# Is English becoming easier/more regular?



## Johnnyjohn

Compared to German, English has lost some irregularities contained in a Germanic language. German has no regular formation of superlative/comparatives or plurals with or without umlauts and far more ways to create plurals, also noun classes too and gender. What I want to figure out is the regularity of the other areas such as strong verbs and demonyms in English and related language. I can't figure out if it is becoming more irregular or regularizing and whether the same is happening to other languages in the same family. 

I have a hard time figuring out the regularity of forming demonyms in English and comparing it to other related languages as well. Perhaps the regularization for others is inevitable in the disappearance of a feature. English is progressing further down the language cycle and may become more and more analytic thus losing plurals and tenses in a millennium, likewise, Chinese is starting to show features of agglutination, and I hear Estonian has fusional features when compared to it's more agglutinating brother Finnish. The cycle continues.

The thing is, I can't see the immediate replacement features. I would expect something to come along in order to replace a method as one disappears, but some tend to be more redundant in features such as German which has plural articles, plural conjugations, and 12 ways to form plurals. This indirectly distresses me being a native English speaker, to feel as if we are losing features such as strong verbs, irregular plurals, forming some perfects with to-be, and many more, while not investing in other areas, as if the tongue were not in good hands. And English has been belittled so much, yes, for less inflection. "Grammarless language", so much belittling. It really hurts for the native English speaker to hear someone call English "primitive" compared to more highly inflected languages. I even hear some claim a language such as Mandarin Chinese, which has no inflection and is very regular, to be grammarless.

We may not have gender but we could have a classifier system or some sort of association such as those collective names, but they never caught on yet they could have. Genders and different plurals distinguish homonyms, and this is done in German (Woerter vs Worte, Das Junge vs Der Junge)
Examples for those not familiar with Germanic languages:
http://hhr-m.userweb.mwn.de/de-decl/noun/

There were many, many names for groups of humans, animals, and other matter available but we never used them fully. Were we too lazy to have an extra helping features, such as gender has been for some, if other languages could?  Even Serbo-croation is full of collective nouns, which uses a system without fancy names but derivation, that are used in full despite having gender!

What is your belief on the matter? And what should we do? Maybe English does need an academy. 
Or the absence thereof. Things such as reflexive only verbs, modal stacking, newer tenses (habitual be, new aspects), are discouraged in English in exchange for simplified English and older features are discarded or not taught. A bad cycle. 

I suspect most academies seek to include new features while tightly holding on to old ones/irregularities in order to create a "difficult" language, then you have English which does the contrary.
For example: We seldom obey the rules for latin or greek plurals. But I've seen more German speakers obeying theirs.


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## killerbee256

While English is much simpler sister German still not a "simple" language. Having spent some time in Brazil teaching English I can tell you that English phonics are not simple at all, it just seems that way to us native speakers. For example "pin" and "pan" those seem like very different words, right? While their not for Portuguese speakers just telling those sounds about apart is hard, much less pronouncing the difference. 

As far as other Germanic languages go, German itself is externally conservative due to it's history, basically there are so many "dialects" in Germany that were so different from each other that many were in fact different languages. So the few educated people in the middle ages used a very archaic "high" German as a compromise, then once we reach the 18th and 19th century and public schooling emerged and it became more of a common spoken language and started surplant the "dialects."

Now if you look at these other German languages, like low German, or Swiss German you'll find that are simpler then standard German. Also look at Dutch for instance, before dutch independence it was considered just another German dialect. Dutch while not as simplified as English is simplified compared to high German. The same goes for Scandinavian Language.


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## Johnnyjohn

Simplified is the wrong word, simplified in inflectional morphology perhaps. Morphology goes in cycles. Some like Finnish use cases and postpositions, while Chinese uses auxiliaries and syntax, and Dutch and English to some degree do, which each have some unique qualities I reckon, but standard High German seems to be pressed and full of features. Loss of gender is natural. A language such as Chinese had no tones or grammaticalized classifiers 3,000 years ago, but they evolved. We don't know what will become in English, it could gain complexities in new areas in the coming centuries.

Heck, for German, the simple past is being kept alive quite long and so is the genitive, but then they insist on bringing in more features while keeping the old, hence "Awful German". Those double infinitive (ersatz infinitiv) constructions tend to come in whatever comfortable order in dialects but have to come in a different order in SOV clauses. Heck, dialects allow more variation in order of a cluster instead of the prescribed one.

