictable random formation of different inflected forms of almost all word classes as it innovated so rapidly which leave remnants behind to this day. Such a process hasn't been noticed if not nonexistent in any other language family (except for NE caucasian noun cases only). Complex but regular (or with controlled classes if irregular in a way) languages are the norm elsewhere in the world.


----------



## berndf

Johnnyjohn said:


> Note: many languages do not inflect adjectives to agree


This is usually brought with a highly rigid word order which is as difficult and counter-intuitive for speakers of a fully case inflected language as language as adjective agreement is presumably for you. In case inflected languages adjective agreement serves to correlate head nouns and attributes. E.g.:
_Domum viri veteris video = I see the old man's house.
Domum viri veterem video = the the man's old house.
_


Johnnyjohn said:


> There are 5 declension with different subtypes due to heavy mixing of already existing paradigms to make more. It's not just sound change but mixing and matching.





Johnnyjohn said:


> Russian, Ancient Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, etc the whole roster, they are irregular. A person will need to memorize by heart almost many new word forms since there is little predictability in many areas.


Authors of Latin dictionaries that except for a very small number of truly irregular nouns and adjectives (I am ignoring foreign words which in educated speech, and classical Latin was an educated register, foreign words usually have a life or their own) nominative singular and genitive singular are sufficient to intuitively generate all declensions for a well trained speaker (I am unfortunately not one of them, so I can't verify this from own experience). This suggest that there is a much higher degree of regularity in Latin declension than meets an untrained eye from reading grammar books. As a native speaker of a case inflected language I can confirm that inflections are produced intuitively and not memorized. I have studied the formal grammar of my own language very carefully, yet it often happens to me that I cannot tell you the case of a word forum without thinking while I intuitive use it without problems. In such cases, I have to construct sentences of which I know that they require genitive, dative, accusative, strong, weak ... word forms and iterate them in my mind until the I find one where the word form matches.

Mixing of paradigms: English has similar "irregularities", just that they concern prepositions and not endings. Why do you say "I came *on *Monday" and "I came *at *12 o'clock"? "Irregularities" do not disappear with the loss of inflections, they just pop up elsewhere. And, like before, the loss of case inflections is paid for by a rigid word order that makes certain things more difficult and round about to express. E.g.:
_Caesar Cleopatram amat = Caesar loves Cleopatra.
Cleopatram Caesar amat = Caesar loves Cleopatra, rather than someone else._


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## Johnnyjohn

berndf said:


> This is usually brought with a highly rigid word order which is as difficult and counter-intuitive for speakers of a fully case inflected language as language as adjective agreement is presumably for you. In case inflected languages adjective agreement serves to correlate head nouns and attributes. E.g.:
> _Domum viri veteris video = I see the old man's house.
> Domum viri veterem video = the the man's old house.
> _
> 
> Authors of Latin dictionaries that except for a very small number of truly irregular nouns and adjectives (I am ignoring foreign words which in educated speech, and classical Latin was an educated register, foreign words usually have a life or their own) nominative singular and genitive singular are sufficient to intuitively generate all declensions for a well trained speaker (I am unfortunately not one of them, so I can't verify this from own experience). This suggest that there is a much higher degree of regularity in Latin declension than meets an untrained eye from reading grammar books. As a native speaker of a case inflected language I can confirm that inflections are produced intuitively and not memorized. I have studied the formal grammar of my own language very carefully, yet it often happens to me that I cannot tell you the case of a word forum without thinking while I intuitive use it without problems. In such cases, I have to construct sentences of which I know that they require genitive, dative, accusative, strong, weak ... word forms and iterate them in my mind until the I find one where the word form matches.
> 
> Mixing of paradigms: English has similar "irregularities", just that they concern prepositions and not endings. Why do you say "I came *on *Monday" and "I came *at *12 o'clock"? "Irregularities" do not disappear with the loss of inflections, they just pop up elsewhere. And, like before, the loss of case inflections is paid for by a rigid word order that makes certain things more difficult and round about to express. E.g.:
> _Caesar Cleopatram amat = Caesar loves Cleopatra.
> Cleopatram Caesar amat = Caesar loves Cleopatra, rather than someone else._



-Rigid word order doesn't have irregular forms. Latin adjectives are full of irregularities as I linked to before, irregularities not just from sound change, sound change is a fraction of the whole picture.

-Latin cases are as you described but German cases are not as irregular, it's only the plural, languages like Korean and numerous upon numerous languages with cases in the world only have 1-2 declensions and some several subtypes (like Sanskrit, supposedly 6 declensions but the endings don't change except for sandhi and assimilation rules, the suffixes are far more consistent) but latin has 5 with many different suffixes for each on top of numerous subtypes within subtypes.
Sanskrit nouns: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit_nouns
It's really more like 1 declension with a few subtypes unlike Latin.

-Languages without cases don't necessarily have said use of those prepositions, and those are adverbial phrases and practically a separate derived phrase. 
Modern IE languages also have complex use of prepositions, in fact it was found that Czech speakers use prepositions more often than English speakers despite being a language with 7 cases and many declensions, and those prepositions must take cases on top of more exceptions. 

-Indo European languages have qualities that I have listed that set the family apart from other families, while other families may not be set apart as much by equivalent qualities. The picture of a very irregular language with irregular nouns, verbs, adjectives, and gender such as Russian/Latin/Czech is not an example of what people supposedly always spoke until modern simplification occurred, there are many conservative societies with languages far less so. Latin/Ancient Greek was not how things have always been for 148,000 years, and Russian is not the example of what languages always will become. The below isn't to you bernf, but I mention them anyway:
Languages can become far more irregular and difficult, Latin/Russian/Lithuanian/Ancient Greek came from a much simpler ancestor, yet people think it is strange if something like gender, cases, and conjugations disappear as happened in English but do not blink an eye when a language gains them, why would them leaving be so noticable if they came into existence from a language not having them? I feel as if the romanticization of Latin/Russian/Lithuanian/Ancient Greek types is responsible for all the negative statements about English from other IE speakers.


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## arielipi

berndf said:


> Mixing of paradigms: English has similar "irregularities", just that they concern prepositions and not endings. Why do you say "I came *on *Monday" and "I came *at *12 o'clock"? "Irregularities" do not disappear with the loss of inflections, they just pop up elsewhere.


I actually believe it is possible to construct a language with almost no irregularities (almost because any affix may need to have one exceptional rule, e.g. in english an instead of a for aeiou (h) )

more to the point, i do not agree that irregularities pop in subject A if they do not in subject B. all combinations are possible.

EDIT: johnny, how can there be any language with no cases?


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## Johnnyjohn

arielipi said:


> I actually believe it is possible to construct a language with almost no irregularities (almost because any affix may need to have one exceptional rule, e.g. in english an instead of a for aeiou (h) )
> 
> more to the point, i do not agree that irregularities pop in subject A if they do not in subject B. all combinations are possible.
> 
> EDIT: johnny, how can there be any language with no cases?



Can you elaborate on what you mean?

Also I understand your comment on cases, as if prepositions are case-like particles etc, but there are languages with none though, many isolating asian languages (that have not progressed as far as Chinese and Vietnamese in morphology) still use serial verbs to do what adverbs, tenses, participles, verbal nouns, prepositions, and modal inflections/verbs would do.


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## berndf

Johnnyjohn said:


> -Rigid word order doesn't have irregular forms. Latin adjectives are full of irregularities as I linked to before, irregularities not just from sound change, sound change is a fraction of the whole picture.
> 
> -Latin cases are as you described but German cases are not as irregular, it's only the plural, languages like Korean and numerous upon numerous languages with cases in the world only have 1-2 declensions and some several subtypes (like Sanskrit, supposedly 6 declensions but the endings don't change except for sandhi and assimilation rules, the suffixes are far more consistent) but latin has 5 with many different suffixes for each on top of numerous subtypes within subtypes.
> Sanskrit nouns: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit_nouns
> It's really more like 1 declension with a few subtypes unlike Latin.
> 
> -Languages without cases don't necessarily have said use of those prepositions, and those are adverbial phrases and practically a separate derived phrase.
> Modern IE languages also have complex use of prepositions, in fact it was found that Czech speakers use prepositions more often than English speakers despite being a language with 7 cases and many declensions, and those prepositions must take cases on top of more exceptions.
> 
> -Indo European languages have qualities that I have listed that set the family apart from other families, while other families may not be set apart as much by equivalent qualities. The picture of a very irregular language with irregular nouns, verbs, adjectives, and gender such as Russian/Latin/Czech is not an example of what people supposedly always spoke until modern simplification occurred, there are many conservative societies with languages far less so. Latin/Ancient Greek was not how things have always been for 148,000 years, and Russian is not the example of what languages always will become. The below isn't to you bernf, but I mention them anyway:
> Languages can become far more irregular and difficult, Latin/Russian/Lithuanian/Ancient Greek came from a much simpler ancestor, yet people think it is strange if something like gender, cases, and conjugations disappear as happened in English but do not blink an eye when a language gains them, why would them leaving be so noticable if they came into existence from a language not having them? I feel as if the romanticization of Latin/Russian/Lithuanian/Ancient Greek types is responsible for all the negative statements about English from other IE speakers.


I agree that "romanticising" Latin for its alleged "logicalness" is silly but then, this is nothing modern linguists would ever do.

Latin evidently has a relatively complex declension system though less "irregular" as it appears from the outside.

The overall complexity and "irregularity" of a language is not necessarily reduced by eliminating the declension system as in English. The complexities and "irregularities" just pop up at different places. From a complex declension system you cannot deduce that the language as such is more complex.

I agree, rigid word order does not add per se irregularities but generally it adds complexity to the rule system.


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## HerrK

I thought I'd finally create an account here and chime in. Latin is nowhere near as irregular as you're making it out to be. (I added numbers to your points for easy reference)



Johnnyjohn said:


> Okay, Latin is irregular due to these qualities:
> Adjectives:
> 1. Latin Adjectives take different endings in the third declension for gender and often for the ablative cases=irregular
> 2. The third declension does not loan any flexibility to such unlike Arabic adjectives which are consistent for feminine or masculine
> 3. Comparatives can be formed multiple ways
> 4. Just go through this page then compare it to Arabic which is very complex already, Arabic has one comparative form and the rules on whether it takes that form or an adverb is based on what kind of adjective it is (unlike Russian for example where there is barely any way to know how the comparative is formed whether periphrastic or by derivation) But why? Not just sound change but due to the fact the comparative and superlative paradigm did not exist at some point in PIE, the ending probably originated as a way to create intensive adjectives. They are irregular due to being separate lexical words in origin.
> Note: many languages do not inflect adjectives to agree, and many don't have comparative or superlative forms either to add, English is not unique.
> 
> English adjectives are not made to agree or inflect (something that is frequently pointed out by other IE speakers/learners), comparative forms are a little inconsistent, that's all.
> 
> Verbs:
> 5. The whole system still leaves marks in English too, and Slavic languages have returned to this method via aspect pairs. Lexical derivation for basic aspect/tense. A similar thing happened with NE caucasian nouns where unpredictable extensions are randomly added that used to be derivational items.
> 6. It explains -io verbs, irregular participles, missing forms, deponent verbs, and unpredictable stems that are not from mere sound change. Verbs in Korean are not the things that fill hundreds of pages the same way. For a more modern example, the perfective in Korean is -a/ess-, aaaannnnd it's what in Russian?
> 
> English still has strong verbs sticking around and some irregular verbs, but it's not as unpredictable as Latin
> 
> Nouns:
> 7. There are 5 declension with different subtypes due to heavy mixing of already existing paradigms to make more. It's not just sound change but mixing and matching.
> 8. Multiple suffixes were created in PIE to accommodate the new feminine gender, and plurality may not have existed in inanimate nouns at some point, so suffixes originally used for forming new words were dragged into becoming new case suffixes with inconsistencies therefrom.
> 9. Many languages outside of Europe do not have page upon page of different declension irregularities in their cases.
> 
> 
> I would like to add:
> 10. Prepositions are also used (I am not saying this is a redundancy, but many languages only have cases or only have prepositions)
> 11. English only uses prepositions (and it is likely PIE may have only used cases like Japanese does at some early point), but the lack of cases in English is also pointed out along with the lack of adjective agreement and conjugation suffixes.
> 
> I can also go on about Lithuanian, Russian, maybe Chechen (but it is the least irregular and exception filled for me overall), Icelandic, etc.
> They are as irregular and complicated in their syntax and morphology as English's script is to other alphabets.
> English is considered exceptionally easy if not the easiest by some other IE speakers but it is not. They have come to see the above as things English lacks
> instead of things they have.



Adjectives:
1. Whether a Latin 3rd-declension adjective takes -er, -is, -e or -is, -is, -e is generally quite apparent. You can tell upon seeing the adjective for the first time. I don't know what you're talking about with irregular ablative forms, but the ending is -i (singular) for every single third declension adjective except vetus, veteris, which acts like a noun and takes -e
2. Not sure what "loan any flexibility" is supposed to mean... the masculine, feminine, and neuter cases only differ in nominative and sometimes accusative, and they do it in a predictable fashion.
3. Comparatives are formed by dropping the ending and adding -ior for m/f and -ius for neuter. The only irregularities are with a few adjectives that are irregular in English, too.
4. Again, comparatives are regular.

Verbs:
5. Perfect stems are unpredictable in every conjugation except the first, yes. However, they do form in regular and semi-predictable patterns. Someone familiar with the language can often correctly guess the perfect stem of a new verb if given the present.
6. -io verbs aren't irregular, just another part of morphology (which you said doesn't count as irregularity), only perfect passive participles are irregular (but like the perfect stem, semi-predictably so), missing forms only apply to fewer than 10 verbs, deponent verbs actual express a voice other than active and passive which has since disappeared (so they're not irregular, just a part of morphology), and we're not talking about Russian.

Nouns
7. Nouns are almost entirely regular as long as you know the declensions (again, that's just morphology). There are only a handful of irregular ones.
8. Not sure how this is relevant. There's no issue with what you're describing in Latin.
9. There are not "page upon page" of irregularities. I could fit them all on _one _page

10. Only two cases govern prepositions, so naturally prepositions are needed. There are far more prepositional concepts than cases, so it makes sense to have two general cases that give the sense of how each preposition functions.
11. English prepositions are used very irregularly. Latin has extremely regular prepositional use. especially compared to German and English.

I should also like to point out that instead of comparing one IE and one non-IE language, you are picking one IE language and then several non-IE languages, choosing languages that are non-irregular in the grammatical/morphological realm being discussed. For instance, if you want to compare Arabic and Latin, you need to point out that Arabic plurals are far more pervasively irregular than the Latin case system.



berndf said:


> nominative singular and genitive singular are sufficient to intuitively generate all declensions for a well trained speaker (I am unfortunately not one of them, so I can't verify this from own experience).



They are.


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## Gavril

Johnnyjohn said:


> -I get where you are coming from. Maybe I will look at it differently if they organize it differently, but irregularity is irregularity,



In compiling the description of a language, a grammarian can choose to omit irregular variants (contracted forms, etc.), making the grammar of that language seem more regular, or he can choose to include them, making it seem more irregular.

He can also choose to designate certain word variations as "derivational", and others as "inflectional". The latter choice can potentially make a language seem more irregular than it otherwise would: for example, if the imperfective/perfective alternation in Slavic is considered inflectional rather than derivational or lexical, it hugely increases the perceived irregularity of the Slavic languages.

So, I don't necessarily agree that "irregularity is irregularity": the regularity and irregularity seen in inflectional tables can reflect the biases of the grammarian(s) who first compiled them.



> a Chechen noun will have an unpredictable extension in the oblique cases and plural that must be memorized by heart, there are far more forms in Latin/Russian/Ancient Greek that must me memorized by heart and are definitely conjugated/declined forms and not separate words (though they are formed as irregularly as derived words)



"are definitely conjugated/declined forms"? I don't share your certainty here: inflectional tables are products of grammarians' methodologies, not obvious and transparent reflections of reality.

(I am not saying that inflectional tables don't reflect reality at all, but I think that their accuracy should be gauged in terms of whether they can help you read, understand and/or communicate in a given language.)



> Fusionality is not the issue here.



It's at least part of the issue. Agglutinativity is a straightforward ("1-to-1") correspondence between meaning and morpheme; fusionality makes this correspondence less straightforward (though it is not the only way of doing so).

You mentioned that Georgian is agglutinative despite its verbal irregularities: if these irregular processes disrupt the 1-to-1 correspondence between morphemes and meanings, then maybe it is more accurate to call these processes fusional. A language can be fusional in some areas and agglutinative in others.



> -Fusionality is not the issue here. Like I said, Hittite is fusional but extremely straightforward if not marvelously simple, while Georgian is agglutinating but has very irregular verbs. I have stressed that the origin of the IE irregularity is not just sound change or its fusionality, its the unpredictable random formation of different inflected forms of almost all word classes 1st/2nd decas it innovated so rapidly which leave remnants behind to this day. Such a process hasn't been noticed if not nonexistent in any other language family (except for NE caucasian noun cases only). Complex but regular (or with controlled classes if irregular in a way) languages are the norm elsewhere in the world.



