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> Unlike English, which if first discovered today spoken by a people in the interior of New Guinea, would lead to accusations of a linguistic hoax. English gra

> Unlike English, which if first discovered today spoken by a people in the interior of New Guinea, would lead to accusations of a linguistic hoax. English grammar is actually very regular. It has lost most of the complexity of its Germanic substrate due to the repeated historic pidginization. For a learner, the lack of grammatical gender is godsent and a turbo hack to producing grammatically correct sentences.

canjobear 4y ago
You're right that English grammar is fairly simple in terms of things like morphology and grammatical gender. Where I think English would be surprising, if discovered as a new language, is the phonology: we have lots of extremely unusual and hard-to-pronounce consonant and vowel sounds. You can take whole classes just to learn how to pronounce the English /r/ in a way that sounds right. Which makes it especially unfortunate as a world language.
- johannes1234321 4y ago
  > You can take whole classes just to learn how to pronounce the English /r/ in a way that sounds right. Which makes it especially unfortunate as a world language. While true that is "solved" by having very distinct accents. Somebody from Oxford, Melbourne, Delhi and Houston ( all pronounce the /r/ and other sounds quite different, but will still understand each other (given a little will on both sides)
  - notahacker 4y ago
    Tolerance of different pronunciations is helpful for people learning to speak English, but not so much for following what they're saying. Plus of course we have a significant number of words where an attempted phonetic pronunciation might not be a bit unusual so much as completely unintelligible. At least we're not that fussy about stress and apart from implied questions don't really convey much important meaning with tone.
    - xhevahir 4y ago
      I don't know about you, but I have a very hard time understanding a lot of Indian accents specifically because of the unfamiliar stress patterns. (That, and their avoidance of aspirated consonants, which drives me crazy.)
      - notahacker 4y ago
        tbh I find the unfamiliar stress patterns of reasonably fluent Indian English speakers a lot less problematic than some of the quirks my fellow Brits' stronger regional accents! The tendency to enunciate syllables we often mash together actually tends to be clearer
        BuckRogers 4y ago
        Yeah I do decent with Indian accents as well. And I have more trouble with Chinese accents and many British accents. But I mostly can’t stand the southern English and their inability to pronounce the letter R. It sounds like someone with a speech impediment. As an American I greatly prefer speaking to a Scot or Irishman. And the closer you get to London the more the English have a French culture. By that I mean an inferiority/superiority complex. They’re always better than everyone else.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
School-Cotton 4y ago
English verb and noun morphology are simple. English phonology and syntax are extremely complex. This is why people say “English has simple grammar”: they’re thinking only about morphology, which is the hard part of Latin, Greek, Russian, etc.
- usernameak 4y ago
  As a native Russian speaker, I would say that getting the morphology wrong won't prevent you from being understood. You will sound pretty weird, but people will still understand you.
  - School-Cotton 4y ago
    Similarly, English syntax errors - which are extremely common among non-native speakers - usually don’t prevent you from being understood, either. E.g. “I wondered what did he do” will be understood perfectly by virtually 100% of English speakers, but will immediately mark you as a non-native speaker (the correct form is “I wondered what he did”).
    - int_19h 4y ago
      And, given the sheer number of accents, getting the pronunciation wrong is not that big of a deal either, especially if you do it consistently. Native speakers adapt very quickly. The real problem is understanding English spoken by those native speakers in all their accents...
dreamcompiler 4y ago
Of course English has gender but mostly in pronouns which are easy to master (until you talk about ships where it gets weird.) Plurals and articles seem to trip up many non-native English speakers. The rules for these things are quite intricate and riddled with exceptions, and if you write a page of prose and make a single mistake with a plural or an article, a native English reader will instantly know you are not a native speaker, even if your meaning is understood. Example: "if you write page of prose and make single mistake with plural or article, native English reader will instantly know you are not native speaker."
- CRConrad 4y ago
  > Of course English has gender but mostly in pronouns which are easy to master (until you talk about ships where it gets weird.) "Ships are 'she', except in the American navy, where littoral surface combatants are 'he'", or "...except in the British navy, where submarines are 'he'", something like that, isn't it? Guess I'll only talk about "the vessel", which should pretty reliably be "it". > Plurals and articles seem to trip up many non-native English speakers. The rules for these things are quite intricate and riddled with exceptions, and if you write a page of prose and make a single mistake with a plural or an article, a native English reader will instantly know you are not a native speaker, even if your meaning is understood. Fortunately not so bad for speakers of German and the Nordic languages, which work rather similarly. (Germans usually give themselves away by using the compound in stead of simple past tense.) > Example: "if you write page of prose and make single mistake with plural or article, native English reader will instantly know you are not native speaker." The canonical example seems to be the Slavic languages, above all Russian.
  - School-Cotton 4y ago
    To me, any use of “she” to refer to ships (or countries, or whatever other inanimate things people sometimes call “she”) sounds dated, weird, and somewhat poetic/figurative. I suspect this usage is almost totally dying out among the younger generations.
    - 4y ago
amyjess 4y ago
English word order is janked, though. It's really annoying that we're modifier-modified when it comes to adjectives but modified-modifier when it comes to relative clauses. We say "the red car", but "the car, which is red,". Also we sometimes use modified-modifier for adjectives for poetic effect, in constructs such as "painter extraordinaire", "minister plenipotentiary", or "court martial". And then we have questions, where English goes from normally being SVO to being OSV. We say "That is John." but ask "Who is that?", and if we say "That is who?", it's usually an expression of abject shock. Or sometimes we dip into our Germanic heritage and bring out V2 word order (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V2_word_order#Vestiges_in_Modern_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V2_word_order#Vestiges_in_Mode...).