They tried stuff like that in English during the 18th century, to force latin grammar and to "correct" English; we could have undergone a similar fate.

I know some languages tend to be more conservative but this is outside of the morphology. Cantonese to Mandarin is sort of what Czech is to Russian. But the method does not get haywired. I can only imagine what a similar method would do to English if they started up the academy, they might create whole classes of animal group names and they would have to agree with the movement of animals etc. They would make an artificial distinction between the (thuh) and the (thee) and we would use extinct dialectal plurals such as treen, eyen, beek, lambru, instead of losing our plurals and turning to other methods
 (determiners, reduplication, measure words) as used in Vietnamese or Chinese. 

I just hate the belittlement given to English for lacking older features, and having a dialectal history rather than a prescribed one. So what should be done? I hate English being looked down on. Is it time for an academy to keep the language from simplifying at the hands of the world?


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## learnerr

Johnnyjohn said:


> They would make an artificial distinction between the (thuh) and the (thee) and we would use extinct dialectal plurals such as treen, eyen, beek, lambru, instead of losing our plurals and turning to other methods [...]


I don't think this is the way academies work for other languages.  They tend to work for preserving of what is still used, imposture of older features only happens when there is some specific political need. Academies may look mad, but not _that_ mad. ;-)

I don't know how and by whom English is looked down on, but can guess that it happens because of the language's becoming more practical, more about the objects of thought and less caring for the subjects of thought: take the processes of elimination of the subjunctive and of simplification of the sentences, for example. That's not so the language that changes, but the culture of thinking does; no academy can help it. And it is up to you to decide whether you'd like to see English a more subjective language.


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## Johnnyjohn

The loss of the subjunctive is a losing of a feature, normally something comes along to replace it. English may not have gender but it could have other means.
Don't assume the loss of inlfection is always simplification. Like I said Fusional-Analytical-Agglutinating-Fusional-etc. but the lack of gaining new features is a sign.

Like I said, Languages go in cycles, some like Chinese have absolutely no inflection but had them in the past, but now suffixes are evolving in Chinese. 
English lacking inflection is not the issues but rather the lacking of features at all when compared to German. It is important to not equate inflection with only grammar. Grammar is more than cases or conjugations. The difference between Synthetic and Analytical is where you put the information, whether in helping words or an ending.

Mandarin is the perfect example of the watered down language spoken by 1.2 Billion. Compared to Cantonese, Mandarin is simplified. Cantonese has more techniques using word order and helping words. And I want English to gain or even regain features in analytical ways as goes the cycle. 

Imagine measure words and numerous aspects besides progressive and perfect! Thai has many different aspect markers despite having no tenses or conjugation, 
http://www.thai-language.com/id/590262, it also uses counting words despite having no gender (3 ____ of dogs, 3 _____ of cars).

and AAVE english is a great example of a dialect with a rich verb aspect system and syntax, but standard English? A no no.

English syntax can be quite complicated with raising of objects and inversion, or placement adjectives to indicate restrictiveness. But these will die I guess and nothing will replace them.
Greek for example lost many features but has gained new ones in other areas to compensate. I almost feel disappoint in native English speakers.

And academies can be bad, High German was a literary language devised to communicate, so was Classicial Latin compared to the vulgar common variety. And Latin was heavily inflected but relied on being inflected instead of trying to have every kind of feature there was!
 The difference is is that English has no literary variety that is become the main form, imagine if everyone spoke Upper German, which is much less overstuffed and mad than Standard. English is losing features and refuses to accept new ones, a bad cycle.


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## killerbee256

I'm not sure it's so simple any more, I think English is beginning to freeze or at least slow down due the fact there are so many speakers. For English there are something like four major groups of just native speakers, the British isles, North America, South Africa and Australia and then there are semi native areas like India. All these groups have much variation among them and within themselves that there is a need to have a standard so that these groups can communicate with each other. Other wise they might not be able to, just imagine a man speaking heavy Ebonics trying to hold a conversation with a old farmer from Cornwall and a man from rural Australia.


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## berndf

Johnnyjohn said:


> The difference is is that English has no literary variety that is become the main form


Well, it has. Chancery English played that role in the transition from Middle English to Modern English; and of course authors like Chaucer. The issue is that England wasn't as poly-centric as Germany and the standard had a much bigger unifying thrust than standard German. We see a rapid fading of dialects in German today and maybe in a century or so, the only difference between dialect may be details how certain vowels are pronounced as it is largely the case in with English dialects.