Can you elaborate on "controlled classes if irregular in a way"? Some specific examples would be helpful.


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## Ben Jamin

Gavril said:


> He can also choose to designate certain word variations as "derivational", and others as "inflectional". The latter choice can potentially make a language seem more irregular than it otherwise would: for example, if the imperfective/perfective alternation in Slavic is considered inflectional rather than derivational or lexical, it hugely increases the perceived irregularity of the Slavic languages.


Using the "inflectional approach" to Slavic verbs is like using the Ptolomeian system to describe the trajectories of planets, while the lexical approach makes it easily understood (but not easily predictable). Actually, an approach that allows an inflectional operation to change the meaning of the verb is nonsensical, albeit still used by many grammarians.


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## arielipi

Johnnyjohn said:


> Can you elaborate on what you mean?
> 
> Also I understand your comment on cases, as if prepositions are case-like particles etc, but there are languages with none though, many isolating asian languages (that have not progressed as far as Chinese and Vietnamese in morphology) still use serial verbs to do what adverbs, tenses, participles, verbal nouns, prepositions, and modal inflections/verbs would do.


I mean that if we were to construct a language we could build one with no irregularities, and i think it should be based mostly on the latin-family; to tell the truth i have thought about such language and if youre interested ill post some of it here.



Ben Jamin said:


> Using the "inflectional approach" to Slavic verbs is like using the Ptolomeian system to describe the trajectories of planets, while the lexical approach makes it easily understood (but not easily predictable). Actually, an approach that allows an inflectional operation to change the meaning of the verb is nonsensical, albeit still used by many grammarians.


 from what i remember of russian, the verb system at least resembles hebrew in a way, and if i understand what you mean by lexical approach i have to disagree, its impossible to teach that way a verb system. you must have a methodology for learning a system.


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## Gavril

Ben Jamin said:


> Using the "inflectional approach" to Slavic verbs is like using the Ptolomeian system to describe the trajectories of planets, while the lexical approach makes it easily understood (but not easily predictable).



I might have chosen an extreme example, but the point was just that there are alternative ways of describing the same data.



> Actually, an approach that allows an inflectional operation to change the meaning of the verb is nonsensical,



I don't understand: tense and plurality are called inflectional operations in English, but they both affect the meaning of verbs and nouns (respectively).


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## Angelo di fuoco

arielipi said:


> I mean that if we were to construct a language we could build one with no irregularities, and i think it should be based mostly on the latin-family; to tell the truth i have thought about such language and if youre interested ill post some of it here.
> 
> from what i remember of russian, the verb system at least resembles hebrew in a way, and if i understand what you mean by lexical approach i have to disagree, its impossible to teach that way a verb system. you must have a methodology for learning a system.



There are regional Romance varieties in Italy that have completely or almost completely got rid of irregularities in the passato remoto equivalents (simple past used for completed actions).

The lexical approach makes the system easier to understand and it is more adequate. E. g. "бить" - "прибить" - "прибивать" - "поприбивать". Imperfective, perfective, imperfective, perfective. The meaning changes slightly each time. The prefix "при-" isn't the only one possible in this case: you can also use "за" instead and the chain remains valid, however, with semantic differences. You can also try other prefixes. This clearly shows that the exclusively morphological approach taken by Johnnyjohn is wrong.


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## arielipi

Ben Jamin said:


> Actually, an approach that allows an inflectional operation to change the meaning of the verb is nonsensical, albeit still used by many grammarians.


In hebrew its like that, its not nonsensical, in hebrew we have 3 time tenses, all stative (simple if you want), and the inflections provide a way to extend the time continuum.


Angelo di fuoco said:


> There are regional Romance varieties in Italy that have completely or almost completely got rid of irregularities in the passato remoto equivalents (simple past used for completed actions).
> 
> The lexical approach makes the system easier to understand and it is more adequate. E. g. "бить" - "прибить" - "прибивать" - "поприбивать". Imperfective, perfective, imperfective, perfective. The meaning changes slightly each time. The prefix "при-" isn't the only one possible in this case: you can also use "за" instead and the chain remains valid, however, with semantic differences. You can also try other prefixes. This clearly shows that the exclusively morphological approach taken by Johnnyjohn is wrong.


I may not understand the difference between lexical approach and inflectional approach, care to elaborate?


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## Angelo di fuoco

Later today, yes. Right now I have to work.


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## berndf

Ben Jamin said:


> Actually, an approach that allows an inflectional operation to change the meaning of the verb is nonsensical, albeit still used by many grammarians.


You are speaking specifically of Slavic grammar or of grammar theory in general?


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## Hulalessar

Gavril said:


> I don't understand: tense and plurality are called inflectional operations in English, but they both affect the meaning of verbs and nouns (respectively).



Only sort of.

If you add _un_- to _wise _you get a new word with a different meaning. If you add _-s_ to _dog _you do not get a new word - you are still talking about the same thing only more than. We tend to think of the word in the singular as being somehow _the _form of the word but it is not really. It is only a convention and for convenience that they are listed in the dictionary in their singular form. There is a word to express "a canine thing or things" which has two forms: _dog_ and _dogs_.  The point can be made more forcefully by looking at Latin where the changes may not involve adding something but changing the ending.

It gets a bit more complicated with verbs and not quite so easy to draw the line between derivation and inflection. A language may for example use inflections to form causative verbs: _eat > make-to-eat = feed. _The question is whether a native speaker of such a language considers _make-to-eat_ a different word to _eat_.


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## Ben Jamin

arielipi said:


> from what i remember of russian, the verb system at least resembles hebrew in a way, and if i understand what you mean by lexical approach i have to disagree, its impossible to teach that way a verb system. you must have a methodology for learning a system.


Why should it be impossible? I have explained the Slavic system to people with Germanic languages as mother tongue, using the explanation that prefixed perfective verbs only seldom have the same meaning as their imperfective unprefixed "counterparts", and very often the meaning is quite different, and they understood this.


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## Ben Jamin

arielipi said:


> In hebrew its like that, its not nonsensical, in hebrew we have 3 time tenses, all stative (simple if you want), and the inflections provide a way to extend the time continuum.
> 
> I may not understand the difference between lexical approach and inflectional approach, care to elaborate?


I meant Slavic languages of course.


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## Gavril

Hulalessar said:


> Only sort of.
> 
> If you add _un_- to _wise _you get a new word with a different meaning. If you add _-s_ to _dog _you do not get a new word



These are not self-evident facts. The only clear fact is that grammarians have traditionally codified _dogs_ and _dog_ as the same word (in dictionaries, etc.), and _wise/unwise_ as different words.


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## Ben Jamin

berndf said:


> You are speaking specifically of Slavic grammar or of grammar theory in general?


About Slavic languages, of course, see the first sentence in the post.


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## Ben Jamin

Gavril said:


> I don't understand: tense and plurality are called inflectional operations in English, but they both affect the meaning of verbs and nouns (respectively).


Not comparable at all with the formation of imperfective and perfective verbs in Slavic languages.


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## berndf

Ben Jamin said:


> About Slavic languages, of course, see the first sentence in the post.


I thought so. I asked explicitly because arielipi seemed to have understood you differently in #91 above.


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## francisgranada

Hulalessar said:


> ... A language may for example use inflections to form causative verbs: _eat > make-to-eat = feed. _The question is whether a native speaker of such a language considers _make-to-eat_ a different word to _eat_.


This is also the case of Hungarian. In general, as a native speaker, I'd say that they are not considered different words, the same way as e.g. the present and the past forms of a verb. That's because the function of the causative suffix is unambiguous and clear. So e.g. _olvas*tat*ni _(to make someone read) is spontaneousely "felt" as a form of _olvasni_ (to read) and not as a different verb (at least I feel so). 

However, in case of an agglutinative language, where the causative is formed by an affix followed by the personal endings etc., maybe we can still speak rather about _derivation_.


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## Hulalessar

Gavril said:


> These are not self-evident facts. The only clear fact is that grammarians have traditionally codified _dogs_ and _dog_ as the same word (in dictionaries, etc.), and _wise/unwise_ as different words.



Surely if _dog _and _dogs _are different words _-s_ cannot be an inflection. It would also mean that in Latin _dominus, domine, dominum, domini, domino, dominos, dominorum and dominis _​are all different words.


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## Gavril

Hulalessar said:


> Surely if _dog _and _dogs _are different words _-s_ cannot be an inflection. It would also mean that in Latin _dominus, domine, dominum, domini, domino, dominos, dominorum and dominis _​are all different words.



Maybe they are all different words; I don't see anything untenable about that possibility.

In any case, my point (from message #89) was that I don't see why Slavic aspectual pairs (_dajati/dati, ustavljati/ustaviti_, etc.) cannot be called "inflectional" simply because they involve a change in the verb's meaning. A bigger problem for calling them inflectional is that this change of meaning is not uniform from verb to verb.


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## Angelo di fuoco

It's not only not uniform from verb to verb, it's also that a verb often - mostly- has several prefixes (with different meanings) and suffixes (lesser number). That's why lexical approach is better than purely morphological.


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## Hulalessar

Gavril said:


> Maybe they are all different words; I don't see anything untenable about that possibility.



Neither do I, but I am not sure it is very useful way to classify words.


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## francisgranada

Gavril said:


> Maybe they are all different words; I don't see anything untenable about that possibility...


No problem, but calling all the verbal forms "different words" probably would make even more problematic to express ourselves quite understandably ... 





> In any case, my point ...  was that I don't see why Slavic aspectual pairs (_dajati/dati, ustavljati/ustaviti_, etc.) cannot be called "inflectional" simply because they involve a change in the verb's meaning.


I'd say that the problem is elsewere. These pairs in general (or mostly) do not change the verb's meaning, at least not significantly. It is not the same phenomenon as the verbal prefixes which make the verbs perfective and at the same time modify their meaning. _Dajati _is rather an iterative or "continuative" of the verb _dati_. We can form such verbs also from prefixed (_eo ipso_ perfective verbs). An example from Slovak: _dať > dávať_, but also _predať > predávať_. Perhaps the reason is that this algoritm is not automatically applicable for all verbs and there are many irregularities (I guess ...).


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## Johnnyjohn

Gavril said:


> In compiling the description of a language, a grammarian can choose to omit irregular variants (contracted forms, etc.), making the grammar of that language seem more regular, or he can choose to include them, making it seem more irregular.
> He can also choose to designate certain word variations as "derivational", and others as "inflectional". The latter choice can potentially make a language seem more irregular than it otherwise would: for example, if the imperfective/perfective alternation in Slavic is considered inflectional rather than derivational or lexical, it hugely increases the perceived irregularity of the Slavic languages.
> So, I don't necessarily agree that "irregularity is irregularity": the regularity and irregularity seen in inflectional tables can reflect the biases of the grammarian(s) who first compiled them.
> "are definitely conjugated/declined forms"? I don't share your certainty here: inflectional tables are products of grammarians' methodologies, not obvious and transparent reflections of reality.
> (I am not saying that inflectional tables don't reflect reality at all, but I think that their accuracy should be gauged in terms of whether they can help you read, understand and/or communicate in a given language.)
> 
> It's at least part of the issue. Agglutinativity is a straightforward ("1-to-1") correspondence between meaning and morpheme; fusionality makes this correspondence less straightforward (though it is not the only way of doing so).
> You mentioned that Georgian is agglutinative despite its verbal irregularities: if these irregular processes disrupt the 1-to-1 correspondence between morphemes and meanings, then maybe it is more accurate to call these processes fusional. A language can be fusional in some areas and agglutinative in others.
> Can you elaborate on "controlled classes if irregular in a way"? Some specific examples would be helpful.



I have explained it before, sound change is only a fraction of why IE languages are exceptionally irregular. If there are multiple unpredictable ways to form a different case or tenses, not one way to form a tense that gets obscured by sound change, they were all separate formations.
Georgian has some fused forms but most of its irregularity manifests in unpredictable thematic suffix extensions in some verb forms where the extension can be one of several separate ones, the fact the future is formed with a prefix that must be learned by heart, and by changes in transitivity classes in some verb forms etc. 
Controlled classes refers to the fact languages in the rest of the world may have an irregular or complicated area but said area is made of only a limited amount of stems such as navajo with only 550 underived verb/adjectives. Even if the verb system is not closed, languages outside of Europe or not influenced by IE tend to have their less morphologically elaborated sides such as Georgian being genderless and with only 1 declension or Navajo having nominals even simpler than English and no separate adjectives. 

Learning Arabic, Korean, Georgian, or Navajo involves learning complicated systems and applying them with easier sides of the languages, like climbing a hill to reach the summit. Learning Russian or Ancient Greek can be liked to climbing a hill only to find there is another hill one after the other with further walls of stone along the ways followed by another hill.



HerrK said:


> Adjectives:
> 1. Whether a Latin 3rd-declension adjective takes -er, -is, -e or -is, -is, -e is generally quite apparent. You can tell upon seeing the adjective for the first time. I don't know what you're talking about with irregular ablative forms, but the ending is -i (singular) for every single third declension adjective except vetus, veteris, which acts like a noun and takes -e
> 2. Not sure what "loan any flexibility" is supposed to mean... the masculine, feminine, and neuter cases only differ in nominative and sometimes accusative, and they do it in a predictable fashion.
> 3. Comparatives are formed by dropping the ending and adding -ior for m/f and -ius for neuter. The only irregularities are with a few adjectives that are irregular in English, too.
> 4. Again, comparatives are regular.
> 
> Verbs:
> 5. Perfect stems are unpredictable in every conjugation except the first, yes. However, they do form in regular and semi-predictable patterns. Someone familiar with the language can often correctly guess the perfect stem of a new verb if given the present.
> 6. -io verbs aren't irregular, just another part of morphology (which you said doesn't count as irregularity), only perfect passive participles are irregular (but like the perfect stem, semi-predictably so), missing forms only apply to fewer than 10 verbs, deponent verbs actual express a voice other than active and passive which has since disappeared (so they're not irregular, just a part of morphology), and we're not talking about Russian.
> 
> Nouns
> 7. Nouns are almost entirely regular as long as you know the declensions (again, that's just morphology). There are only a handful of irregular ones.
> 8. Not sure how this is relevant. There's no issue with what you're describing in Latin.
> 9. There are not "page upon page" of irregularities. I could fit them all on _one _page
> 
> 10. Only two cases govern prepositions, so naturally prepositions are needed. There are far more prepositional concepts than cases, so it makes sense to have two general cases that give the sense of how each preposition functions.
> 11. English prepositions are used very irregularly. Latin has extremely regular prepositional use. especially compared to German and English.
> 
> I should also like to point out that instead of comparing one IE and one non-IE language, you are picking one IE language and then several non-IE languages, choosing languages that are non-irregular in the grammatical/morphological realm being discussed. For instance, if you want to compare Arabic and Latin, you need to point out that Arabic plurals are far more pervasively irregular than the Latin case system.



-An adjective ending in -er could be 1st or 3rd, but even if its all predictable, no other language has adjective suffixes are exception filled and irregular as Latin. Arabic has its broken plurals but the other parts of its morphology are not as complex.
-Comparative irregularities are more than that of English, and comparative irregularities are absent completely in most other language families, its not universal.
-Even if there are rules for latin adjectives, these complexities simply don't exist elsewhere, IE adjectives were modified by derivation and continue to systemize to this day.
-Perfect stems are unpredictable, there are tendencies, but the perfect stem is formed multiple ways, it originated as a separate lexical word and so did the non-finite forms, that's why many Slavic presents are not predictable from their infinitives. Like I have said before, it is not sound change here, and Indo European verbs were not a closed controlled systemized class like Navajo.
-This also explains why the future was formed differently in conjugation 1 and 2 and another way in 3 and 4, the future originated also as a lexical word.
-Fair enough about the cases, the stems are not what I was referring to but the different amounts of suffixes. Its not that corpus-corporis, but portui but cornu, portibus but artubus, ae/i/u/s/ all being different suffixes for one case. Arabic/Sanskrit/Korean case suffixes tend to remain constant except for some sound changes here and there and Arabic has broken plurals (but plenty of other areas in its grammar that make it very regular compared to Russian/Ancient Greek types). 
I also mentioned Chechen, where extentions are added randomly in nouns such as "biesh-bieshuo-biesh*am*azh" or 
"wa-wa*nar*uo-wa*nar*azh" while "kuotam-kuotamuo-kuotamazh" reconstructions show the suffixes are not fused forms but separate morphemes, they originated as derivational suffixes for nouns the way we prefix verbs but when cases and plurals were created they used them to create the new forms, its not sound change here.


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## arielipi

Johnnyjohn said:


> I have explained it before, sound change is only a fraction of why IE languages are exceptionally irregular. If there are multiple unpredictable ways to form a different case or tenses, not one way to form a tense that gets obscured by sound change, they were all separate formations.


