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I dont vant tu teik saids, but German haz diklention und konjugation, vich maiks it a suboptimal lingua franka. Not tu mention meni iregular verbs. Mai vot gos

I dont vant tu teik saids, but German haz diklention und konjugation, vich maiks it a suboptimal lingua franka. Not tu mention meni iregular verbs. Mai vot gos tu som nordik languag like Svedish.

dkdbejwi383 6y ago
You're not going to get a lot of support here, unless you change your vote to Rust.
- soldehierro 6y ago
  Esperanto > Rust
sltkr 6y ago
Does German have (significantly) more irregular verbs than English?
- dmoy 6y ago
  No. German has significantly fewer irregular verbs than English. It's ~200 to ~300. (French is double that?) There's enough to be moderately annoying, but not that bad. Also (in my personal opinion), German irregular verbs tend to be not-as-irregular as English.
  - gecko 6y ago
    The fuzzy thing with counting French irregular verbs is that there are so many that follow similar patterns that they really can't be treated as fully irregular. More, like...oddly specific variants of the -re/-ir/-er verb classes. (You can get into this with English, too, in things like "to come", "came"/"to become", "became", or "to hold", "held"/"to behold", "beheld", but we actually IIRC have fewer groupings like this.) So the raw French number is higher in a strict sense, but potentially between English and German overall.
yongjik 6y ago
Unpopular opinion: Declension and conjugation are nice! It means different forms for the act of watching X (watching birds), X that is watching (watching eyes), or X that is used for the act of watching (watching post). So you immediately know which one is which, instead of trying to figure that out from context (you have 200 milliseconds before the next sentence starts, good luck).
- HideousKojima 6y ago
  In English it's not based on context, it's based on word order. Declension is a cool concept but it's far more confusing to foreigners because word order basically doesn't matter. For example in Czech: Jan zabil Petra Jan Petra zabil Petra Jan zabil Petra zabil Jan Zabil Petra Jan and Zabil Jan Petra are all equivalent to the English "John killed Peter." Change Jan to Jana and Petra to Petr and all 6 of those become "Peter killed John." Even more confusing to a foreigner learning it is that Petra and Jana are the feminine forms of those names in the nominative case.
vidarh 6y ago
If you want to go that route, it's fun to imagine a "unified Germanic" achieved by systematic reform to bring the main Germanic language closer together. Start by purging English of French influence, starting with words where words of Germanic origin exists with a similar meaning. Simplify German grammar. Undo some consonant shifts. E.g (the German and Dutch I had to check/adjust w/Google translate; no guarantees for accuracy): Swedish: En dag kan vi alla tala samma språk Norwegian: En dag kan vi alle snakke samme språk (or "det samme språket") Danish: En dag kan vi alle tale det samme sprog German: Eines Tages können wir alle dieselbe Sprache sprechen Dutch: Op een dag kunnen we allemaal dezelfde taal spreken English: One day we can all speak the same language Now consider "speech" as an alternative to "language" in English (alternatively: "tale" is valid but archaic in Norwegian in this context and we have the English cognate "talk"), and undo that D->T consonant shift in German (e.g. compare Tag to Low German "Dag"), and replace "the" (compare det/de/die/das/der etc.). There are a whole lot of simple spelling and sound changes that'd bring the above languages a lot closer together very easily. Of course it's easy in theory - in practice I've lived through multiple Norwegian language reforms and know how excruciatingly slow it can be to get people to adapt (e.g. Norway changed the spoken form of numbers above 20 in 1952 from the equivalent of "four and fifty" to "fifty-four"; my parents learned the new forms in primary school, yet I still picked up the old forms from them in the late 70's and still switch back and forth between the old and new forms now)
HDMI_Cable 6y ago
I don't think declensions and conjugations matter all that much, seeing how Latin was the Lingua Franca for 2000+ years, and _the_ Lingua Franca: French, has a load of irregulars too. But we all know that it should be Esperanto.
- ithkuil 6y ago
  Esperanto is more like Go. Rust is more like lojban