Johnnyjohn said:


> English is losing features and refuses to accept new ones, a bad cycle.


I don't think so. As you said yourself correctly, morphology isn't grammar. English syntax is complex enough and many of the subtleties of the tense/aspect system developed only in modern English.


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## learnerr

As I composed my first reply, I had to ponder through the matter, and then I wrote my conclusion without writing out the intermediate steps. I think this might have affected comprehensibility of that post. Of course, as many have already pointed out, complexity of English hasn't decreased; for one thing, its vocabulary is complex enough to express a lot of nuances that a language of culture needs to express, for another, its grammar is not exactly simple, either. Still, there was something that drove John's sentiment and compelled him to write here; what it was? He said it was his language's being looked down on by other people, so I started to think what must be the cause.

Incidentally, there are changes in English that cause some bewilderment in me as well, and which make me sometimes enjoy that kind of English more than the modern one. The reaction is purely emotional, so in the beginning I'll list these changes without analysis; the emotional reaction is not _always_ negative, but sometimes it is. Those are:
- loss of the case form "whom";
- tendency to abbreviate words (problem => prob, etc);
- loss of the multi-connected kind of syntax, now sentences appear to be shorter than they were ("For instance, the much-admired machine of Pascal is now simply an object of curiosity, which, whilst it displays the powerful intellect of its inventor, is yet of little utility in itself. Its powers extended no further than the execution of the first four operations of arithmetic, and indeed were in reality confined to that of the first two, since multiplication and division were the result of a series of additions and subtractions." — note how the words like 'powers' are reused in these sentences, making the syntax multi-connected in one flow);
- the aforementioned loss of the subjunctive.

Of course, these all changes do not mean that the language becomes simpler than it was, but they are those changes that may make other people dislike the language (and as for the second feature, I indeed heard people who made laugh out of it). There is something in common between them all, something that unites them and distinguishes them from other, neutral, changes.

The idea: the matter behind such changes is in people's judgement what language is for. The common American sentiment now is that a language is an instrument of communicating ideas, exactly that. So, what language has to do is to express well the objective properties of the things that belong to the world we live in. There would be no way to argue with this judgement if people had free will and thus didn't have to pay attention to themselves; but they don't have free will. We need to consider people as machines, not as logical machines akin to computers since people usually need to behave illogically, but as machines of some other kind. No matter the kind, the machine needs to have a means of decision what ideas it has currently to pay attention to, and for that it needs to evaluate how paying attention to different ideas reflects on its own condition. The condition of the machine's thought is what it has to care for, not only for the things in the world that it has to live in; the first means considering the subject of the thought, the second means considering the objects of the thought.

Now, all these four language features (the case distinction of the word "who", the full words, the intricate ways of expressing links between things, the subjunctive mood) are useless for objective thinking, but they are useful only for subjective thinking, i.e. for taking consideration of the condition of our thinking & feeling about the objects. Therefore, they express the Anglophone culture's desire to think objectively and care less for the subjects of thought. So, the reaction of people, which reaction John did not like, most probably has to do not with _simplification of the language_ (which is non-existent), but with _the changes in the Anglophone culture_. People indeed may perceive these changes as simplification, since they are a simplification in what they care for accompanied by lack thereof in what they don't, but their perception is incorrect. That is what I meant to say.

I hope this was comprehensible and not wrong.


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## myšlenka

Johnnyjohn said:


> The loss of the subjunctive is a losing of a feature, normally something comes along to replace it. English may not have gender but it could have other means. Don't assume the loss of inflection is always simplification. Like I said Fusional-Analytical-Agglutinating-Fusional-etc. but the lack of gaining new features is a sign.


  I am not sure I understand your concern and what you mean by "normally something comes along to replace it". You mentioned the loss of strong verbs and irregular plurals in your first post. Obviously, the "something" that comes along to replace strong verbs and irregular plurals is of course a regular past tense ending and a regular plural ending respectively but it seems to me that you want new irregulars to develop. Is that so?