I'm sorry, how do you define this observation? in all languages there is more than one way to describe anything.
secondly, what do you define as unpredictable? i think most of the times, even frustrating, languages tend to put things in order, and maybe to you theres no logic (yes, i have several friends who came to live in israel from several countries of different languages and its mostly the IE ones that struggle with verbs, its interesting to see this because they really mess up the use of verbs and one could say that the verb system in hebrew is unpredictable, but it pretty much is)


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## HerrK

Johnnyjohn said:


> Fair enough about the cases, the stems are not what I was referring to but the different amounts of suffixes. Its not that corpus-corporis, but portui but cornu, portibus but artubus, ae/i/u/s/ all being different suffixes for one case. Arabic/Sanskrit/Korean case suffixes tend to remain constant except for some sound changes here and there and Arabic has broken plurals (but plenty of other areas in its grammar that make it very regular compared to Russian/Ancient Greek types).



But you said yourself that it's irregularity--not complex morphology--that you're using as your basis for determining that IE languages are uniquely complex. It's silly to compare "portus" (4th declension masculine) to "cornu" (4th declension neuter), because they belong to different inflectional categories. Within those categories, the endings are perfectly predictable and consistent. Having multiple morphological categories is then hardly unique to IE languages. From what little I know of Arabic, I can point out the Sun-Moon letter distinction: someone unfamiliar with the distinction might see the consonant assimilation as irregular, but it makes perfect sense to those familiar with it.

On that subject, my primary point here is that you are selecting multiple non-IE languages to compare to a single IE language. If I take Arabic adjectives and compare them to Latin ones, I suppose I could make Latin seem strange, irregular, and complex. However, if I were to take the non-predictable Arabic plurals and compare them with the completely predictable Latin ones, I would create the opposite appearance. To make a true comparison, multiple IE languages need to be compared against multiple non-IE languages in their entirety.


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## Ben Jamin

Gavril said:


> Maybe they are all different words; I don't see anything untenable about that possibility.
> 
> In any case, my point (from message #89) was that I don't see why Slavic aspectual pairs (_dajati/dati, ustavljati/ustaviti_, etc.) cannot be called "inflectional" simply because they involve a change in the verb's meaning. A bigger problem for calling them inflectional is that this change of meaning is not uniform from verb to verb.


Just in your example the lexical meaning of the words don't change. The change in aspect in these words is, by the way, not changed by adding a prefix, but by changing the suffix. This is the only part of the body of verbs where you can track any morphological regularity, and where both morphological and lexical approach can be used, while the morphological approach used on prefixed vs non prefixed verbs leads to something like Ptolomeian orbital epicycles.


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## Ben Jamin

Angelo di fuoco said:


> It's not only not uniform from verb to verb, it's also that a verb often - mostly- has several prefixes (with different meanings) and suffixes (lesser number). That's why lexical approach is better than purely morphological.


An example from Polish:
konać: archaic _to end/finish_, modern _to be dying, to be in agony_, imperfective
perfective forms:
*wy*konać: _to perform_
*prze*konać: _to convince smb_
*do*konać: _to achieve_
*s*konac: _to die_


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## Nino83

Johnnyjohn said:


> An adjective ending in -er could be 1st or 3rd



Yes, it's true, but If I'm not wrong the adjectives ending in "-er, -is, -e" of the 3rd declension are...13, plus September, October, November, December (which in Latin are adjectives)



Johnnyjohn said:


> Comparative irregularities are more than that of English, and comparative irregularities are absent completely in most other language families, its not universal.



Are you speaking about "_bonus, malus, parvus, magnus, multus_" and  "_dīves, iuvenis, senex_", i.e 8 adjectives? English has 5 irregular adjectives, "_good, bad, little, much, far_" (and "_old/elder_").   



Johnnyjohn said:


> Perfect stems are unpredictable, there are tendencies, but the perfect stem is formed multiple ways



English has about 300 strong verbs while Italian has only 150 irregular verbs, most of all in _passato remoto_. The difference is that _passato remoto_ is little used in Italian (and is almost archaic in spoken French) while in English simple past is, probably, the second tense in importance (after simple present).


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## Gavril

Johnnyjohn said:


> I have explained it before, sound change is only a fraction of why IE languages are exceptionally irregular. If there are multiple unpredictable ways to form a different case or tenses, not one way to form a tense that gets obscured by sound change, they were all separate formations.



I'm not sure what part of my post you're responding to, but fusionality is not only the coalescence of morphemes due to sound change (if that's what you are saying). The basic definition of fusionality is the combination (“fusing”) of more than one grammatical function in a single morpheme.

For example, the Latin suffix -(_i_)_bus _can be seen as a fusional suffix because it indicates plurality, dative case and ablative case, even though it did not arise through coalescence of the plural/ablative/dative suffixes (unless the final-_s_ of -_ibus_ was originally a plural suffix).

Incidentally,it seems likely that contrasts in Latin such as -_ibus_ vs. -_is_ (ablative/dative plurals for different noun classes) *are* motivated at least partly by sound change: if -_is_ were used as the abl./dat. plural of the 3rd declension, there would be a risk of confusion with genitive singular -_is_ (from earlier *-_es_). To give another example, if the suffix -_es_ was used as the nominative plural of the 1st and 2nd declensions, the vowel of this suffix would probably have coalesced with the stem vowels -a- and -o-, creating a risk of confusion with accusative plural -_os _and -_as_ (from earlier *-_ons_/*-_ans_).


I realize that sound change does not account for all of these developments – e.g. we still need factors such as the generalization of pronoun endings to noun stems in order to explain the initial step toward irregularity. But I would be very surprised if generalizations of this kind, and consequent “reshuffling” of affixes, had never occurred in a non-IE language.



> Controlled classes refers to the fact languages in the rest of the world may have an irregular or complicated area but said area is made of only a limited amount of stems such as navajo with only 550 underived verb/adjectives.



550 seems like a respectable enough number. English probably has more unique word-stems than that (since we do not have as many modifying affixes at our disposal), but the available set of stems is not necessarily much more “open” than that of Navajo, if we consider the number of words that most English speakers use in day-to-day communication.



> Learning Arabic, Korean, Georgian, or Navajo involves learning complicated systems and applying them with easier sides of the languages, like climbing a hill to reach the summit. Learning Russian or Ancient Greek can be liked to climbing a hill only to find there is another hill one after the other with further walls of stone along the ways followed by another hill.



If we grant that e.g. Arabic is more complex but less irregular than Russian, I don't understand why it would be harder to learn a system with some complexity and irregularity than a system with less irregularity but much greater complexity.

Also, it is debatable whether fluency in a language requires the systematic study of that language's grammar to begin with. Have you read (or conducted) any studies on the average length of time it takes for English speakers to master Arabic versus the length of time it takes them to master Russian?


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## berndf

Gavril said:


> 550 seems like a respectable enough number. English probably has more unique word-stems than that (since we do not have as many modifying affixes at our disposal), but the available set of stems is not necessarily much more “open” than that of Navajo, if we consider the number of words that most English speakers use in day-to-day communication.


That is actually the same order of magnitude as in Proto-Germanic. The estimate of Proto-Germanic strong verbs is about 800. All weak verbs can be understood an "derived".


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## Johnnyjohn

Nino83 said:


> Yes, it's true, but If I'm not wrong the adjectives ending in "-er, -is, -e" of the 3rd declension are...13, plus September, October, November, December (which in Latin are adjectives)
> Are you speaking about "_bonus, malus, parvus, magnus, multus_" and  "_dīves, iuvenis, senex_", i.e 8 adjectives? English has 5 irregular adjectives, "_good, bad, little, much, far_" (and "_old/elder_").
> English has about 300 strong verbs while Italian has only 150 irregular verbs, most of all in _passato remoto_. The difference is that _passato remoto_ is little used in Italian (and is almost archaic in spoken French) while in English simple past is, probably, the second tense in importance (after simple present).



-Its still more than the majority of languages in the rest of the world. There are far more exceptions too even if predictable.
-English has 150 irregular verbs of which 50% are strong verbs, not 300.



Gavril said:


> I'm not sure what part of my post you're responding to, but fusionality is not only the coalescence of morphemes due to sound change (if that's what you are saying). The basic definition of fusionality is the combination (“fusing”) of more than one grammatical function in a single morpheme.
> 
> For example, the Latin suffix -(_i_)_bus _can be seen as a fusional suffix because it indicates plurality, dative case and ablative case, even though it did not arise through coalescence of the plural/ablative/dative suffixes (unless the final-_s_ of -_ibus_ was originally a plural suffix).
> Incidentally,it seems likely that contrasts in Latin such as -_ibus_ vs. -_is_ (ablative/dative plurals for different noun classes) *are* motivated at least partly by sound change: if -_is_ were used as the abl./dat. plural of the 3rd declension, there would be a risk of confusion with genitive singular -_is_ (from earlier *-_es_). To give another example, if the suffix -_es_ was used as the nominative plural of the 1st and 2nd declensions, the vowel of this suffix would probably have coalesced with the stem vowels -a- and -o-, creating a risk of confusion with accusative plural -_os _and -_as_ (from earlier *-_ons_/*-_ans_).
> I realize that sound change does not account for all of these developments – e.g. we still need factors such as the generalization of pronoun endings to noun stems in order to explain the initial step toward irregularity. But I would be very surprised if generalizations of this kind, and consequent “reshuffling” of affixes, had never occurred in a non-IE language.
> 
> -*I understand some parts of the 5 declensions have purposes but some such as genitive don't have much explanation other than mixing. There are other of identical form where context is just used.*
> 
> 550 seems like a respectable enough number. English probably has more unique word-stems than that (since we do not have as many modifying affixes at our disposal), but the available set of stems is not necessarily much more “open” than that of Navajo, if we consider the number of words that most English speakers use in day-to-day communication.
> 
> *-They include adjectives, add adjectives to the count for English.*
> 
> If we grant that e.g. Arabic is more complex but less irregular than Russian, I don't understand why it would be harder to learn a system with some complexity and irregularity than a system with less irregularity but much greater complexity.
> Also, it is debatable whether fluency in a language requires the systematic study of that language's grammar to begin with. Have you read (or conducted) any studies on the average length of time it takes for English speakers to master Arabic versus the length of time it takes them to master Russian?
> 
> *-Irregularity means one must learn more unique forms. A language with 100 irregular verbs requires more drills than one with 5 predictable declension, 5 distinctions for all verbs vs 100 distinctions of unique words. Complexity can be learned and known as one knows how to ride a bike or do a math exam, irregularity is like a history exam where pure memorization is all that matters. One learns hundreds of trivial facts for one, the other a few dozen formulas that are always regular.*





HerrK said:


> But you said yourself that it's irregularity--not complex morphology--that you're using as your basis for determining that IE languages are uniquely complex. It's silly to compare "portus" (4th declension masculine) to "cornu" (4th declension neuter), because they belong to different inflectional categories. Within those categories, the endings are perfectly predictable and consistent. Having multiple morphological categories is then hardly unique to IE languages. From what little I know of Arabic, I can point out the Sun-Moon letter distinction: someone unfamiliar with the distinction might see the consonant assimilation as irregular, but it makes perfect sense to those familiar with it.
> *
> -But why is Cornu not the same as portus? It doesn't disambiguate anything. It was due to suffix exchange, while they may be predictable in this case, it is redundant. Multiple morphological distributions don't occur the same way, they are found in fewer areas.*
> 
> On that subject, my primary point here is that you are selecting multiple non-IE languages to compare to a single IE language. If I take Arabic adjectives and compare them to Latin ones, I suppose I could make Latin seem strange, irregular, and complex. However, if I were to take the non-predictable Arabic plurals and compare them with the completely predictable Latin ones, I would create the opposite appearance. To make a true comparison, multiple IE languages need to be compared against multiple non-IE languages in their entirety.
> 
> *-I've made big comparisons before, I could compare Navajo and Russian, and Latin and Arabic fully, I'll type something up right now.*



Languages tend in my opinion to not be as distributed in difficulty the same way as conservative IE. 
My metaphor is this: imagine an RPG where one can spread lets say 12 points (maybe korean?) over 4 stats, one may concentrate some points in one area or the other but it all adds up to 12. But there are those with 24 points (like Russian), and while others may have 9 in one stat (Georgian verbs), they would only have 1 in the other three (Georgian is genderless with fixed stress and one plural suffix). 
One may have 4 in one area (Latin plurals) compared to 7 in another (Arabic plurals) but the other points average out higher (Latin has more "points" when added up). I have only found levels above 14-ish in IE, the exception are the NE Caucasian languages but only in the pronouns/nouns, which would be 9 if including the 4 genders but the others aspects average up to 9 as usual for 18 total points. This is my opinion, you can disagree, its alright, this is not a theory, just my hypothesis on difficulty ranking. 

Maybe I described it wrongly, but why do all you think IE languages look so unique to me? If I am incorrect, where would I get this misconception from? I just notice a combination of irregularity and complexity that sticks out, I can't find it elsewhere in the world, other languages don't look or feel as difficult as them when I study their grammars (except for NE caucasian nouns and the Estonian adjective inflection from IE). I cannot find a single language that gives me the same impression as Russian for example. On the other extreme end we can find languages that are extremely straightforward like Turkic, Austronesian, and Inuit languages with low complexity, and then we find languages in east Asia where the grammar is so bare one wonders how they could not have innovated during their entire history at least some complexity, their existence puzzles me too.


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## Gavril

Johnnyjohn said:


> -I understand some parts of the 5 declensions have purposes but some such as genitive don't have much explanation other than mixing.


What specifically do you mean by the genitive? The different genitive suffixes of each class (-i vs. -is, -rum vs. -um) could have been motivated in the same way as the dative/ablative plurals (-is vs. -bus) -- i.e., by stem-suffix coalescences and a resulting desire/need for disambiguation.



> There are other of identical form where context is just used.



True, but that doesn't mean that avoidance of ambiguity is not a (potential) mechanism for the creation or re-shuffling of suffixes. Sometimes disambiguation does not happen (or doesn't catch on) because the relevant distinction comes up less frequently.



> -Irregularity means one must learn more unique forms. A language with 100 irregular verbs requires more drills than one with 5 predictable declension, 5 distinctions for all verbs vs 100 distinctions of unique words. Complexity can be learned and known as one knows how to ride a bike or do a math exam, irregularity is like a history exam where pure memorization is all that matters.



If we are talking about inflectional paradigms, more complexity means more data points to learn (i.e. memorize).

I'm pretty sure that most IE languages do not have 100 irregular paradigms, i.e. 100 irregular paradigms that cannot be collapsed into a much smaller number of patterns. Even a language like Ancient Greek probably does not have that many, unless all principal parts of a verb are seen as being inflectionally related to each other, rather than derivationally or lexically. At least some of the principal parts in Greek (such as the perfect) raise similar questions to the ones pertaining to Slavic aspectual pairs.


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## berndf

Johnnyjohn said:


> -But why is Cornu not the same as portus? It doesn't disambiguate anything. It was due to suffix exchange, while they may be predictable in this case, it is redundant. Multiple morphological distributions don't occur the same way, they are found in fewer areas.


If two declensions are sufficient in Latin to generate the complete declension set of a noun than it has the same level of irregularity than Arabic where you also need two.


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## fdb

berndf said:


> If two declensions are sufficient in Latin to generate the complete declension set of a noun



If .......


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## Gavril

I suspect that *cornu *vs *portui *is an example of how the inflectional tables in a grammar book don't necessarily reflect the actual behavior/knowledge of a language's speakers. 

In other words, maybe the variants _portu_ (contracted) and _cornui_ (uncontracted) both occurred in the corpus of spoken and written Latin (just as the plural forms _portibus_ and _portubus_ are both attested), but the variants _portui_ and _cornu_ happened to be dominant in the samples that were used (by grammarians) as the basis for the "correct" dative singular forms of these words.

Also, phrases like "to the horn" (_cornu_) and "to the knee" (_genu_) are probably not heard very often to begin with, so the first compilers of Latin grammar guides may not have had much to work with when they were trying to codify the dative singular form of neuter _u_-stems.


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## Johnnyjohn

Gavril said:


> I suspect that *cornu *vs *portui *is an example of how the inflectional tables in a grammar book don't necessarily reflect the actual behavior/knowledge of a language's speakers.
> 
> In other words, maybe the variants _portu_ (contracted) and _cornui_ (uncontracted) both occurred in the corpus of spoken and written Latin (just as the plural forms _portibus_ and _portubus_ are both attested), but the variants _portui_ and _cornu_ happened to be dominant in the samples that were used (by grammarians) as the basis for the "correct" dative singular forms of these words.
> 
> Also, phrases like "to the horn" (_cornu_) and "to the knee" (_genu_) are probably not heard very often to begin with, so the first compilers of Latin grammar guides may not have had much to work with when they were trying to codify the dative singular form of neuter _u_-stems.



I have considered that written latin is not how they actually spoke, similar with Ancient Greek, maybe the spoken language was more straightforward the way Swiss German has simpler morphology than High German. But modern language like Russian/Lithuanian and sort are the way they are, we can see it for ourselves. We could argue the extreme difficulty of IE languages compared to the rest of the world is due to prescriptivism but I cannot believe it.



berndf said:


> If two declensions are sufficient in Latin to generate the complete declension set of a noun than it has the same level of irregularity than Arabic where you also need two.



