3 ms·

Certainly. English can express the same ideas with less tenses, and having a gender for inanimate objects is absurd.

thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
But English pronunciation and spelling can be awful: "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed." See https://emmawilkin.com/blog/2020/2/17/a-rough-coated-dough-faced-thoughtful-ploughman https://emmawilkin.com/blog/2020/2/17/a-rough-coated-dough-f...
- argentinian 3y ago
  "The Chaos" is a poem demonstrating the irregularity of English spelling and pronunciation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfRSvTSY0d4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfRSvTSY0d4
kerkeslager 3y ago
> English can express the same ideas with less tenses This isn't exactly correct. We have all the same tenses, it's just that in English these tenses are more frequently created using separate words, rather than a modification to the infinitive verb. Since modifications to the infinitive verb may not work on all infinitive verbs, this results in more irregularities in Spanish. For example, the future tense in English takes the infinitive verb ("to pay" or "to eat") and adds "will" before it ("I will pay", "They will eat"). In Spanish the future tense take the infinitive verb ("pagar" or "comer") and modifies the ending--but the endings are different, so they have to be modified differently--the results are similar but different enough to matter. And there are different conjugations for the subject as well. So: I will pay => Pagaré They will eat => (Ellas|Ellos) comeran If you know the future tense for "pay" in English, you can easily construct the future tense of any infinitive verb for any subject ("They will eat", "He will run", "You will go"). But knowing "Pagaré" teaches you nothing about how to conjugate even the same infinitive for a different subject, let alone other infinitives.
- jrochkind1 3y ago
  This is from high school Spanish and I don't know what I'm talking about, but I don't think the Spanish past preterite vs past imperfect distinction exists in English grammer? You can of course do some things to capture them when translating to English, like sometimes use the "past progressive" in English to translate the past imperfect in Spanish -- but, then, Spanish also has a "past progressive" as a separate grammatical form too. And you probably wouldn't want to just always translate Spanish imperfect to English past progressive mechanically anyway, not for a good translation. In general I don't believe it's true that every language has exactly the same tenses, I think they actually can vary.
  - btilly 3y ago
    Correct. Languages do NOT all have the same tenses. Chinese, for example, has no tenses. When it comes to counting tenses of languages, people disagree on how many there are. For example consider English. https://www.englishclub.com/grammar/verb-tenses.php https://www.englishclub.com/grammar/verb-tenses.php offers 12. But as noted there, it can be argued that there really are only 6. Spanish is usually said to have 16 tenses, but there is again some wiggle room. See https://www.busuu.com/en/spanish/tenses https://www.busuu.com/en/spanish/tenses.
    - kerkeslager 3y ago
      I'm not a linguist but I do know both languages (English and Spanish) fairly well, and my impression is that this is mostly a semantic argument, which is based around the way we conjugate a single word. If you were very strict about only looking at the single word, English stays very simple (do=infinitive/present plural, does=present singular, doing=progressive, did=past, done=arguably not a tense because it's an adjective). If you look at it in this way, Spanish obviously has more tenses--they have six different variations of just the present tense, for example. But that doesn't capture the whole story because English does have all those tenses, English just doesn't do it in one word. Notably, there's no future tense in the one-word variations, so nobody reasonably will argue that the above is all the tenses. And that takes you to a complicated place because you can do multi-word variations in Spanish, too, and sometimes those are functionally the same (what's the difference between "voy a pagar" and "pagaré"?). And if you start allowing for multiple-word tenses, then there's a virtually unlimited number of constructions possible, and any limitation you could place on this is completely subjective. For example, your link doesn't list "I will have had been doing" as a tense, but it's obviously a grammatically correct construction with a real use--the only reason for not including it is a subjective judgment that it's too uncommon. And critically, you can do all of those in both languages, it's just a matter of how many words and how awkward/uncommon the construction will be. The different structures of the languages lead one toward preferring certain structures ("pagaré" over "voy a pagar" in Spanish, while one would likely say "I'll pay" in English because there's no one-word option). But to represent these as different tenses is pretty subjective and maybe a bit silly. The one thing I'm aware of that Spanish can do that English can't is communicate formality with a conjugation, i.e. "tú" form versus "usted" form, but I'd argue that's not a tense, because "tense" seems to be about the the temporatlity of the verb and that's a modification to accommodate the formality of the subject of the sentence.