  As for the loss of subjunctive and grammatical gender, these are two very different features. The subjunctive carries meaning and I am quite sure speakers of English who don't use the subjunctive have a way to express that meaning. Grammatical gender on the other hand isn't necessarily connected to a certain meaning (though some studies show that grammatical gender affects meaning). It's not clear to me in what way grammatical gender is practical and informative except in cases where it disambiguates homonyms or where it helps narrow down the number of possible discourse referents. Both cases are rather marginal and context will in any case be sufficient to decide what is meant so it's not clear to me why you want a linguistic feature to replace it.

It is true that English has lost most of its inflectional morphology but it has grammaticalized other features that you don't find in closely related languages:
- _do_-insertion in questions and negative sentences.
- progressive aspect.


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## Johnnyjohn

I've read all the above to just note. Too add my view, the English tense aspect system is nearly at the same level as most romance languages in methods, the main difference is the lack of conjugation for each and every one which makes them get considered more complex. We have a future, past, conditional, present, but no distinct imperfect form (we can use "was going to" but I wouldn't be surprised if Spanish could do that with their own prospective future) and each can be combined with the progressive, perfect, or both as in Spanish or Portuguese. The biggest thing I think that English is missing when compared to other Indo-Euro languages is gender. (I use that word, "missing" without any implication of need or deficiency). 

To Lerner: This is what I am emphasizing, people call English many things precisely for what it looks like at first look. The anglophone culture is looked down on to some degree. English is subject to even belittling by foreigners if we are to go so far. I think this can rest on gender(which is legitimate, English has an absence) and a bias towards non-analytical methods(which is not, English grammar is not lacking), we can see folks lamenting the decay of Latin into "simplified" varieties, nevertheless, that is false. I want a strong anglophone culture just as any other one, but there is not so much.


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## learnerr

Johnnyjohn said:


> To Lerner: This is what I am emphasizing, people call English many things precisely for what it looks like at first look.


That's true for every language, just different people look at different things being inquiried by their minds, and things look for them differently at first look...


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## Johnnyjohn

It seems english is also losing a modal verb or two. Tharf is dead and ought, need, and dare as semi modals are getting rarer. Shall is going to die too. 
And to Myslenka, the subjunctive is pretty much gone in Germanic languages to a degree, I think. The word Brauchen is becoming somewhat modal in German, looks light they get even more still. Also the lost of perfects with to be as well happened in English.

It is hard to keep the self together when seeing things pass but not being immediately aware of new forms. I can't see a new technique that did come about this decade I could consider a replacement, and that is what I was talking about the whole time.


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## marrish

Johnnyjohn said:


> This is what I am emphasizing, people call English many things precisely for what it looks like at first look. The anglophone culture is looked down on to some degree. English is subject to even belittling by foreigners if we are to go so far. I think this can rest on gender(which is legitimate, English has an absence) and a bias towards non-analytical methods(which is not, English grammar is not lacking), we can see folks lamenting the decay of Latin into "simplified" varieties, nevertheless, that is false. I want a strong anglophone culture just as any other one, but there is not so much.


I don't find it going very far with foreigners (not native English speakers) passing comments about this language, I hope it is not a taboo. If you perceive that Anglophone culture is looked down on, it is not different from other cultures or languages being looked down on. Still I perceive this as a giant complaining about the ailments of a dwarf, given the tendency of English becoming a world language and its culture (well, the primitive, commercial and very superficial one, which is more American than English but let us not forget other groups) being fed to all continents instead of propagating the English speaking Nobel Prize winners around the world. Last but not least what I perceive is English's status a the prestigious languages in a number of countries and milieux, amongst which you reminded me of former English colonies. 

If the English language is "inferior" to others because its purported simplicity, it's another question. My view is that it is able to serve all functions of the modern world with success, not only thanks to its vast vocabulary but for its creativity and leaning to adjust in all situations, be it colloquial, literary or scientific.

It may be that for it's grammar it is such a versatile language! After all, I know several more complicated grammars (Sanskrit Latin etc.) but it's English that's universally applied.

Now that I'm singing the glory of English I'd be more glad it'd be French or German or Urdu. But it's not my point to be tilting at windmills.


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## Johnnyjohn

Johnnyjohn said:


> It seems english is also losing a modal verb or two. Tharf is dead and ought, need, and dare as semi modals are getting rarer. Shall is going to die too.
> And to Myslenka, the subjunctive is pretty much gone in Germanic languages to a degree, I think. The word Brauchen is becoming somewhat modal in German, looks light they get even more still. Also the lost of perfects with to be as well happened in English.
> 
> It is hard to keep the self together when seeing things pass but not being immediately aware of new forms. I can't see a new technique that did come about this decade I could consider a replacement, and that is what I was talking about the whole time.