You have to look elsewhere to see why I may see Latin as more overwhelming than Arabic, adverbs are easier in Arabic, derivation is extremely transparent, pronouns are more regular, agreement is consistent (why do 1st and 2nd person pronoun genitives in Latin agree but not the 3rd?) and the regular verbs of all modes other than the first are all predictable, and all regular verbs have pretty much the same suffixes, and one less gender. I posted a metaphor on "rpg points" a few posts up which explains how things seem more overwhelming in Latin to me, and the IE family in general (except for NE caucasian nouns) compared to other families.


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## Gavril

Johnnyjohn said:


> I have considered that written latin is not how they actually spoke, similar with Ancient Greek, maybe the spoken language was more straightforward the way Swiss German has simpler morphology than High German. But modern language like Russian/Lithuanian and sort are the way they are, we can see it for ourselves. We could argue the extreme difficulty of IE languages compared to the rest of the world is due to prescriptivism but I cannot believe it.



Spoken languages are not immune to the effects of prescriptivism: my English would probably be different (perhaps more regular in some ways) if I had not been taught to follow certain standards growing up. Regardless, even though prescriptivism may not explain IE irregularity as a whole, it seems like a plausible enough explanation (pending further evidence) of small differences like _cornu_/_portui_.

By the way, I saw the update you made to your last post and wrote a response:



> Maybe I described it wrongly, but why do all you think IE languages look so unique to me?



IE languages look unique to me too in some ways, but I do not have much perspective (I've only studied a few non-IE languages in any depth, and I've only achieved any real proficiency in one of them).

It's possible that the IE languages look unique to both of us because the standard grammatical descriptions of non-IE languages have all been "filtered" through the framework of IE to some degree: the study of older IE languages played an important role in developing the standard categories grammarians use today. This doesn't mean that grammar books of non-IE languages cannot be reliable guides for communicating in these languages; it just means that they do not necessarily tell the whole story.


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## Giorgio Spizzi

Hullo.

Just for the record, L. Lepschy and G. Lepschy's _The Italian Language Today_ (Huchinson & Co., 1977) lists approximately 220 _irregular_ and _defective_ verbs. 

GS


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## Nino83

And more sites (this, for example) say that in Modern English there are 370 irregular verbs (not 150).


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## Johnnyjohn

Nino83 said:


> And more sites (this, for example) say that in Modern English there are 370 irregular verbs (not 150).



Many of those are prefixed words.



Gavril said:


> Spoken languages are not immune to the effects of prescriptivism: my English would probably be different (perhaps more regular in some ways) if I had not been taught to follow certain standards growing up. Regardless, even though prescriptivism may not explain IE irregularity as a whole, it seems like a plausible enough explanation (pending further evidence) of small differences like _cornu_/_portui_.



Possibly explains why it takes longer than usual for things to regularize too. I know of a Russian speaker who mentioned they learn a "correct" version in school. 
The question is if this type of prescriptivism is unique to European culture, other kinds actually simplify or at least regularize the grammar (Sanskrit irregularities and redundancies were removed, not preserved deliberately when standardized),and Navajo also doesn't feel as prescribed, it has irregularities but things that would seem sloppy to us are part of the language such as the strong simplicity of the nouns. Is IE prescriptivism and languages who use IE style prescriptivism in their classrooms unique?

I mean it annoys me when I hear someone say "My language is so complex I have trouble learning it and must still learn to this day!" which makes absolutely no sense unless prescriptivism.

Edit: I think I can put my finger further on IE (and NE caucasian nouns), the thing is that there tends to always be some incomplete process going on, so many non-productive forms, adjectives that take 2 or 3 genders in Ancient Greek for example, its not by sound as in Latin, two rhyming adjectives could have completely gender agreement. Some sort of piling upon piling of techniques or very slow gradual simplification (often going back to what caused the irregularity, aspect pairs in Russian according to the inflectional view yet the language still has unpredictable infinitive and participle stems, but verb class 1 is the most productive so the irregularity will go sometime soon), not so stable.


----------



## mexerica feliz

Giorgio Spizzi said:


> Hullo.
> 
> Just for the record, L. Lepschy and G. Lepschy's _The Italian Language Today_ (Huchinson & Co., 1977) lists approximately 220 _irregular_ and _defective_ verbs.
> 
> GS



According to Spanish Verb Institute's ''Statistics of Spanish verbs'':

Out of 95,284 verbs only 49,171 are regular (predictable from the infinitive form in all tenses),
this is just 51% in percentage.                 

http://www.verbolog.com/arbol.htm

Spanish verbs are difficult even for us, speakers of Portuguese, because in Portuguese there are not many irregular verbs (percent-wise).
So, unless we've been studying it for a long time, we're likely to ''regularize'' Spanish verbal forms, in a Portuguese-like fashion
saying things like ''_ te defendo porque dependo de ti '' _ instead of _''te defiendo porque dependo de ti_.''


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## mexerica feliz

Nino83 said:


> Yes, it's true, but If I'm not wrong the adjectives ending in "-er, -is, -e" of the 3rd declension are...13, plus September, October, November, December (which in Latin are adjectives)
> 
> 
> 
> Are you speaking about "_bonus, malus, parvus, magnus, multus_" and  "_dīves, iuvenis, senex_", i.e 8 adjectives? English has 5 irregular adjectives, "_good, bad, little, much, far_" (and "_old/elder_").
> 
> 
> 
> English has about 300 strong verbs while Italian has only 150 irregular verbs, most of all in _passato remoto_. The difference is that _passato remoto_ is little used in Italian (and is almost archaic in spoken French) while in English simple past is, probably, the second tense in importance (after simple present).



Italian is similar to Spanish, in many verbs labeled as ''regular'', foreign learner cannot guess the present form from the infinitive,
but this is not aknowledged in L1 grammars of Italian:

for example the present form of *véndere *is  *(io) vèndo*, a completely different vowel is used,
(unlike in *prèndere *which is regular:* (io) prèndo*).

the present form of 
*giocare *is (io) _*giòco*_,  but of
*toccare *is (io) _*tócco*_,

completely unpredictable from the infinitive (since you don't know when the vowel is going to be open or close),
that means many Italian verbs are morphophonologically irregular (if regularity is defined as ''predictability from the infinitive form'').


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## Angelo di fuoco

mexerica feliz said:


> According to Spanish Verb Institute's ''Statistics of Spanish verbs'':
> 
> Out of 95,284 verbs only 49,171 are regular (predictable from the infinitive form in all tenses),
> this is just 51% in percentage.
> 
> http://www.verbolog.com/arbol.htm
> 
> Spanish verbs are difficult even for us, speakers of Portuguese, because in Portuguese there are not many irregular verbs (percent-wise).
> So, unless we've been studying it for a long time, we're likely to ''regularize'' Spanish verbal forms, in a Portuguese-like fashion
> saying things like ''_ te defendo porque dependo de ti '' _ instead of _''te defiendo porque dependo de ti_.''



If you think that there are few irregular verbs in Portuguese, that is simply not true. You just are accustomed to them. Portuguese, like Italian, does not always indicate the quality (openness or closeness) of a vowel, although more often than Italian. Portuguese has no diphthongs like e-ie or o-ue, but it has close or open e, e-i and e-ei, i-ei, o-u (not for all persons) and other modifications. In some cases the phonological difference between two words is the openness or closeness of the stressed vowel, like in almóço and almôço (and don't ask me which is which).


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## Nino83

mexerica feliz said:


> Italian is similar to Spanish, in many verbs labeled as ''regular'', foreign learner cannot guess the present form from the infinitive,
> but this is not aknowledged in L1 grammars of Italian:
> 
> for example the present form of *véndere *is  *(io) vèndo*, a completely different vowel is used,
> (unlike in *prèndere *which is regular:* (io) prèndo*).



As you probably know, in Italian the difference between "é" and "è", "o" and "ò" is not distinctive. 
In writing there's no difference while in speech every regional accent have different distribution between mid-open and mid-closed vowels and it is not important at all (there are very very few minimal pairs), this is why it's not written. 

Read here about this irrelevant distinction. 

I always suggest to those people who want to learn Italian that they study double consonants, which is the most important thing, due to the fact that there are, really, a lot of minimal pairs and that they leave aside the opposition between mid-open and mid-closed vowels (which is, really, useless). 

So, these verb forms are regular.


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## mexerica feliz

Nino83 said:


> As you probably know, in Italian the difference between "é" and "è", "o" and "ò" is not distinctive.



It is in standard Italian.
In Angolan and Moçambican Portuguese open and close e and o's are many times merged, but no one in the world would consider them an example of STANDARD Portuguese.

In this thread, people are comparing standard variants of languages, and not dialects or idiolects.
If you want to change the 7 vowel system of standard Italian, write to Accademia della Crusca,

_Passar bem.

_


> So, these verb forms are regular.


They're not morphophonetically regular in standard Italian.


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## Nino83

mexerica feliz said:


> It is in standard Italian.
> In this thread, people are comparing standard variants of languages, and not dialects or idiolects.
> If you want to change the 7 vowel system of standard Italian, write to Accademia della Crusca



Devoto Oli and Treccani weren't (clearly) speaking about _dialects_ or _idiolects_, and they didn't say that the Italian vocalic system has 5 vowels. They say something different, i.e that this distinction is irrelevant. 
Standard Italian pronunciation is spoken by actors and some journalist, which is less than 1% of the total (also within Tuscany there are some variatons in the distribution of these vowels).


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## mexerica feliz

From my experience, most Italians from Central Italy (Tuscany, Lazio with Rome, Marche, Umbria) have a robust 7 vowel system, as indicated in dictionaries
(as you know, modern dictionaries like De Mauro and Oxford/Paravia include all varieties of central italian vocalism: lèttera/léttera, pòsto/pósto, cèntro/céntro,
 in only a handful of words vowels vary in central Italian). Northern Italian singers (like Paola e Chiara or Laura Pausini or Nek) really try to respect this vocalism
in singing since it sounds nicer. So, it's not true that the difference has died out outside of Florence.
It would be better to say it was always marginal in areas of Galloromanic and South Italic languages and people there never cared to master the phonology
of standard Italian (unless they were newscasters, actors or singers).

There must be a reason Perugia is highly regarded as the place to learn Italian,
and not Milan, Turin or Naples.  Monica Bellucci has a perfect standard accent, and in an interview she said she had never taken enunciation classes. 
Many people from Central Italy speak perfect standard Italian, just like many people from Oxfordshire speak standard British English. 

It's always funny to see Italians saying things against the standard Italian accent while at the same time being crazy about acquiring RP. 
More Italians speak with standard Italian accent (as indicated in dictionaries) than there are Englishmen using RP.


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## Nino83

This should be part of another thread (I think). 



mexerica feliz said:


> From my experience, most Italians from Central Italy (Tuscany, Lazio with Rome, Marche, Umbria) have a robust 7 vowel system, as indicated in dictionaries



Yes. Northern Italians have 7 vowels but the opposition is between closed and open syllables. 
So, in Northern Italy (Emilia Romagna, and Laura Pausini, included) they say "vèndere" (and not "véndere"). 



mexerica feliz said:


> (as you know, modern dictionaries like De Mauro and Oxford/Paravia include all varieties of central italian vocalism: lèttera/léttera, pòsto/pósto, cèntro/céntro,
> in only a handful of words vowels vary in central Italian). Northern Italian singers (like Paola e Chiara or Laura Pausini or Nek) really try to respect this vocalism
> in singing since it sounds nicer. So, it's not true that the difference has died out outside of Florence.



One thing is singing in a cd, another thing is speaking. In this video Laura Pausini starts with a "tutto b*é*ne" (and it's normal, she's Emilian). The journalist didn't correct her (because it's irrelevant). 



mexerica feliz said:


> It would be better to say it was always *marginal* in areas of Galloromanic and South Italic languages and people there never cared to master the phonology of standard Italian (unless they were newscasters, actors or singers).



As you can read in that article (of Treccani) also in Rome there is a different distribution (and it's easy to say if an anchor is from Rome). 

Anyway, nobody in Italy would say that "vendere" is an irregular verb.


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## mexerica feliz

Nino83 said:


> Anyway, nobody in Italy would say that "vendere" is an irregular verb.



I guess nobody in Italy would say ''says'' is an irregular form either.
If a form has irregular/unexpected pronunciation, it is an irregular form in my book (although it may not be a strong verb).



> Anyway, nobody in Italy would say that "vendere" is an irregular verb.


Just like most Spaniards wouldn't say _defender _is an irregular verb, even though it builds the present tense with _defiendo_.

General linguists would say
véndere: vèndo in standard Italian and
defender: defiendo in Spanish
are morphophonetically irregular verbs, even though they're not _strong verbs_ morphologically.


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## Nino83

mexerica feliz said:


> If a form has irregular/unexpected pronunciation, it is an irregular form in my book (although it may not be a strong verb).



Yes, only if the expected pronunciation would be considered wrong (this is not the case in Italian, unless you're an actor during a shot, in that case Italian language will have a lot of "irregular" verbs, but when the actor comes home, Italian will be very regular).


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## Hulalessar

mexerica feliz said:


> According to Spanish Verb Institute's ''Statistics of Spanish verbs'':
> 
> Out of 95,284 verbs only 49,171 are regular (predictable from the infinitive form in all tenses),
> this is just 51% in percentage.



Unfortunately the webpage given is not available to see what they mean by regular. Assuming they mean that only 51% of verbs follow _exactly _the forms of _hablar_, _beber _or _vivir_, the statistic does not tell the whole story. The 49% will include radical changing verbs, verbs that are only irregular in that changes have to be made to comply with the rules of Spanish orthography, and verbs such as _parecer _which only have a minor irregularity and of which there are quite a few. However, if it is only verbs following _hablar_, _beber _or _vivir _that you label as regular that is no more than a choice; whilst there has to be a limit as to how far you go otherwise you will not end up with any irregular verbs at all, there is a case for extending the "regular" categories to include radical changing verbs, orthographically changing verbs and verbs like _parecer_. Indeed, if Spanish orthography were revised so that there was a one to one correspondence between phonemes and graphemes some verbs would become regular overnight.

In fact, notions of regularity are best approached in two distinct ways. The first is didactic. It is convenient and indeed desirable to introduce pupils to paradigms that a large number of verbs follow and to point out the exceptions. The second is descriptive. There, for example, you can point out that from a historic point of view what looks irregular is in fact perfectly regular if sound changes have taken place.

When it comes to complexity, any amount of irregularity introduces unpredictability, at least until you know all the irregularities. However many the irregularities the overall complexity is the same because when faced with a word you do not know how it is going to behave.

When it comes to something like the plural of Arabic nouns it is pretty pointless talking about unpredictability or irregularity. The best approach is simply to say that you have to learn singular and plural separately for each noun. Whilst that adds to what needs to be learned, it is no more a complication than having to remember the gender of a noun.

What can be said about Arabic nouns can be said about Latin third conjugation verbs - you simply learn the four principal parts. You may not be able to predict what the principle parts are, but that does not make third conjugation verbs irregular. There are only ten truly irregular verbs in Latin.


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## Johnnyjohn

Hulalessar said:


> What can be said about Arabic nouns can be said about Latin third conjugation verbs - you simply learn the four principal parts. You may not be able to predict what the principle parts are, but that does not make third conjugation verbs irregular. There are only ten truly irregular verbs in Latin.



This kind of quality finds itself in a far more controlled fashion outside of IE grammar or NE caucasian nouns. Having gender, plurals, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs altogether irregular in having to memorize every new word is not a universal.


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## Angelo di fuoco

You have to memorise every new word in some way or another, even in your native language. However, learning a language is not limited to learning by heart morphological particles compressed into a few tables. Am I right to suppose that your studying so many different languages is mostly limited to reading books _about_ the languages with little practice, especially the oral part?
Language is about communication, which means producing meaningful texts, and that's a thing you seem to forget. Intuition and the ability to produce sense is just as important.

You could turn your statement upside down: "not having... is not a universal" would still be true. That's why we have about 7000 human languages on this planet.

I mean, just stop complaining and making lists of the kind like "this kind of language is better because its morphology is easier to memorise for me, a native speaker of English". It's not only annoying. After a while it becomes boring.

Sorry for the emotional outburst.


----------



## Johnnyjohn

Angelo di fuoco said:


> You have to memorise every new word in some way or another, even in your native language. However, learning a language is not limited to learning by heart morphological particles compressed into a few tables. Am I right to suppose that your studying so many different languages is mostly limited to reading books _about_ the languages with little practice, especially the oral part?
> Language is about communication, which means producing meaningful texts, and that's a thing you seem to forget. Intuition and the ability to produce sense is just as important.


-To communicate one needs to know how to modify words in a sentence, it is a matter of memorization, having to know 10 words for each word requires more storage in the brain.


Angelo di fuoco said:


> You could turn your statement upside down: "not having... is not a universal" would still be true. That's why we have about 7000 human languages on this planet.


