3 ms·
> As a natural one [English] is one of the simplest. Strongly disagree. I think it's one of the most baroque, with too many special cases, irregulars, and gotc
by lmkg 17y ago
> As a natural one [English] is one of the simplest.
Strongly disagree. I think it's one of the most baroque, with too many special cases, irregulars, and gotchas. It doesn't have specific types of complexity. For example, its morphology[1] seems pretty bare, at least if you compare it to other Indo-European languages, but even there it's more complex than Japanese or native Hawaiian. To your point, that makes it mostly amenable to search-and-replace filters, which is convenient.
[1] Changes to the word reflecting grammatical usage, such as "-ness" signifying a noun or "-ed" signifying a past tense. These are usually the bits of other languages that English-speakers think are "hard."