But English pronunciation and spelling can be awful: "A rough-coated, dough-faced, thoughtful ploughman strode through the streets of Scarborough; after falling into a slough, he coughed and hiccoughed." See https://emmawilkin.com/blog/2020/2/17/a-rough-coated-dough-faced-thoughtful-ploughman https://emmawilkin.com/blog/2020/2/17/a-rough-coated-dough-f...

argentinian 3y ago
"The Chaos" is a poem demonstrating the irregularity of English spelling and pronunciation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfRSvTSY0d4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfRSvTSY0d4

kerkeslager 3y ago

> English can express the same ideas with less tenses This isn't exactly correct. We have all the same tenses, it's just that in English these tenses are more frequently created using separate words, rather than a modification to the infinitive verb. Since modifications to the infinitive verb may not work on all infinitive verbs, this results in more irregularities in Spanish. For example, the future tense in English takes the infinitive verb ("to pay" or "to eat") and adds "will" before it ("I will pay", "They will eat"). In Spanish the future tense take the infinitive verb ("pagar" or "comer") and modifies the ending--but the endings are different, so they have to be modified differently--the results are similar but different enough to matter. And there are different conjugations for the subject as well. So: I will pay => Pagaré They will eat => (Ellas|Ellos) comeran If you know the future tense for "pay" in English, you can easily construct the future tense of any infinitive verb for any subject ("They will eat", "He will run", "You will go"). But knowing "Pagaré" teaches you nothing about how to conjugate even the same infinitive for a different subject, let alone other infinitives.

jrochkind1 3y ago
This is from high school Spanish and I don't know what I'm talking about, but I don't think the Spanish past preterite vs past imperfect distinction exists in English grammer? You can of course do some things to capture them when translating to English, like sometimes use the "past progressive" in English to translate the past imperfect in Spanish -- but, then, Spanish also has a "past progressive" as a separate grammatical form too. And you probably wouldn't want to just always translate Spanish imperfect to English past progressive mechanically anyway, not for a good translation. In general I don't believe it's true that every language has exactly the same tenses, I think they actually can vary.
- btilly 3y ago
  Correct. Languages do NOT all have the same tenses. Chinese, for example, has no tenses. When it comes to counting tenses of languages, people disagree on how many there are. For example consider English. https://www.englishclub.com/grammar/verb-tenses.php https://www.englishclub.com/grammar/verb-tenses.php offers 12. But as noted there, it can be argued that there really are only 6. Spanish is usually said to have 16 tenses, but there is again some wiggle room. See https://www.busuu.com/en/spanish/tenses https://www.busuu.com/en/spanish/tenses.
  - kerkeslager 3y ago
    I'm not a linguist but I do know both languages (English and Spanish) fairly well, and my impression is that this is mostly a semantic argument, which is based around the way we conjugate a single word. If you were very strict about only looking at the single word, English stays very simple (do=infinitive/present plural, does=present singular, doing=progressive, did=past, done=arguably not a tense because it's an adjective). If you look at it in this way, Spanish obviously has more tenses--they have six different variations of just the present tense, for example. But that doesn't capture the whole story because English does have all those tenses, English just doesn't do it in one word. Notably, there's no future tense in the one-word variations, so nobody reasonably will argue that the above is all the tenses. And that takes you to a complicated place because you can do multi-word variations in Spanish, too, and sometimes those are functionally the same (what's the difference between "voy a pagar" and "pagaré"?). And if you start allowing for multiple-word tenses, then there's a virtually unlimited number of constructions possible, and any limitation you could place on this is completely subjective. For example, your link doesn't list "I will have had been doing" as a tense, but it's obviously a grammatically correct construction with a real use--the only reason for not including it is a subjective judgment that it's too uncommon. And critically, you can do all of those in both languages, it's just a matter of how many words and how awkward/uncommon the construction will be. The different structures of the languages lead one toward preferring certain structures ("pagaré" over "voy a pagar" in Spanish, while one would likely say "I'll pay" in English because there's no one-word option). But to represent these as different tenses is pretty subjective and maybe a bit silly. The one thing I'm aware of that Spanish can do that English can't is communicate formality with a conjugation, i.e. "tú" form versus "usted" form, but I'd argue that's not a tense, because "tense" seems to be about the the temporatlity of the verb and that's a modification to accommodate the formality of the subject of the sentence.