-I am dealing with tendencies based on families. If all language families except language family 98# lack quality A, 98# would not be just different from 97#, it would be different from #>98>#. Many features can be shared, why does Navajo have a continuous like English? Are they related?
But if Navajo inflected adverbs for case, gender, number, tense, referentiality, mood, aspect, and politeness in completely unpredictable ways by suffixing a unique random extension for every single form that can never be predicted, It would be fair to point out the difference since there is no recorded language that does all of that.


Angelo di fuoco said:


> I mean, just stop complaining and making lists of the kind like "this kind of language is better because its morphology is easier to memorize for me, a native speaker of English". It's not only annoying. After a while it becomes boring.


-Its not necessarily good or bad, I am putting forth a point that IE and NE caucasian nouns are unique and the comparisons don't lie, maybe the data is incorrect, maybe grammar books on Russian are just pulling my leg.



Angelo di fuoco said:


> Sorry for the emotional outburst.


-I gotta calm myself too, considering all the offensive comments my native languages gets all the time, while I gave my criticisms concerning some of the relatives of yours, none approached anything of the same level offensive we get really.


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## berndf

Johnnyjohn said:


> -To communicate one needs to know how to modify words in a sentence, it is a matter of memorization, having to know 10 words for each word requires more storage in the brain.


This is not the case in any of the languages we have discussed. Some languages might have greater or smaller number of irregularities. But the overwhelming number of word forms are still easily predictable.

I agree with you that some IE languages possess a unusually complex morphological system. What I feel strange is you tendency in this discussion to identify complexity of morphology with complexity of a language. Morphology represents but a tiny part of the overall complexities of a language and a language that is complex in one aspect isn't necessarily complex in another as aspect.


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## Angelo di fuoco

Johnnyjohn said:


> -To communicate one needs to know how to modify words in a sentence, it is a matter of memorization, having to know 10 words for each word requires more storage in the brain.



I don't know why you insist on the 10 words for each word. A couple of different endings don't make a word a different word. Given that we use only a tiny part of our brain's capacities, I don't see any problems with that. Or do you think that memorising the heavily used auxiliary verbs and tenses is that much easier, especially when you need not one, but two, three or four components for a verbal form?



Johnnyjohn said:


> -I am dealing with tendencies based on families. If all language families except language family 98# lack quality A, 98# would not be just different from 97#, it would be different from #>98>#. Many features can be shared, why does Navajo have a continuous like English? Are they related?



No idea. I haven't studied Navajo. Why don't many other languages have that?



Johnnyjohn said:


> But if Navajo inflected adverbs for case, gender, number, tense, referentiality, mood, aspect, and politeness in completely unpredictable ways by suffixing a unique random extension for every single form that can never be predicted, It would be fair to point out the difference since there is no recorded language that does all of that.



Study Basque, study Tagalog, study Japanese thoroughly.
As to "completely unpredictable" and "random", you are, as always, grossly exaggerating.



Johnnyjohn said:


> -Its not necessarily good or bad, I am putting forth a point that IE and NE caucasian nouns are unique and the comparisons don't lie, maybe the data is incorrect, maybe grammar books on Russian are just pulling my leg.



Or they just aren't any good. Maybe they failed to explain that the difference between imperfective and perfective verbs in Slavic languages isn't only grammatical, but also semantical.



Johnnyjohn said:


> -I gotta calm myself too, considering all the offensive comments my native languages gets all the time, while I gave my criticisms concerning some of the relatives of yours, none approached anything of the same level offensive we get really.



Not in this thread and not in the one where you started lamenting. I didn't see English receive any sort of criticism that you speak of.
Anyways, the relative morphological simplicity of English is seen by many as an asset and one of the keys to the international success of your language.
For my part, I had to go through great pains to explain the phonology of my language to some singers (native speakers of Germanic languages) and to achieve a more or less decent pronunciation.


----------



## Cenzontle

For those interested in the cyclic nature of "simplification" and "complexification" of grammar as a language changes over the centuries, 
I recommend a book by Guy Deutscher, _The Unfolding of Language_ (Henry Holt, 2005), especially chapter 5, "The Forces of Creation" (144-170), which you can see online here.


----------



## Johnnyjohn

Cenzontle said:


> For those interested in the cyclic nature of "simplification" and "complexification" of grammar as a language changes over the centuries,
> I recommend a book by Guy Deutscher, _The Unfolding of Language_ (Henry Holt, 2005), especially chapter 5, "The Forces of Creation" (144-170), which you can see online here.



It didn't occur just this way in Indo European verbs/adjectives or NE caucasian nouns, its not sound change that makes them so irregular. Even some different declension endings are not fused forms. Some irregular plurals in Russian are like Brat-bratja, -ja was a collectivizing suffix that was made the plural marker for this and a few other words, it is not fusion. There were three basic ways to form the aorist in PIE, it was not sound change but unpredictable extension or mixing of suffixes to create new declensions.



Angelo di fuoco said:


> I didn't see English receive any sort of criticism that you speak of.
> Anyways, the relative morphological simplicity of English is seen by many as an asset and one of the keys to the international success of your language.
> For my part, I had to go through great pains to explain the phonology of my language to some singers (native speakers of Germanic languages) and to achieve a more or less decent pronunciation.



Morphological simplicity? There is nothing quite like when some European language native says "English is so primitive and the dumbest language, but don't feel offended, your language is the most spoken one due to its poorness, be happy its the world language!" not that you said that but those who see the lack of* irregular* *morphology* in English as exceptional has never stepped foot outside of Europe and seen how things are in other language families. English is not morphologically simple in the long run, it would not be seen the way it is now if all of its relatives and a couple exceptions in the Caucas just disappeared and never left a trace. It wouldn't affect me much.


----------



## Nino83

Johnnyjohn said:


> There is nothing quite like when some European language native says "English is so primitive and the dumbest language, but don't feel offended, your language is the most spoken one due to its poorness, be happy its the world language!"



I still don't understand why you're comparing Modern English with Classical Latin, instead of Modern English with Romance languages (which are very regular, i.e f. s. "a" -->   f. pl. "e"/"as", m. s. "o" --> m. pl. "i"/"os", third declension s. "e"/"consonant" --> pl. "i"/"es", the first in Italian, the second in Spanish and Portuguese). 
Old English has nouns like "engel/englas", "dæg/dagas", "fōt/fēt", "hnutu/nhyte", "mann/menn", "frēond/frīend", "lamb/lambru" and so on.  

Classical Latin has a more complex morphology (than Modern English) just because it has a case system but it doesn't have more "regular irregularities" than Old English. 
Romance languages have a less complex morphology than Latin (like Modern English has a less complex morphology than Old English) but nobody says that those languages are dumber. 

One example is (as sombody just said) the definite article ("he goes to the cinema" and "he goes to school"), whose use (in Germanic or in Romance languages) is often unpredictable for Slavic speakers. 
As somebody just said, one language can be more complex in some area but easier in other areas. 

Another example is the difference between "he enjoys doing", he likes doing/to do" and "he wants to do", "he can do". Are they predictable? 
In Italian/Spanish/Portuguese/French is a lot simpler: verb + infinitive. "Gli piace fare", "vuole fare", "può fare".


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## berndf

Johnnyjohn said:


> There is nothing quite like when some European language native says "English is so primitive and the dumbest language, but don't feel offended, your language is the most spoken one due to its poorness, be happy its the world language!"...


Nobody is saying such a thing, not here nor would any half way serious linguist ever say such a thing. And as a non-native speaker who spent many years studying the subtleties of that language, I can assure you, English is not an easy language. So whom are you fighting?


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## Angelo di fuoco

Johnnyjohn said:


> It didn't occur just this way in Indo European verbs/adjectives or NE caucasian nouns, its not sound change that makes them so irregular. Even some different declension endings are not fused forms. Some irregular plurals in Russian are like Brat-bratja, -ja was a collectivizing suffix that was made the plural marker for this and a few other words, it is not fusion. There were three basic ways to form the aorist in PIE, it was not sound change but unpredictable extension or mixing of suffixes to create new declensions.



You make it sound as if all those bad, bad people did all that on purpose for the sake of making your life more complicated.
No, it's not fusion, its lexicalisation, preserved in modern Russian (братия). English has _children_ and _brethren_. So what?
It is not "mixing", it is shifting.
And, once again, please stop that "unpredictable", "random" and "redundant" stuff.



Johnnyjohn said:


> Morphological simplicity? There is nothing quite like when some European language native says "English is so primitive and the dumbest language, but don't feel offended, your language is the most spoken one due to its poorness, be happy its the world language!" not that you said that but those who see the lack of* irregular* *morphology* in English as exceptional has never stepped foot outside of Europe and seen how things are in other language families. English is not morphologically simple in the long run, it would not be seen the way it is now if all of its relatives and a couple exceptions in the Caucas just disappeared and never left a trace. It wouldn't affect me much.



Yes, the morphology of contemporary English is relatively simple, and I don't know why you denie it. The English language as a whole is not simple at all.
I wouldn't say it's the lack of *irregular* morphology, it's just the *rudimentary* morphology (first and foremost virtually non-existent declension and drastically reduced conjugation) _tout court_ that speakers of most Indo-European languages find disturbing: a related language that lacks features you would expect it to have.


----------



## Gavril

Ben Jamin said:


> Originally Posted by *Gavril
> *In any case, my point (from message #89) was that I don't see why Slavic aspectual pairs (_dajati/dati, ustavljati/ustaviti_, etc.) cannot be called "inflectional" simply because they involve a change in the verb's meaning. A bigger problem for calling them inflectional is that this change of meaning is not uniform from verb to verb.
> 
> 
> 
> Just in your example the lexical meaning of the words don't change.
Click to expand...


What do you mean by "lexical meaning" here?


----------



## Johnnyjohn

Angelo di fuoco said:


> You make it sound as if all those bad, bad people did all that on purpose for the sake of making your life more complicated.
> No, it's not fusion, its lexicalisation, preserved in modern Russian (братия). English has _children_ and _brethren_. So what?
> It is not "mixing", it is shifting.
> And, once again, please stop that "unpredictable", "random" and "redundant" stuff.
> Yes, the morphology of contemporary English is relatively simple, and I don't know why you denie it. The English language as a whole is not simple at all.
> I wouldn't say it's the lack of *irregular* morphology, it's just the *rudimentary* morphology (first and foremost virtually non-existent declension and drastically reduced conjugation) _tout court_ that speakers of most Indo-European languages find disturbing: a related language that lacks features you would expect it to have.



But the Children and Brethren example are hardly found in the same huge quantities in any other language family. It's not bad, but the sheer amount of derived forms and extensions is unique. English morphology is relatively simple compared to European languages, but that is due to lacking redundancy, it rids itself of the morphology when a new technique such as an auxiliary or particle arises. PIE at some point only had 8 cases and no prepositions, Korean and Japanese only have cases too, so many languages have a handful of cases and maybe a few prepositions for adjunct use and then some languages have prepositions like English or modern Chinese. But what languages used multiple declensions and unpredictable prepositions?
The fact speakers of IE languages are surprised by English's grammar only shows a lack of linguistic knowledge. I know a french woman who was shocked to find out Chinese was less inflected than English, she could not comprehend that there was a language that "has even less grammar" than English. English was the absolute bottom that nothing ever went below for her, nor did the idea that a language like Turkish which is genderless, nearly 100% regular, only 8 vowels and hardly any consonant clusters, no articles, no adjective inflection or irregular forms, and extremely transparent derivation could be easier grammatically despite having conjugations and cases ever occur to her.



berndf said:


> Nobody is saying such a thing, not here nor would any half way serious linguist ever say such a thing. And as a non-native speaker who spent many years studying the subtleties of that language, I can assure you, English is not an easy language. So whom are you fighting?



The concept of the exceptionality of English lacking certain morphology. I agree, I do believe English is the easiest Germanic language except for Afrikaans and is overall accessible, it is not hard to learn at all but not exceptionally easy. It looks like a normal language to the rest of the world, not a hard one, but not remarkably simplistic. They would more likely notice Russian's irregularity.
Linguists today are like this guy: http://www.economist.com/node/15108609
Shame.



Nino83 said:


> I still don't understand why you're comparing Modern English with Classical Latin, instead of Modern English with Romance languages (which are very regular, i.e f. s. "a" --> f. pl. "e"/"as", m. s. "o" --> m. pl. "i"/"os", third declension s. "e"/"consonant" --> pl. "i"/"es", the first in Italian, the second in Spanish and Portuguese).
> Old English has nouns like "engel/englas", "dæg/dagas", "fōt/fēt", "hnutu/nhyte", "mann/menn", "frēond/frīend", "lamb/lambru" and so on.
> Classical Latin has a more complex morphology (than Modern English) just because it has a case system but it doesn't have more "regular irregularities" than Old English.
> Romance languages have a less complex morphology than Latin (like Modern English has a less complex morphology than Old English) but nobody says that those languages are dumber.
> One example is (as sombody just said) the definite article ("he goes to the cinema" and "he goes to school"), whose use (in Germanic or in Romance languages) is often unpredictable for Slavic speakers.
> As somebody just said, one language can be more complex in some area but easier in other areas.
> Another example is the difference between "he enjoys doing", he likes doing/to do" and "he wants to do", "he can do". Are they predictable?
> In Italian/Spanish/Portuguese/French is a lot simpler: verb + infinitive. "Gli piace fare", "vuole fare", "può fare".



I know about Old English nouns, Old English is more like Arabic than Latin in the difficulties. I originally started with comparing conservative IE to other conservative languages in other families, I must have gotten off topic. Yes the syntactical usage of articles and non-finite forms exists, but weren't the non finite forms and articles even more so complicated in Ancient Greek and the non-finite forms in Latin? I have been making a point that IE morphology and NE noun morphology is unusually irregular not due to sound change only but the type of inflection used, hence they are uniquely irregular in the world in that way.


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## berndf

No, Johnyjohn, English isn't easy just because it lacks morphology. It is not at all easy.


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## Johnnyjohn

berndf said:


> No, Johnyjohn, English isn't easy just because it lacks morphology. It is not at all easy.



I said it was NOT hard, I didn't say it was extremely easy. It is not one of the most difficult languages at all. But as a German, you must have run into many of those who claim English is exceptionally easy and/or we use it as a world language due to it being easy (not mentioning colonial expansion or American entertainment dominance). Mega-Languages tend to have their respective bigger brothers such as French to Spanish, Hakka to Mandarin, Korean to Japanese (yes, I know they are not related but the sprachbund effect makes them very alike) and German to English (nothing like Icelandic or Russian in China that I know of)

Oh to add to the mention of articles by Angelo, memorizing them in derived set phrases is not much nor are the usage of non finite forms considering one must learn what case a preposition uses, what case a verb takes, if the locative case must be used with na and v as is in 150 masculine nouns in Russian, memorizing the present stem that cannot be predicted from the infinitive in many verbs (not all I admit), memorizing prepositional usage that is as complex as in English, and memorizing some of the participle form of many verbs, and mobile stress (which alone isn't so bad, but it is multiplied in memorization amounts due to those other factors)


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## berndf

Johnnyjohn said:


> I said it was NOT hard...


... Which is wrong.


Johnnyjohn said:


> Mega-Languages tend to have their respective bigger brothers such as French to Spanish, Hakka to Mandarin, Korean to Japanese (yes, I know they are not related but the sprachbund effect makes them very alike) and German to English


Spanish the "big brother" of French? English the "big brother" of German? I am not sure what this is supposed to mean.


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## Johnnyjohn

berndf said:


> ... Which is wrong.
> Spanish the "big brother" of French? English the "big brother" of German? I am not sure what this is supposed to mean.


Sorry, must not have been clear, German is the big brother, French and Hakka too to their respective languages. They are the more conservative version with more distinctions and are less streamlined. Mega languages are as I define a language which is widely spoken and tends to "trim" certain things, but almost all of the ones alive today except Indonesian are still more complex than the likes of something like Turkish or any extremely transparent straightforward language.

It doesn't take searching to come across the comments on English made by other IE speakers, you can't have never heard or read one. What about that economist article I linked? Unlike the guy who claims and writes articles on why all languages originate from Arabic, the guy who wrote that article is believable sounding despite not being completely correct which makes for more bad linguistics.

Going back to IE morphology and NE caucasian noun morphology, the future formation is French is a good explanation for me to use as a metaphor. Imagine instead of just "have" the words "need" "want" "go" or even a contracted form of the adverb for "later" are all used to form the future tense, different verbs get a different verb to contract to and there are no reliable ways to predict the future tense. That is almost exactly the case with the newly developed PIE verbal system which leaves hundreds of unpredictable stems to this day in Slavic and Baltic languages. It probably transitions from something similar to the Uralic or Hittite system. 
That is the basis of the verb/adjective gender system (in Ancient Greek)/some cases in IE and the oblique and plural stems of nouns (only) in NE caucasian.
Most languages settle for one new method for any new grammatical indication, and then some irregularities from sound change or occasional confusion.
English did it with auxiliaries, Chinese is starting to do it with the contraction method, the arabic verb system used vowel alternations which are not predictable for only a few modes due to sound change, but the method is consistent even if somewhat irregular.