To add to this I notice German has gained a colliquial continuous and the ultra perfekt and ultra plusquamperfekt is gaining ground in certain dialects. On the other hand, nothing in English has spread whatsoever recently, we are losing features still. This is another point I am making, like I said, I feel a certain disappointment with how the anglophone culture is waning, it is precisely this reluctance to accept new inventions that bugs me despite being a language with no academy, and one being willing to disregard anything! Ironic.


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## rbrunner

Johnnyjohn said:


> To add to this I notice German has gained a colliquial continuous and the ultra perfekt and ultra plusquamperfekt is gaining ground in certain dialects.



I am curious, because German is my mother tongue, but I never heard of these new language features that you mention here: Can you give some example sentences?



Johnnyjohn said:


> I feel a certain disappointment with how the anglophone culture is waning.



Isn't it quite a stretch from a language that did not seem to acquire new grammatical features lately to a whole culture waning?

I can tell you something about that splendid German language hanging on to all those genders, umlauts and irregularities: Just take something from popular culture and check how young people in Germany call it. Given the choice to use a perfect, legitimate and apt German word and an English one, what do think they mostly use? Rhetorical question, of course: The German word usually is so uncool, it's nearly untouchable. If you are caught using it, you get ridiculed.

It's really no way to treat one's own language, if you ask me. An no, irregularities and the invention of new grammatical features don't make up for this.


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## berndf

rbrunner said:


> I am curious, because German is my mother tongue, but I never heard of these new language features that you mention here: Can you give some example sentences?


_Ich war am Arbeiten, als er kam_ instead of _Ich arbeitete [gerade], als er kam_. In some dialects (Stichwort: _Rheinische Verlaufsform_) this _am_-progressive (which is possible in different registers and dialects) has been grammaticalized and is mandatory like the continuous form is in the equivalent English sentence_ I was working when he came_._

Ich habe geschlafen gehabt_ or even _Ich hatte geschlafen gehabt _instead of _ich schlief_ or _ich habe geschlafen_ (not to be confused with the "double perfect" as a replacement of the pluperfect: _Ich habe geschlafen gehabt ~ Ich hatte geschlafen_)


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## Johnnyjohn

The AM continuous doesn't really carry over elsewhere though. I am not sure if it can be used in passives or participles. 
(I came, having slept.= I bin gekommt, habend geschlafen, but not a progressive I think (having been sleeping))

The best equivalent is what happened to Mandarin in Beijing. Beijing Mandarin is pretty much a watered down variety of Chinese used for communication, people almost always ignore the correct measure word and just use 个 for everything, and there are fewer aspect particles than Cantonese and only 4 tones and no sandhi. They also "simplified" the characters making it even harder to read since phonetic and etymological information is gone. 

To rbrunner: I am referring to the native speakers culture for the native speakers culture. It is our language and we have our own history with it. I don't want it to become like Standard Mandarin. And you may have the teenager using denglish but you have the other guy who thinks it is the silliest; and a joke of a language. When I started with languages, I never expected English to have it's reputation good or bade, I though it would just be a language like Spanish, German, French, etc.


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## berndf

There is nothing continuous in "I came, having slept". It is a perfect participle clause but no progressive aspect is expressed.


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## Johnnyjohn

I meant that it can't be turned into "having _been_ sleeping" with the am continuous. I knew that had no progressive aspect.

To ask, what is the double perfect or double plusquamperfect for? To express something even before another perfect? I had had slept before he had slept? I remember talking like as a kid that before being corrected.


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## berndf

A past event that occured before another past event. It is sometimes consistent with the English pluperfect: _He had already eaten when I arrived ~ Er hatte schon gegessen, als ich ankam_, but not always.


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## Johnnyjohn

Alright, back on topic. One of the biggest questions I have is what happened to English modals and what or why they would become the way they have. Being defective and unable to take objects nor being able to stack or be used in double infinitives, all of these possible in many other German languages. 

And to remind, I am not seeing anything new coming into the language. No new constructions that is, no double perfect, absentive, new tense, etc. but some verbs are becoming irregular, this however is not my preferred type of change.


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