I dont vant tu teik saids, but German haz diklention und konjugation, vich maiks it a suboptimal lingua franka. Not tu mention meni iregular verbs. Mai vot gos tu som nordik languag like Svedish.

dkdbejwi383 6y ago

You're not going to get a lot of support here, unless you change your vote to Rust.

soldehierro 6y ago
Esperanto > Rust

sltkr 6y ago

Does German have (significantly) more irregular verbs than English?

dmoy 6y ago
No. German has significantly fewer irregular verbs than English. It's ~200 to ~300. (French is double that?) There's enough to be moderately annoying, but not that bad. Also (in my personal opinion), German irregular verbs tend to be not-as-irregular as English.
- gecko 6y ago
  The fuzzy thing with counting French irregular verbs is that there are so many that follow similar patterns that they really can't be treated as fully irregular. More, like...oddly specific variants of the -re/-ir/-er verb classes. (You can get into this with English, too, in things like "to come", "came"/"to become", "became", or "to hold", "held"/"to behold", "beheld", but we actually IIRC have fewer groupings like this.) So the raw French number is higher in a strict sense, but potentially between English and German overall.

yongjik 6y ago

Unpopular opinion: Declension and conjugation are nice! It means different forms for the act of watching X (watching birds), X that is watching (watching eyes), or X that is used for the act of watching (watching post). So you immediately know which one is which, instead of trying to figure that out from context (you have 200 milliseconds before the next sentence starts, good luck).

HideousKojima 6y ago
In English it's not based on context, it's based on word order. Declension is a cool concept but it's far more confusing to foreigners because word order basically doesn't matter. For example in Czech: Jan zabil Petra Jan Petra zabil Petra Jan zabil Petra zabil Jan Zabil Petra Jan and Zabil Jan Petra are all equivalent to the English "John killed Peter." Change Jan to Jana and Petra to Petr and all 6 of those become "Peter killed John." Even more confusing to a foreigner learning it is that Petra and Jana are the feminine forms of those names in the nominative case.

vidarh 6y ago

If you want to go that route, it's fun to imagine a "unified Germanic" achieved by systematic reform to bring the main Germanic language closer together. Start by purging English of French influence, starting with words where words of Germanic origin exists with a similar meaning. Simplify German grammar. Undo some consonant shifts. E.g (the German and Dutch I had to check/adjust w/Google translate; no guarantees for accuracy): Swedish: En dag kan vi alla tala samma språk Norwegian: En dag kan vi alle snakke samme språk (or "det samme språket") Danish: En dag kan vi alle tale det samme sprog German: Eines Tages können wir alle dieselbe Sprache sprechen Dutch: Op een dag kunnen we allemaal dezelfde taal spreken English: One day we can all speak the same language Now consider "speech" as an alternative to "language" in English (alternatively: "tale" is valid but archaic in Norwegian in this context and we have the English cognate "talk"), and undo that D->T consonant shift in German (e.g. compare Tag to Low German "Dag"), and replace "the" (compare det/de/die/das/der etc.). There are a whole lot of simple spelling and sound changes that'd bring the above languages a lot closer together very easily. Of course it's easy in theory - in practice I've lived through multiple Norwegian language reforms and know how excruciatingly slow it can be to get people to adapt (e.g. Norway changed the spoken form of numbers above 20 in 1952 from the equivalent of "four and fifty" to "fifty-four"; my parents learned the new forms in primary school, yet I still picked up the old forms from them in the late 70's and still switch back and forth between the old and new forms now)

HDMI_Cable 6y ago

I don't think declensions and conjugations matter all that much, seeing how Latin was the Lingua Franca for 2000+ years, and _the_ Lingua Franca: French, has a load of irregulars too. But we all know that it should be Esperanto.

ithkuil 6y ago
Esperanto is more like Go. Rust is more like lojban