Edit: I forgot to mention, latin has prepositional phrases too for manner, direction, time, and purpose plus the complication of 2 cases taking them. The only thing missing may be prepositional governance but that is also absent from many languages without cases too. Don't forget what I wrote about Russian.


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## berndf

When the German and English grammars took their present form, German was certainly more widely spoken than English.


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## Gavril

Johnnyjohn said:


> It doesn't take searching to come across the comments on English made by other IE speakers, you can't have never heard or read one. What about that economist article I linked?



Where does the author of that article say that English is "not hard" (your words from the last post) to learn?

The author says that English is "simple" based on a couple of morphological criteria, but it is pretty clear that he/she (the article has no byline that I can see, so I don't know the author's gender) is not making any serious attempt to compare the relative difficulty of learning languages, since (s)he does not even apply consistent criteria to each language group. (S)he simply cherry-picks various "colorful features" of each group for the reader's amusement.


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## Johnnyjohn

Gavril said:


> Where does the author of that article say that English is "not hard" (your words from the last post) to learn?
> 
> The author says that English is "simple" based on a couple of morphological criteria, but it is pretty clear that he/she (the article has no byline that I can see, so I don't know the author's gender) is not making any serious attempt to compare the relative difficulty of learning languages, since (s)he does not even apply consistent criteria to each language group. (S)he simply cherry-picks various "colorful features" of each group for the reader's amusement.



The person who wrote it is wrong on many levels. It has the typical tone of a self loathing native english speaker who thinks everything else is exotic and better.
It repeats the usual cliched "no conjugation, cases, or gender" thing that supposedly makes English unimaginably simple. The sad thing is this person supposedly has a degree, but then there are those who write articles claiming Arabic is the origin of all languages including Chinese (which are equally untrue) and they are technically linguists. Hence the incredible amount of bigotry/patronization native English speakers face from other European brethren or European speakers.
http://www.omniglot.com/language/articles/engunilang.php
http://www.usingenglish.com/weblog/archives/000037.html (look at the comments)
http://www.amideast.org/blogs/toeic4success/2011/08/english-easier-other-languages
The idea of "languages" being Russian, Spanish, French, Italian, German and only things related is so strong that even mentioning something from Asia or Africa makes them think of something unimaginably bizarre. English is aching to divorce the rest of the European languages like an abused spouse in my opinion.


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## Gavril

I don't hear the "self-loathing" you're talking about at all in that article (the tone seems pretty light-hearted throughout). By the way, why do you say that the writer of the article supposedly has a degree, when the article doesn't even have a byline?

I'm not sure what your three new links are meant to prove, other than people's varied views on what is easy and difficult about English. The article in the third link only compares English to other widely-studied European languages, but it doesn't make any attempt to hide this fact either.



Johnnyjohn said:


> The person who wrote it is wrong on many levels. It has the typical tone of a self loathing native english speaker who thinks everything else is exotic and better.
> It repeats the usual cliched "no conjugation, cases, or gender" thing that supposedly makes English unimaginably simple. The sad thing is this person supposedly has a degree, but then there are those who write articles claiming Arabic is the origin of all languages including Chinese (which are equally untrue) and they are technically linguists. Hence the incredible amount of bigotry/patronization native English speakers face from other European brethren or European speakers.
> http://www.omniglot.com/language/articles/engunilang.php
> http://www.usingenglish.com/weblog/archives/000037.html (look at the comments)
> http://www.amideast.org/blogs/toeic4success/2011/08/english-easier-other-languages
> The idea of "languages" being Russian, Spanish, French, Italian, German and only things related is so strong that even mentioning something from Asia or Africa makes them think of something unimaginably bizarre. English is aching to divorce the rest of the European languages like an abused spouse in my opinion.


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## Nino83

Johnnyjohn said:


> but weren't the non finite forms even more so complicated in Latin?



No, they weren't. 

"he *gives up* doing" --> desistit facere
"he *wants to do*" --> vult facere (Caesar Romae primus *esse* *voluit*)
"he *can do*" --> potest facere (Beatus *esse* sine virtute nemo *potest*) 

We have one form, "facere", in Latin and three forms, "doing", "to do", "do", in Modern English. 
In Modern English these forms are unpredictable. You have to study every single verb. 

Classical Latin doesn't have definite articles.


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## berndf

Johnnyjohn said:


> http://www.usingenglish.com/weblog/archives/000037.html (look at the comments)


In comment pages of internet blogs you find all kind of boodcurdling nonsense. So, why would one care?





Johnnyjohn said:


> http://www.amideast.org/blogs/toeic4success/2011/08/english-easier-other-languages


This article comes to the same conclusion we have been telling you here all long: English is easier in comparison to other European languages in some aspects and more difficult in others.

Gordon comes to the quite popular overall assessment that as a foreign learner it is relatively easy to arrive at a stage where you are able to carry out a meaningful _very basic_ conversation owing to the simplicity of its morphological system (or essential rather to the lack of one) but that the full language with all its lexical and idiomatic sophistication is just as hard to master as any other language.

Why English has cast off most of its inflectional system has but the subject of much debate. What we know for sure is when it happened: during the Middle English period, roughly from from the mid 12th to the mid 15th century. It might have started a bit earlier, because it usually takes a while until colloquial modifications of a language become reflected in written language. This was the time when English was essentially an "underdog" language with the ruling elite speaking a different language: First Old Norse in the Danish ruled parts of England and then, after the Norman conquest, Anglo-French. This has led to the hypothesis that English underwent a kind of creolization process during this period. Needless to say that this theory is quite controversial. We had a lengthy discussion here too: http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=240473.


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## arielipi

I can't agree that a language grows to have sporadic or random suffixes, there is always some logic to things because humans think logically, it just cant be otherwise.


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## Ben Jamin

berndf said:


> This has led to the hypothesis that English underwent a kind of creolization process during this period. Needless to say that this theory is quite controversial. We had a lengthy discussion here too: http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=240473.



Using the term "creolization"  would have much more sense if the English began to speak a simplified and altered French.


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## berndf

Ben Jamin said:


> Using the term "creolization"  would have much more sense if the English began to speak a simplified and altered French.


Not necessarily. A creole is by definition a native language that has developed out of a pidgin. The definition of _creole _does not imply which group has adopted the pidgin as its native language. It may very well be a group that formerly spoke the language the pidgin is based on.


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## francisgranada

Nino83 said:


> ...
> "he *gives up* doing" --> desistit facere
> "he *wants to do*" --> vult facere (Caesar Romae primus *esse* *voluit*)
> "he *can do*" --> potest facere (Beatus *esse* sine virtute nemo *potest*)
> ...


This is a good illustration of how different languages can be complex (or "complicated") in different way. The Latin uses the infinitive in all the three examples, so it is simpler from this point of view. On the other hand the forms _do_, _to do_ and _doing _are completely regular, while the Latin forms _vult _and _potest _are unpredictably irregular and in case of _desistit _one has to know to which conjugation pattern this verb belongs. From this point of view the English is simpler ...

For comparison, the above examples in Hungarian:
"he gives up *doing*" --> feladja a *tevést *(_tevés_= _doing_, but as noun, not a verbal form)
"he wants *to do*" --> akar *tenni *(_tenni _= _to do_, infinitive)
"he *can do*" --> *tehet *(_tehet _= "can do"; _-he_- is an affix expressing the possibility)

So it seems as if in Hungarian irregularly/unpredictibly three different forms would correspond to the Latin infinive _facere _depending on the "main" verb. However, it is not true. Simply the verb _feladni _(< _fel_=up, _adni_=to give) requires a noun as object (even if used in figurative sense) plus there is an affix that we can use to express the possibilty (instead of a separate verb like _can_, _posse_). The Hungarian examples might show how it is difficult to "jugde" the complexity/irregularity of a language from "outside" (i.e. from the point of view of other languages) ...


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## irinet

[/U]





Nino83 said:


> No, they weren't.
> 
> "he *gives up* doing" --> desistit facere
> "he *wants to do*" --> vult facere (Caesar Romae primus *esse* *voluit*)
> "he *can do*" --> potest facere (Beatus *esse* sine virtute nemo *potest*)
> 
> We have one form, "facere", in Latin and three forms, "doing", "to do", "do", in Modern English.
> In Modern English these forms are unpredictable. You have to study every single verb.


At least,  the English language has 'to do' / 'doing'  as the only known forms following the present/past / future tense as to the context above. My language,  for instance,  is a nightmare with 1) the person morphemes: ' vreau să fac' (1st person singular),  'vre*m* să face*m*'  (same person,  plural,   'vre*i* să fac*i*' - 'vre*ți* să face*ți*' (2nd person sg. - pl.) etc. 
Though,  we shortened the long infinitive 'facere'  and made it 'face',  we rarely use it. More,  we have changed an impersonal,  non-predicative mood into a personal,  predicative one (infinitive - conjunctive)  and use it extensively. 2) On the syntactic level,  the two personal, predicative moods take the same subject in two separate,  distinct syntactic units which are clearly in an agreement, instead of a simpler one ('vreau/vrem/vrei/vreți a face'). 
What is perplexing to me is that we do not have the 'irregular - regular'  concepts applied to my language?!


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## francisgranada

I guess it's due to the loss of the ending _-re_ in function of the infinitive in Romanian. Otherwise this construction is not so difficult to understand, similar constructions are possible/imaginable (at least in theory, even if not used this way) in (some) other languages too (e.g. in Italian _voglio che io faccia, vogliamo che facciamo, etc ..._)


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## francisgranada

irinet said:


> ...  What is perplexing to me is that we do not have the 'irregular - regular'  concepts applied to my language?!


Could you explain better what does it mean? There are no irregularities in Romanian at all, or what we call "irregularity" in general, it is not considered irregularity in case of Romanian? ...


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## Nino83

francisgranada said:


> So it seems as if in Hungarian irregularly/unpredictibly three different forms would correspond to the Latin infinive _facere _depending on the "main" verb. However, it is not true...



This is why I'd say that probably Hungarian is more regular than Latin or than Romance languages or other Germanic languages (German and Icelandic have 3 genders, 4 cases and Icelandic has something like 70 subcategories, depending on different stems) but probably it is not easier for an English speaker to learn, because of different syntactic structures. 
Once I read on internet (the sentence was written by a teacher of Finnish): "Finnish is not easier or harder than any other IE language, is simply _different_". 

The example of Francis shows very well this concept.


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## Johnnyjohn

irinet said:


> [/U]
> At least,  the English language has 'to do' / 'doing'  as the only known forms following the present/past / future tense as to the context above. My language,  for instance,  is a nightmare with 1) the person morphemes: ' vreau să fac' (1st person singular),  'vre*m* să face*m*'  (same person,  plural,   'vre*i* să fac*i*' - 'vre*ți* să face*ți*' (2nd person sg. - pl.) etc.
> Though,  we shortened the long infinitive 'facere'  and made it 'face',  we rarely use it. More,  we have changed an impersonal,  non-predicative mood into a personal,  predicative one (infinitive - conjunctive)  and use it extensively. 2) On the syntactic level,  the two personal, predicative moods take the same subject in two separate,  distinct syntactic units which are clearly in an agreement, instead of a simpler one ('vreau/vrem/vrei/vreți a face').
> What is perplexing to me is that we do not have the 'irregular - regular'  concepts applied to my language?!


I don't know what to say. So a language with only 2 tenses would that conjugates would hypothetically be more difficult than one with several moods and aspects and several evidentiality categories that does not conjugate for person or number? Like gender, languages that conjugate for person and number are not the majority, they are frequent but the lack thereof is not exceptional or a sign of unusual simplicity.

I've read the previous comments and I am cooling down, but the point I have made from the beginning is that IE morphology is uniquely irregular and that people whose native languages are IE are possibly misguided as to how irregular languages usually are in the rest of the world. I think part of this has to do with the prescriptivism in Europe, I would expect prescriptivism to standardize and regularize a grammar (like the one of Sanskrit) but it seems for millennia grammarians as early as Ancient Greece and Rome have sought to preserve as many irregular forms and redundancies as they can manage. Why wouldn't late Latin lose cases since prepositions were coming into use, why wouldn't gender reorganize, etc.  The PIE forms would systemize far more quickly into new verbal and nominal systems with fewer holes or inconsistent stem formations which still drag on in modern IE. 

Similarly, I have repeatedly pointed out the modern IE languages like Russian have cases and prepositions which are equally complex and irregular, it is a unique redundancy. The unpredictability of infinitive stems, past stems, participles, and suffixes is not just some consequence of sound change.

And don't forget their verbs govern cases and prepositions, and the 150 unique locative nouns, and the heavy amount of prepositional phrases too. Russian prepositional usage is far more complicated than that of English, a caseless language. A study even showed speakers use them far more frequently in speech than English speakers do. This is not found in languages elsewhere where either cases or prepositions are used exclusively for syntactical purposes (they can both exist but one would be used only for objects, locative adverbs, and direct grammatical functions and all underived prepositions would only take one case.)

 The next time someone points out the lack of conjugation, declension, gender, and adjective agreement in English is exceptional, I will give a good argument back!
English is not exceptional for not holding on to all these features. If a languages gains cases, no one notices, but if it loses them later on, oh how it is unimaginably simplified!


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## berndf

Johnnyjohn said:


> I think part of this has to do with the prescriptivism in Europe, I would expect prescriptivism to standardize and regularize a grammar (like the one of Sanskrit) but it seems for millennia grammarians as early as Ancient Greece and Rome have sought to preserve as many irregular forms and redundancies as they can manage.


That is impossible. The IE inflection systems developed long before there was such a thing as systematic grammar.

Let me give you a hypothetical example of how English could develop into a case inflected language again. Let's concentrate on the locative case. English currently expresses the locative as follows:
On Friday
At noon
In the room
On the bus

Now let's further assume that English prepositions changed to postpositively that are enclitically merged with the head-noun (as e.g. the Vulgar Latin auxiliary verb habere expressing the future tense became a suffix in Romance: _amare habeo_ became _aimerai_ in French). Then, with a few sound shifts, the above expressions might develop into the following locative forms:
Fruidi-tun (inserted t for ease of pronunciation as in French _y a-t-il_)
Nonn-at
Rum-at
Bas-un

And now you have got from these few examples already four declension classes for the locative. Note that the overall complexity has only minimally increased: from three prepositions you have to remember with every noun to four locative declensions classes you have to remember with every noun.


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## Gavril

Johnnyjohn,

1) You mentioned the 150 unique locative nouns in Russian. It is not a uniquely IE phenomenon to have alternate case affixes that are restricted to a limited number of nouns, and that express the same meaning as a more productive affix. In Finnish, there is a suffix called the prolative, which is only used with a limited number of nouns, and expresses (in modern-day Finnish) more or less the same idea as the adessive case. For example,

_kirjei*tse*_ "by letter/mail" (prolative), _kirjee*l*_*lä* "with (a) letter" (adessive)
_puhelimi*tse*_ "via telephone", _puhelime*lla*_ "on/with (the) telephone"
_meri*tse*_ "by sea", _mere*llä* _"on/by (the) sea"
etc.


2) You wrote:



> Russian prepositional usage is far more complicated than that of English, a caseless language.



How is it more complicated, apart from the fact that Russian prepositions can take more than one case? Pre/postpositions taking multiple cases is not an IE-only phenomenon either, by the way.


3) You wrote: 




> This is not found in languages elsewhere where either cases or prepositions are used exclusively for syntactical purposes (they can both exist but one would be used only for objects, locative adverbs, and direct grammatical functions and all underived prepositions would only take one case.)



I don't understand what you mean by this. Can you please give a specific example of cases/adpositions being used exclusively for syntactical purposes, and a specific example of them not being used exclusively for syntactical purposes?

If you are talking about semantic redundancy between case expressions and prepositional phrases, then that exists outside IE as well.


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## Johnnyjohn

berndf said:


> That is impossible. The IE inflection systems developed long before there was such a thing as systematic grammar.
> 
> Let me give you a hypothetical example of how English could develop into a case inflected language again. Let's concentrate on the locative case. English currently expresses the locative as follows:
> On Friday
> At noon
> In the room
> On the bus
> 
> Now let's further assume that English prepositions changed to postpositively that are enclitically merged with the head-noun (as e.g. the Vulgar Latin auxiliary verb habere expressing the future tense became a suffix in Romance: _amare habeo_ became _aimerai_ in French). Then, with a few sound shifts, the above expressions might develop into the following locative forms:
> Fruidi-tun (inserted t for ease of pronunciation as in French _y a-t-il_)
> Nonn-at
> Rum-at
> Bas-un
> 
> And now you have got from these few examples already four declension classes for the locative. Note that the overall complexity has only minimally increased: from three prepositions you have to remember with every noun to four locative declensions classes you have to remember with every noun.



