3 ms·
Quite the opposite, English is a relatively poor language that lacks many refined elements found in many other languages such as specific gender and verbal infl
by coliveira 6y ago
Quite the opposite, English is a relatively poor language that lacks many refined elements found in many other languages such as specific gender and verbal inflection. A language like German is able to create very specific words by a well defined process, a process that is missing in English. So, while it is possible to express a lot of different meanings in English, the language is not very sophisticated at this compared to others. The big advantage enjoyed by English is the fact that it has been spread by the two imperial world powers of the last 200 years.
- jimktrains2 6y agoWhy do you consider gender inflections to be refined? Genderized things are essentially arbitrary and just something else that needs to be memorized. Even for people it gets tedious at times, hence why english has has the singular they for quite a while for referring to positions or unspecified people.
- wolfgke 6y ago> Genderized things are [...] just something else that needs to be memorized The same holds for the vocable - here, "nobody" complains that this is just something else that needs to be memorized. So, just consider the genus as part of the vocabulary word.