58 points
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Alright, are you calling English sane?

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25 points

Oh, trust me, we are 😭

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16 points

If the teacup fits.

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34 points

There are parts of English that are simple and there are parts that are complex. Same as any language! The cool thing about linguistics is learning about the neat features of some languages. For example, Chinese doesn’t use articles!

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10 points

Are articels useful at all?

What’s the advantage of having a female /male table?

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38 points

they can create tablets

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19 points

Gendered articles probably not but having “a” vs “the” removes the need for additional cases (eg. I/me/my). Latin and Russian don’t have articles but they have more cases which have different suffixes that have to be applied to all nouns. Usually simplifying one part of language makes another part more complex. English has a very simple case structure but the word order is much more strict

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2 points

Neither does Russian, Ukrainian, and I’m guessing, many other Slav languages.

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23 points

Its the language equivalent to a brick…

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10 points

I love it

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9 points

sure, how complex is: their, there, they’re. sure, they sound the same but there is no reason they’re difficult to use in their intended purpose.

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28 points

English grammar is alright as far as languages are concerned. There is some bs but nothing exceptional.

Pronounciation in the English language on the other hand is absolute insanity. If there are any rules besides grouped up exceptions then let me know.

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16 points

And reusing the same word to mean a plethora of completely unrelated things lol.

EG:

Jam = a fruit preserve, to play music, stopped traffic, a door that’s held open, to cram something into something else

Set = a collection of something, to change an option on a device, when something gelatinous becomes more solid, when the sun goes down, a stage or movie background, a list of songs at a concert, to put something down, and about 50 other things

Run = to move quickly, to enter a contest (ie run for President), to have something turned on (is that computer running, running a tap), to be a certain length (this films run time is 90 minutes), to be behind (this bus is running late), to be in charge of something (I’m running this place), a hand in poker, to be liquid (this egg is runny), a tear in a pair of tights

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3 points

I wonder how much of that is due to french and how much from german/saxon dialects. French love mute consonants and wildly different vowel sounds.

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2 points

If there are any rules

As far as I know the only rule is, that I (German) pronounce it always wrong.

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4 points

A lot of the problem is that we use Middle English spellings for a lot of words, but the pronunciation continued to change after the spellings were standardized.

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7 points

I guess you haven’t seen polish then.

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Oh I have, it’s not sane either.

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9 points
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5 points
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4 points
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95 points

Japanese: wtf are you talking about?

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9 points

I’m still learning but what about wa (わ)? It’s used to signify the subject of a sentence I think.

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3 points

I thought that’s the is/am/are (I forgot the term for these)

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6 points

The word you’re looking for is “copula”, and it’s actually 「です」(desu)

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5 points
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Wa just signifies the subject (The translation would be “as for …”)

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16 points

It’s actually 「は」, and… kind of. It marks the topic, which is sort of the thing the conversation is generally about, which typically is the subject of each sentence, but not necessarily. It’s kinda hard to explain it well since it doesn’t really map cleanly onto any grammatical feature in english.

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5 points

Well the “ha” (は) pronounced “wa” is basically like a pointer to the word before it. Like smb. comments “THIS” after it.

The “wa” (わ) character on the other hand is used as a letter in a word. It won’t usually stand alone in a sentence (which is a bit weird since the japanese usually don’t use spaces so you just have to guess/know)

The は is also used in words so have fun knowing when it is a particle and when not.

I am just a beginner on japanese.

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28 points

Finnish: No, seriously, what are they talking about?

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14 points

Chinese too

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10 points

Portuguese: append “s”. O, os; a, as;

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18 points

Russian:

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4 points

Yeah, but what comes after gets messy

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1 point

All languages are like that. If you don’t do something one way, you have to do it another. Basically if you sacrifice complexity in grammar, you have to make up for it in other ways through things like case, word-order, tone and register, etc. It’s a popular myth that languages can be more or less complex than one another.

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