The IE verbal system developed from derivational morphology, the language went through phases:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Indo-European_verbs#Development_of_the_conjugational_system
Phase 4 would have arrived or arrive sooner if it weren't for prescriptivism try to freeze a languages irregularities. Do you acknowledge what I was putting forth? The Korean language forms the perfective aspect with the suffix -a/ess-, but to this day there are remnants of different stem formations in Indo European. The irregularities in Indo European inflection and NE Caucasian nouns is exceptional due to the fact derivation is used to inflect (not that regularization would take place, but no, prescriptivism!), all the conjugations and adjective irregularities in Latin is borne from this, the nominal system is not that difficult I admit and isn't overly difficult, but the way it's all thrown together is unique. You can disagree, but can you confirm you understand my argument?

You gave those examples of nouns but I have already mentioned in Russian that prepositional phrases like that are created just as randomly as in English on top of existing cases, and 150 masculine nouns where two prepositions use a different case, on top of memorizing every case a preposition uses on top of noun case irregularities. The thing is that all of these features are used while languages in the rest of the world may have complex cases or prepositions, but not both. Latin has prepositional phrases too and adverbials likewise, those you listed are adverbial phrases, the formation of locative adverbials (not adjuncts) in Russian and Latin is as complicated except that English has in,on,at while Latin just has in.

If Indo European languages aren't shown for what they are, if they continue to dominate the world, then linguistics will progress more slowly. Imagine if creationism were accepted by 90% of the world and you were part of the 10% who had another explanation, I feel that way against those who think English is stupid/primitive and believe all the other misconceptions.


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## Pribina

Johnnyjohn said:


> but not both


Source?


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## francisgranada

Johnnyjohn said:


> ... If a languages gains cases, no one notices, but if it loses them later on, oh how it is unimaginably simplified!


I _have _noticed , for example in case of some Indo-Iranian languages, like the Hindi or Romani. An interesting example of morphology, the Carpathian Romani (Gipsy):

1. The original Indo-Iranian declension is lost, however three IE-like cases survive: _direct case_ (in function of nominative and accusative [except of animated nouns, where the _indirect case_ is used]), _indirect case_ (now used in various/specific functions ...) and the _vocative. _

2. Later on, new agglutinative-like case endings developped, so the "new" case endings are (almost) uniform for each noun, however, there are some differences/specificities in the declension depending on the gender, number and animatedness. The new case endings are attached to the _indirect case_. 

An example of the declension (singular, masculine, animated): _*phral *_(brother)
(the "new" case endings are in boldface)

direct case: _phral_
indirect case: _phrales_
*****
nominative: _phral_
accusative:     _phrales_
genitive:        _phrales*kero*_
dative:          _phrales*ke*_
locative:        _phrales*te*_
instrumental: _phrale*ha *_(instead of the expected _phralesha_)
ablative:        _phrales*tar
*_vocative: _phrala__! _

P.S. Prepositions are used as well (even with the _nominative _or _direct case_)


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## irinet

Johnnyjohn said:


> I don't know what to say. So a language with only 2 tenses would that conjugates would hypothetically be more difficult than one with several moods and aspects and several evidentiality categories that does not conjugate for person or number? Like gender, languages that conjugate for person and number are not the majority, they are frequent but the lack thereof is not exceptional or a sign of unusual simplicity.
> 
> The next time someone points out the lack of conjugation, declension, gender, and adjective agreement in English is exceptional, I will give a good argument back!
> English is not exceptional for not holding on to all these features. If a languages gains cases, no one notices, but if it loses them later on, oh how it is unimaginably simplified!



Hi, 
I love the idea of 'simplicity',  especially when kids have to learn by heart these morphological and syntactic features!  I'd rather teach about a language that can be understood and about the way we combine words on different levels to make the best of it. 
For instance,  the adjective agreement is another problem when we take 'cases' into account.  We go for years with a definition that has a false basis and no one seems to care or to evidence exceptions from the rules as English does. 
It is also interesting the English 'verbal phrase' /'verb +preposition' construction to me. For instance,  in my language there is no such concept,  the prepositions or the adverbs are independent parts of speech. While the first goes with the noun together in a syntactic unit as it is related to the accusative case,  the latter goes with the verb but distinct as a syntactic part which is fine by me. Due to this preposition - noun, say, 'relatedness',  more speakers leave out the Dative case which lacks prepositions but uses morphemes. Isn't it difficult to teach,  and how to be explicit?! In an extremely visually - based communication  era,  it seems that everything has to be 'on scene/screen'.  And morphemes aren't 'on scene/screen'! Very weird. 
I submit to the idea that language strings are very difficult to understand and if they are our tools for a better communication,  then we have to find better solutions to simplify them or the ways we use them.


----------



## Johnnyjohn

Gavril said:


> Johnnyjohn,
> 
> 1) You mentioned the 150 unique locative nouns in Russian. It is not a uniquely IE phenomenon to have alternate case affixes that are restricted to a limited number of nouns, and that express the same meaning as a more productive affix. In Finnish, there is a suffix called the prolative, which is only used with a limited number of nouns, and expresses (in modern-day Finnish) more or less the same idea as the adessive case. For example,
> _kirjei*tse*_ "by letter/mail" (prolative), _kirjee*l*_*lä* "with (a) letter" (adessive)
> _puhelimi*tse*_ "via telephone", _puhelime*lla*_ "on/with (the) telephone"
> _meri*tse*_ "by sea", _mere*llä* _"on/by (the) sea"
> etc.
> 2) You wrote:
> How is it more complicated, apart from the fact that Russian prepositions can take more than one case? Pre/postpositions taking multiple cases is not an IE-only phenomenon either, by the way.
> 3) You wrote:
> I don't understand what you mean by this. Can you please give a specific example of cases/adpositions being used exclusively for syntactical purposes, and a specific example of them not being used exclusively for syntactical purposes?
> 
> If you are talking about semantic redundancy between case expressions and prepositional phrases, then that exists outside IE as well.



These features are a result of contact with IE languages. Can you name a language in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, or the Americas which uses both cases and prepositions along with something like those 150 masculine nouns? Arabic has 3 cases but all prepositions take the genitive, some languages have prepositions or postpositions along with cases like Ingush (a NE caucasian language whose nouns take random thematic suffixes in the oblique and plurals that can never be predicted, otherwise it is not so overly irregular or redundant), but all objects use a case; none use a postposition and the case forms are used for adverbial expression too, postpositions are never used outside of an adjunct, they are not used with direct objects or with adjectives as in "I am angry WITH him". Some here, some there, but never everywhere!

Remember the rpg points analogy I used in a previous post on this thread? You have 6-14 points of irregularity, gender, and/or unpredictable concatenations like prepositional verbs, and could allot them into 4 attributes, but IE has 18-20 points and forces an average of 5 points into each while other languages spread 6-12. NE caucasian languages are the exceptions and would put 11 in nouns but the remaining ones would average 7 for 18 in total. Don't forget points multiply each other in complexity, having both cases and prepositions both multiply each other in complexity or having adjective agreement which wouldn't be as difficult for a language like Spanish but it is multiplied by cases, declension classes, and different gender agreements as in Latin. Or Mobile stress combined with unpredictable verb stem formation in Russian, the mobile stress isn't unusually difficult but it is multiplied by 10 due to its environment. Latin would not be so overwhelming to me if the verbal and adjectival system was based on inflection rather than derivation, the nouns could be left as they are 

Nevertheless the nominal system of nouns and adjective inflections are so full of irregularities involving I stems all the way to gender agreement, nominal declension for some adjectives, and more, I have a hard time believing it just came from regular sound change as I have never seen a grammatical system outside of Europe that is as confused with its suffixes, how could there be so many exceptions and subtypes to the third declension adjectives and nouns? I stem, mixed stem, words like Canis which take -um not -ium, 6 adjectives which decline like regular 3rd declension nouns like vetere, multiple ways to form comparatives for regular adjectives and many taking an adverb that cannot be predicted among more with different endings for comparative forms, even if predictable the exceptions just number incredibly more than languages outside of Europe for no reason, indeclinables, heteroclites, heterogenous ones, and the rest require memorizing the genitive to know which declension to use, then there are actually irregular nouns on top of those! The nouns don't have an explanation, but the irregularity of the verbs and adjectives do anyway that I have mentioned dozens of times already.
http://books.google.com/books?id=FqBhAwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
Exception after exception after exception starting at chapter one. I cannot fathom why I don't find this in Asia.

And these are just the nouns, not the verbal system where every verb outside of conjugation 1 is not predictable. These are very few compared to Russian with a dozen times as many irregularities in nouns and verbs. Its the combination of everything. IE languages and NE caucasian nouns are unique in the way their irregularity formed and the fact this irregularity is multiplied by other already existing parts of the grammar.

Russian uses prepositions as randomly as English on top of cases. There can be some redundancy but there is never the same amount at all outside of Europe, brevity is a feature of almost every single language outside of Europe. Complex, but not with a lot of decaying paradigms, leftover and competing features, and formations.
People of European language background have come to expect a language like Russian to be something that English is not; they don't realize it may be that it is best seen as having things English doesn't have instead of seeing it as English lacking things Russian has thus making English somehow a poor primitive language.

I really believe prescriptivism has to do with the gigantic pile up of irregularities all at once. The regularization would have taken only centuries instead of millennia if colloquial varieties were not prevented from regularizing. Why do we force native speakers to say "shone" instead of "shined"? But we don't mind if people say "snuck" instead of "sneaked" as they started doing now? It's a bragging match on irregularity! People mock English so much saying "We use it because it is the easiest, it has no grammar, no exceptions, and no conjugation or cases like every single language in the world except it" but the truth is that languages outside of IE and NE caucasian concerning nouns never ever became as irregular and exception riddled, it has never happened!


----------



## Gavril

Johnnyjohn,

Can you please respond to these points one by one, rather than in a single paragraph? Thank you.
*

1) *


Johnnyjohn said:


> These features are a result of contact with IE languages.



Proof, please?

*2) *


> Can you name a language in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, or the Americas which uses both cases and prepositions along with something like those 150 masculine nouns?



No, I can't, because I have no detailed knowledge (outside a few basic grammatical facts I've learned) of any languages spoken in these regions. And with all due respect, unless you have studied every non-European language in some detail, you have no basis for asserting that they lack the properties in question, either.

*3)* 


> postpositions are never used outside of an adjunct,



In what languages? Again, in Finnish, if you are describing where a person is going, where something was sent, how a person feels toward someone, etc., this will often (though not necessarily) involve an adpositional phrase that corresponds to what would be called a "complement phrase" (rather than an adjunct phrase) in English.

*4)*


> as I have never seen a grammatical system outside of Europe that is as confused with its suffixes, how could there be so many exceptions and subtypes to the third declension adjectives and nouns? I stem, mixed stem, words like Canis which take -um not -ium, 6 adjectives which decline like regular 3rd declension nouns like vetere, multiple ways to form comparatives for regular adjectives with different endings for comparative forms,



If Latin were still spoken today, and a modern-day linguist were to try to investigate its grammar, without any pre-modern grammatical descriptions to guide him, I really wonder how much the resulting "Latin grammar" would resemble the one we see in books today.

*5)*


> These are very few compared to Russian with a dozen times as many irregularities in nouns and verbs.



Are you considering Russian aspectual pairs as part of these verbal irregularities? If so: it is not clear that Slavic aspect is a grammatical alternation to begin with.

*6)*


> People mock English so much



Can you please stop talking about this? The topic of this thread is comparison between the irregularity of IE languages and that of other language groups; it is not about what the public might think of this issue.


----------



## berndf

Johnnyjohn said:


> Phase 4 would have arrived or arrive sooner if it weren't for prescriptivism try to freeze a languages irregularities. Do you acknowledge what I was putting forth? The Korean language forms the perfective aspect with the suffix -a/ess-, but to this day there are remnants of different stem formations in Indo European. The irregularities in Indo European inflection and NE Caucasian nouns is exceptional due to the fact derivation is used to inflect (not that regularization would take place, but no, prescriptivism!), all the conjugations and adjective irregularities in Latin is borne from this, the nominal system is not that difficult I admit and isn't overly difficult, but the way it's all thrown together is unique. You can disagree, but can you confirm you understand my argument?


I am afraid not really. You have made a case that formalized grammar had artificially extended the life cycle of a particular development stage of Latin as it existed at some time during the republican era. But you have presented nothing to suggest that the grammarians of the time didn’t anything else than recoding a naturally grown language as it presented itself to them.



Johnnyjohn said:


> These features are a result of contact with IE languages. Can you name a language in Asia, Africa, the Pacific, or the Americas which uses both cases and prepositions along with something like those 150 masculine nouns? Arabic has 3 cases but all prepositions take the genitive...


I wonder what is wrong with attaching different cases with prepositions. Semitic cases carry much less information than their IE counterparts; the comparison is therefore not quite valid. Prepositions bear a logical relation to the cases they govern. Admittedly, as a result of meaning changes of certain prepositions which are not reflected in the cases they govern, some prepositions seem to govern “wrong” cases, like e.g. the English _to_ which governed the dative (when accusative and dative were still distinguishable, that is until about 600-700 years ago) instead of the semantically to be expected accusative. For a class of prepositions, the cases are necessary to distinguish different meanings which in English sometimes led to a split of prepositions to compensate for the loss of information, e.g. _in_+dative => _in_+objective case and _in_+accusative => _into_+objective case.



Johnnyjohn said:


> I have never seen a grammatical system outside of Europe that is as confused with its suffixes...


It may be confusing to you as you don’t share a native speakers intuition. Unless you can demonstrate that a system is actually confusing to native speakers themselves, it is unacceptably presumptuous to call the language itself “confused”.


----------



## Ben Jamin

Gavril said:


> If so: it is not clear that Slavic aspect is a grammatical alternation to begin with.



It is quite clear that Slavic "aspectual pairs"* are pairs of fully independent lexemes, with all morphological forms each, inclusive the infinitive, which indicates that the lexical approach is correct.
There is however, a transformation consisiting of change of ending that can be treated as a morphologica transformation, but it functions at the same time as a creation of a new lexeme.
The morphological approach to prefixing of verbs is a lost case.

*They are actually not pairs but arrays of two, or more verbs.


----------



## berndf

Ben Jamin said:


> It is quite clear that Slavic "aspectual pairs"* are pairs of fully independent lexemes, with all morphological forms each, inclusive the infinitive, which indicates that the lexical approach is correct.
> There is however, a transformation consisiting of change of ending that can be treated as a morphologica transformation, but it functions at the same time as a creation of a new lexeme.
> The morphological approach to prefixing of verbs is a lost case.
> 
> *They are actually not pairs but arrays of two, or more verbs.


Do you think to is fair to compare Slavic derived perfective verbs to derivational suffixes wew find in Germanic or Latin created (usually through suffixing), like e.g. the Latin frequentative as in _dicere_ (to speak) - _dictare _(to say repeatedly) or the Germanic causative as in English _to fall _- _to fell _(the umlauted "e" in_ to fell_ as a reflext of the Germanic_ -j-_ suffix to mark the causative)?


----------



## Nino83

Johnnyjohn said:


> as difficult for a language like Spanish but it is multiplied by cases, declension classes, and *different gender agreements* as in Latin.



As far as I know gender agreement in Spanish and Latin is the same. What do you mean with "different"? 



Johnnyjohn said:


> Latin would not be so overwhelming to me if the verbal and adjectival system was based on inflection rather than derivation, the nouns could be left as they are



What does it mean? Also in English nouns and verbs become adjectives by adding "al" or "able" or "ing". What is the difference between English and Latin? 



Johnnyjohn said:


> I stem, mixed stem



I repeat. Latin simplified declensions. 
Old High German had 7 different declension patterns ("i" and "u", "monosyllabic", "r", "nd" "z" and "weak" declension). 
Instead of having 7 declension patterns, you have only one, i.e third declension. 



Johnnyjohn said:


> words like Canis which take -um not -ium


11 of the first group, 10 of the second, 0 of the third, 8 irregular. A total of 29 irregular nouns in the third declension. Is this the Latin irregularity you're speaking of? 
Old High German had 7 different declensions for these nouns. 
As we know, dative and genitive cases were replaced, in popular speech, by "de + ablative" and "ad + accusative", so there were very few irregularities, i.e only 8 irregular nouns. 
So, 7 different Old High German declensions vs. 8 irregular nouns in Latin. 



Johnnyjohn said:


> 6 adjectives which decline like regular 3rd declension nouns like vetere



6 adjectives? What a shame!  



Johnnyjohn said:


> multiple ways to form comparatives for regular adjectives



Multiple? 
1) regular: altus, i = alti - i + *ior/ius* = altior, ius - fortis, is = fortis - is + *ior/ius* = fortior, ius 
2) adjectives which end with e, i, u + us (eus, ius, uus): perifrastic construction, i.e *magis* + adjective 
3) adjectives ending with ficus, dicus, volus: *entior/entius* 
4) 5 irregular adjectives: bonus, malus, magnus, parvus, multus



Johnnyjohn said:


> And these are just the nouns, not the verbal system where every verb outside of conjugation 1 is not predictable.



Also Germanic languages have strong verbs. 
The first conjugation was the only productive one in later stages. Why? Because it was the most regular. 