canjobear 4y ago

You're right that English grammar is fairly simple in terms of things like morphology and grammatical gender. Where I think English would be surprising, if discovered as a new language, is the phonology: we have lots of extremely unusual and hard-to-pronounce consonant and vowel sounds. You can take whole classes just to learn how to pronounce the English /r/ in a way that sounds right. Which makes it especially unfortunate as a world language.

johannes1234321 4y ago
> You can take whole classes just to learn how to pronounce the English /r/ in a way that sounds right. Which makes it especially unfortunate as a world language. While true that is "solved" by having very distinct accents. Somebody from Oxford, Melbourne, Delhi and Houston ( all pronounce the /r/ and other sounds quite different, but will still understand each other (given a little will on both sides)
- notahacker 4y ago
  Tolerance of different pronunciations is helpful for people learning to speak English, but not so much for following what they're saying. Plus of course we have a significant number of words where an attempted phonetic pronunciation might not be a bit unusual so much as completely unintelligible. At least we're not that fussy about stress and apart from implied questions don't really convey much important meaning with tone.
  - xhevahir 4y ago
    I don't know about you, but I have a very hard time understanding a lot of Indian accents specifically because of the unfamiliar stress patterns. (That, and their avoidance of aspirated consonants, which drives me crazy.)
    - notahacker 4y ago
      tbh I find the unfamiliar stress patterns of reasonably fluent Indian English speakers a lot less problematic than some of the quirks my fellow Brits' stronger regional accents! The tendency to enunciate syllables we often mash together actually tends to be clearer
      - BuckRogers 4y ago
        Yeah I do decent with Indian accents as well. And I have more trouble with Chinese accents and many British accents. But I mostly can’t stand the southern English and their inability to pronounce the letter R. It sounds like someone with a speech impediment. As an American I greatly prefer speaking to a Scot or Irishman. And the closer you get to London the more the English have a French culture. By that I mean an inferiority/superiority complex. They’re always better than everyone else.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

School-Cotton 4y ago

English verb and noun morphology are simple. English phonology and syntax are extremely complex. This is why people say “English has simple grammar”: they’re thinking only about morphology, which is the hard part of Latin, Greek, Russian, etc.

usernameak 4y ago
As a native Russian speaker, I would say that getting the morphology wrong won't prevent you from being understood. You will sound pretty weird, but people will still understand you.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  Similarly, English syntax errors - which are extremely common among non-native speakers - usually don’t prevent you from being understood, either. E.g. “I wondered what did he do” will be understood perfectly by virtually 100% of English speakers, but will immediately mark you as a non-native speaker (the correct form is “I wondered what he did”).
  - int_19h 4y ago
    And, given the sheer number of accents, getting the pronunciation wrong is not that big of a deal either, especially if you do it consistently. Native speakers adapt very quickly. The real problem is understanding English spoken by those native speakers in all their accents...

dreamcompiler 4y ago

Of course English has gender but mostly in pronouns which are easy to master (until you talk about ships where it gets weird.) Plurals and articles seem to trip up many non-native English speakers. The rules for these things are quite intricate and riddled with exceptions, and if you write a page of prose and make a single mistake with a plural or an article, a native English reader will instantly know you are not a native speaker, even if your meaning is understood. Example: "if you write page of prose and make single mistake with plural or article, native English reader will instantly know you are not native speaker."

CRConrad 4y ago
> Of course English has gender but mostly in pronouns which are easy to master (until you talk about ships where it gets weird.) "Ships are 'she', except in the American navy, where littoral surface combatants are 'he'", or "...except in the British navy, where submarines are 'he'", something like that, isn't it? Guess I'll only talk about "the vessel", which should pretty reliably be "it". > Plurals and articles seem to trip up many non-native English speakers. The rules for these things are quite intricate and riddled with exceptions, and if you write a page of prose and make a single mistake with a plural or an article, a native English reader will instantly know you are not a native speaker, even if your meaning is understood. Fortunately not so bad for speakers of German and the Nordic languages, which work rather similarly. (Germans usually give themselves away by using the compound in stead of simple past tense.) > Example: "if you write page of prose and make single mistake with plural or article, native English reader will instantly know you are not native speaker." The canonical example seems to be the Slavic languages, above all Russian.
- School-Cotton 4y ago
  To me, any use of “she” to refer to ships (or countries, or whatever other inanimate things people sometimes call “she”) sounds dated, weird, and somewhat poetic/figurative. I suspect this usage is almost totally dying out among the younger generations.
  - 4y ago

amyjess 4y ago

English word order is janked, though. It's really annoying that we're modifier-modified when it comes to adjectives but modified-modifier when it comes to relative clauses. We say "the red car", but "the car, which is red,". Also we sometimes use modified-modifier for adjectives for poetic effect, in constructs such as "painter extraordinaire", "minister plenipotentiary", or "court martial". And then we have questions, where English goes from normally being SVO to being OSV. We say "That is John." but ask "Who is that?", and if we say "That is who?", it's usually an expression of abject shock. Or sometimes we dip into our Germanic heritage and bring out V2 word order (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V2_word_order#Vestiges_in_Modern_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V2_word_order#Vestiges_in_Mode...).