Johnnyjohn said:


> I really believe prescriptivism has to do with the gigantic pile up of irregularities all at once. The regularization would have taken only centuries instead of millennia if colloquial varieties were not prevented from regularizing.



Strong verbs are the most used ones in daily speech so they tend to be more conservative. 

In Italy, Latin is taught in some high schools. 
My language doesn't have cases (except for personal pronouns) but I hadn't any problem translating during school tests. 
We were allowed to use only  a dictionary, which didn't have any declension/conjugation chart.  

EDIT: 

About prepositions + cases: 
- in Latin only two complements were made using the genitive case: causa/gratia + genitive and loco/in loco + genitive 
- in all other cases there were preposition + accusative or preposition + ablative, i.e only two prepositional cases 
- when genitive and dative were replaced by "de + ablative" and "ad + accusative", "causa/gratia + genitive" became "ad + accusative" and loco/in loco + genitive" became "pro + ablative", so there were only three cases, i.e nominative, accusative and ablative 
- when the final "m" and vocalic lenght were lost (about the third century, i.e very early), there were only two cases, i.e nominative and accusative. 

So, when I studied Latin, it was simple because after a preposition there were or the ablative case or the accusative case, in almost all cases.


----------



## Ben Jamin

berndf said:


> Do you think to is fair to compare Slavic derived perfective verbs to derivational suffixes wew find in Germanic or Latin created (usually through suffixing), like e.g. the Latin frequentative as in _dicere_ (to speak) - _dictare _(to say repeatedly) or the Germanic causative as in English _to fall _- _to fell _(the umlauted "e" in_ to fell_ as a reflext of the Germanic_ -j-_ suffix to mark the causative)?



There is undoubtedely a similarity between Latin, Germanic and Slavic way of producing new verbs by infixation or apophony, like "sitzen"/"setzen" and "siedzieć"/"siadać" (perfective) or "sadzać" (causative). or «stać»/»stanąć» (the infix changes the meaning from "to stand" to "to stand up").


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## francisgranada

The situation in the Slavic languages is even more complex than Ben Jamin's example (#179) suggests. See for example the verb "sedieť" (to sit) in Slovak:

_sedieť _(the basic verb - to sit)
_sedávať _(frequentative - to sit often/repeatedly)
_sadiť _(causative - to seat, to plant, ...)
_sadievať _(frequentative of the previous)
_sádzať _(frequentative of _sadiť _- today to set/put/lay ...)
_sadať _(durative? - expresses the action/process of sitting down)
_sadnúť _(perfective - to sit down)

Plus all the above verbs can be provided with (some) prefixes that make them perfective and (typically) give them a different  meaning (e.g. _posedieť, zasadnúť, vysadiť, zasadiť_, etc ...). However, _sedieť _seems to be an extremely "productive" verb from this point of view. For example _čítať _(to read) has only the basic and frequentative variant (_čítavať_). In some cases the derived forms are used only with prefixes, e.g. _poletúvať _(frequ. from _letieť _- to fly), *_letúvať _does not exist. 

In some (few) cases the original unprefixed form has fallen into disuse and has been replaced by a prefixed form, loosing thus the perfective aspect. E.g. _poznať _(to know) in standard Slovak has replaced the original _znať _so it is percieved as not perfective.

There are also many differences among the Slavic languages. E.g. the Slovak variant of the Polish "stanąć" (to stand up) would be  _stanúť_, but this form today doesn't exist in the standard language.


----------



## Johnnyjohn

berndf said:


> I am afraid not really. You have made a case that formalized grammar had artificially extended the life cycle of a particular development stage of Latin as it existed at some time during the republican era. But you have presented nothing to suggest that the grammarians of the time didn’t anything else than recoding a naturally grown language as it presented itself to them.
> 
> I wonder what is wrong with attaching different cases with prepositions. Semitic cases carry much less information than their IE counterparts; the comparison is therefore not quite valid. Prepositions bear a logical relation to the cases they govern. Admittedly, as a result of meaning changes of certain prepositions which are not reflected in the cases they govern, some prepositions seem to govern “wrong” cases, like e.g. the English _to_ which governed the dative (when accusative and dative were still distinguishable, that is until about 600-700 years ago) instead of the semantically to be expected accusative. For a class of prepositions, the cases are necessary to distinguish different meanings which in English sometimes led to a split of prepositions to compensate for the loss of information, e.g. _in_+dative => _in_+objective case and _in_+accusative => _into_+objective case.
> 
> It may be confusing to you as you don’t share a native speakers intuition. Unless you can demonstrate that a system is actually confusing to native speakers themselves, it is unacceptably presumptuous to call the language itself “confused”.



1. If the grammarians just recorded the language as it is, then they only prove just how I am correct about why IE languages are exceptionally irregular. The fact the verbal system is based off of some derivational system is unique, nothing like this has ever happened elsewhere in the world. To this day some IE languages are dragging around hundreds of rotting verbal paradigms. You cannot predict the perfect stem in Latin, in other languages a regular verb is predictable and an irregular verb is not, but in latin all regular verbs are not predictable to some degree.

2. The semantic confusion of prepositions and cases has never occurred to the same degree outside of Europe. Languages commonly either have complex prepositions or complex cases even if they have both they focus on one. One just doesn't find this outside of Europe.

3. A native speaker has all the time in the world to hammer in numerous unpredictable messy paradigms by sheer memorization alone. There is often no pattern in IE languages, its just pure memorization of irregularity after irregularity.



Nino83 said:


> As far as I know gender agreement in Spanish and Latin is the same. What do you mean with "different"?
> 
> What does it mean? Also in English nouns and verbs become adjectives by adding "al" or "able" or "ing". What is the difference between English and Latin?
> I repeat. Latin simplified declensions.
> Old High German had 7 different declension patterns ("i" and "u", "monosyllabic", "r", "nd" "z" and "weak" declension).
> Instead of having 7 declension patterns, you have only one, i.e third declension.
> 
> 11 of the first group, 10 of the second, 0 of the third, 8 irregular. A total of 29 irregular nouns in the third declension. Is this the Latin irregularity you're speaking of?
> Old High German had 7 different declensions for these nouns.
> As we know, dative and genitive cases were replaced, in popular speech, by "de + ablative" and "ad + accusative", so there were very few irregularities, i.e only 8 irregular nouns.
> So, 7 different Old High German declensions vs. 8 irregular nouns in Latin.
> 
> 6 adjectives? What a shame!
> 
> Multiple?
> 1) regular: altus, i = alti - i + *ior/ius* = altior, ius - fortis, is = fortis - is + *ior/ius* = fortior, ius
> 2) adjectives which end with e, i, u + us (eus, ius, uus): perifrastic construction, i.e *magis* + adjective
> 3) adjectives ending with ficus, dicus, volus: *entior/entius*
> 4) 5 irregular adjectives: bonus, malus, magnus, parvus, multus
> 
> Also Germanic languages have strong verbs.
> The first conjugation was the only productive one in later stages. Why? Because it was the most regular.
> 
> Strong verbs are the most used ones in daily speech so they tend to be more conservative.
> 
> In Italy, Latin is taught in some high schools.
> My language doesn't have cases (except for personal pronouns) but I hadn't any problem translating during school tests.
> We were allowed to use only a dictionary, which didn't have any declension/conjugation chart.
> 
> EDIT:
> 
> About prepositions + cases:
> - in Latin only two complements were made using the genitive case: causa/gratia + genitive and loco/in loco + genitive
> - in all other cases there were preposition + accusative or preposition + ablative, i.e only two prepositional cases
> - when genitive and dative were replaced by "de + ablative" and "ad + accusative", "causa/gratia + genitive" became "ad + accusative" and loco/in loco + genitive" became "pro + ablative", so there were only three cases, i.e nominative, accusative and ablative
> - when the final "m" and vocalic lenght were lost (about the third century, i.e very early), there were only two cases, i.e nominative and accusative.
> 
> So, when I studied Latin, it was simple because after a preposition there were or the ablative case or the accusative case, in almost all cases.



1. 11 of what? 10 of what? specify, don't forget heteroclitics and the numerous exceptions listed here in every declension and adjective. Unlike Spanish, Latin adjectives have different gender agreements and declensions. I will ignore nouns as alone they are not so difficult but when combined with the verbal and adjective system of Latin, one will be in for a very irregular language. Its even worse in Icelandic now, as many as 40 declensions many of which are due to suffix swapping not only sound change, how did this never happen elsewhere? But lets focus on adjectives and verbs only.

2. Don't forget 5 adjectives like facillimus. Even if it is as few as you said, the multiple methods to compare have never occurred outside of Europe, find any language in Asia or Africa and they have one productive method or none at all where they just use conjunctions or rephrasing. Don't forget different gender agreements, even if there are less than 100 unpredictable adjectives its still more than many other languages outside of Europe. They are nowhere near as confused.

3. Strong verbs are a leftover in English due to the fact that for some reason the Germanic speakers just threw away their original verbal system only to replace it with a bunch of more derived weak verbs that were also with irregularities that have managed to just trim down now. 

4. By derivation, I will say it for the 10th time, Indo European languages innovated numerous features, so did NE caucasian languages with their nouns, but back to IE, the original language did not have comparative forms, new forms were created using already existing derivational suffixes that originally were for intensive adjectives meaning different suffixes could be used (how does one know red-reddish, but cheese-cheesy? derivation is not predictable), and derivation meant multiple methods for word formation, the verbal system created a perfect, aorist, and future, each of these separate unpredictable lexical words, adjectives also needed to agree with nouns but since the original PIE system had only two genders, languages like Ancient greek had adjectives with the same endings that randomly varied between 2 or 3 genders. The new gender also dragged in more derivational suffixes into creating new feminine paradigms which were inconsistent.
To this day the irregularities caused by the above still hang on in Slavic and baltic languages, and Icelandic. These processes also aggravated and caused the effects of sound change to occur far far more frequently leading to more irregularity. The IE process has not happened in any other language family. IE languages are uniquely irregular not due to sound change in the beginning, it is due to using derivation for everything where inflection is normally used. The exception are NE caucasian languages but with their nouns ONLY, to this day for example in Archi or Chechen around 50% of all underived nouns have a random extension in the oblique, plural, plural oblique that can never be predicted. That is around 800 irregular nouns with 4 parts! 8 times as much as Latin's nouns. Luckily IE didn't go that far with nouns... but the other stuff is there.


----------



## Nino83

Johnnyjohn said:


> 11 of what? 10 of what? specify



The third declension has three patterns. In the first there is singular ablative in "e" and plural genitive in "um", in the second there is "e" and "ium". 
Well, there are 10 nouns which, seeing their morphology, they should have "ium" but they have "um" (like canis, is) and there are 10 nouns that should have "um" but they have "ium". Seeing that in spoken (vulgar) Latin, just during the Republican Era (and Plautus gives some example in his commedies) the genitive case was replaced with "de + ablative", these 21 nouns are not irregular in spoken Latin. 

The third declension has only 8 irregular nouns. Latin is more regular than Old High German, which has 7 declensions for these nouns. 



Johnnyjohn said:


> Unlike Spanish, Latin adjectives have different gender agreements and declensions.



Spanish and Italian gender agreement is the same. 
The only difference I know (with Latin) is the neuter gender. 

bonus puer/bona puella/bonum vinum = buono (m.)/buona (f.) (IT) bueno/buena (SP)
fortis puer/fortis puella/forte vinum = forte (m., f.) (IT) fuerte (SP)
celeber puer/celebris puella/celebre vinum = celebre (m., f.) (IT), célebre (SP)

Is there any case in which gender agreement is different? Let me know. 



Johnnyjohn said:


> when combined with the verbal and adjective system of Latin, one will be in for a very *irregular* language.



Why, where, when? Some example?



Johnnyjohn said:


> Even if it is as few as you said, the multiple methods to compare have never occurred outside of Europe



Multiple? *ior* and *entior* are the same (it's due to phonological issues and it is really predictable). So there are *two* methods (*ior* and *magis*). 

I can speak only about Latin, because I don't know Slavic or other IE languages with case system. 

Only accusative and ablative are used with prepositions (except two cases, with genitive). Adjectives agreement is simply if you know the gender of the nous which is really predictable (for all declension but one, the third). In Germanic languages gender of nouns is not predictable. 

Latin doesn't seem to me more irregular or unpredictable than Old High German, Old English, Old Norse, Icelandic, where also three cases are used with prepositions. 

Can you make some example (not about the 6 second class adjectives, the 8 irregular third declension nouns or the 5 irregular adjectives in comparatives)? 

It's obvious that languages which lack grammatical genders are more regular, so it is not a fair comparison.


----------



## Johnnyjohn

Nino83 said:


> The third declension has three patterns. In the first there is singular ablative in "e" and plural genitive in "um", in the second there is "e" and "ium".
> Well, there are 10 nouns which, seeing their morphology, they should have "ium" but they have "um" (like canis, is) and there are 10 nouns that should have "um" but they have "ium". Seeing that in spoken (vulgar) Latin, just during the Republican Era (and Plautus gives some example in his commedies) the genitive case was replaced with "de + ablative", these 21 nouns are not irregular in spoken Latin.
> 
> The third declension has only 8 irregular nouns. Latin is more regular than Old High German, which has 7 declensions for these nouns.
> 
> 
> 
> Spanish and Italian gender agreement is the same.
> The only difference I know (with Latin) is the neuter gender.
> 
> bonus puer/bona puella/bonum vinum = buono (m.)/buona (f.) (IT) bueno/buena (SP)
> fortis puer/fortis puella/forte vinum = forte (m., f.) (IT) fuerte (SP)
> celeber puer/celebris puella/celebre vinum = celebre (m., f.) (IT), célebre (SP)
> 
> Is there any case in which gender agreement is different? Let me know.
> 
> 
> 
> Why, where, when? Some example?
> 
> 
> 
> Multiple? *ior* and *entior* are the same (it's due to phonological issues and it is really predictable). So there are *two* methods (*ior* and *magis*).
> 
> I can speak only about Latin, because I don't know Slavic or other IE languages with case system.
> 
> Only accusative and ablative are used with prepositions (except two cases, with genitive). Adjectives agreement is simply if you know the gender of the nous which is really predictable (for all declension but one, the third). In Germanic languages gender of nouns is not predictable.
> 
> Latin doesn't seem to me more irregular or unpredictable than Old High German, Old English, Old Norse, Icelandic, where also three cases are used with prepositions.
> 
> Can you make some example (not about the 6 second class adjectives, the 8 irregular third declension nouns or the 5 irregular adjectives in comparatives)?
> 
> It's obvious that languages which lack grammatical genders are more regular, so it is not a fair comparison.



-All your counter examples are Indo European languages. Latin doens't seem to be more irregular than OHG, OE, etc. because those are Indo European languages too.
You forgot to add some superlative ones such as extremus which are not part of the original pattern. Maybe the irregularity was manageable for our Ancestors since their language had fewer word roots, but now with thousands of roots and shifts and analogies hither thither this may be why I hear so many groan about Russian when they didn't find latin hard. Yes, sound change can lead to a very difficult language like tlingit:http://tlingit.info/resources/Grammar-of-Tlingit-Language.pdf
But imagine if tlingit used derivational morphology for its inflections, ouch.


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## Nino83

Johnnyjohn said:


> -All your counter examples are Indo European languages. Latin doens't seem to be more irregular than OHG, OE, etc. because those are Indo European languages too.



Yes, but the discussion started with this sentence: 



Johnnyjohn said:


> The other question is why Latin (and Ancient Greek as well) grew far more redundant, complicated, and heavily irregular compared to Proto-Indo-European at its earliest stages.



OHG, OE, ON, Icelandic are more complicated than Latin in morphology and gender of nouns (which is important for the declension of adjectives) is less predictable. 
So the sentence could be rephrased: "The other question is why *IE languages*, in early times, grew far more redundant, complicated, and heavily irregular compared to Proto-Indo-European at its earliest stages." 

The answer is not easy. Was there any common Indo-European language? What was its grammar like? Was it simpler than that of IE languages?


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## Johnnyjohn

Nino83 said:


> Yes, but the discussion started with this sentence:
> 
> OHG, OE, ON, Icelandic are more complicated than Latin in morphology and gender of nouns (which is important for the declension of adjectives) is less predictable.
> So the sentence could be rephrased: "The other question is why *IE languages*, in early times, grew far more redundant, complicated, and heavily irregular compared to Proto-Indo-European at its earliest stages."
> The answer is not easy. Was there any common Indo-European language? What was its grammar like? Was it simpler than that of IE languages?



The very very earliest stages probably looked like hittite, so yes, it may have been not so schwer. But look at NE caucasian noun classes if you want a more transparent example of the evidence for a unique type of inflection existing. 

There are more things going on that came into existence such as random gender, most languages in the world if not the rest except for the Nakh subbranch of NE caucasian languages have semantic properties to the gender if there are more than 2 genders.


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## berndf

*Moderator note: We have come to a full circle now and there is no sign of any progress in the discussion. The thread is now closed. To all who participated, thank you very much for the lively discussion.*


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