Timeline for Is there any evidence to support the claim that English grammar is unusually straightforward?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
27 events
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| May 30, 2021 at 21:06 | comment | added | Vladimir F Героям слава | ... you need to know what is the subject of the sentence to be able to construct Slavic questions where the order is less-free, to apply and understand reflexive pronouns correctly and for many other things in the language. | |
| May 30, 2021 at 21:04 | comment | added | Vladimir F Героям слава | "Slavs are used to beginning a sentence with whatever word first comes to one's mind. ... Not so in English, the SVO sequence is practically never broken, which means that to be able to speak English correctly you've got to know what the subject and what the object in the utterance are, that is, you have to learn the sentence analysis" LOL I encounter many English learning Czech and many of their difficulties with the Czech (not only word) order comes from the lack of knowledge of syntax analysis, The Slavic (or certainly Czech and Slovak) is certainly not random. Also... | |
| Sep 26, 2020 at 19:57 | comment | added | Yellow Sky | @BillJ - You British Council link, in the 1st paragraph, says “There are four present tense forms”. Do you mean you wrote those 6 comments above just to attract my attention to the fact that those 16 are not tenses, but tense forms? If so, I can do you a favor and edit the answer substituting “tenses” for “tense forms” if you tell me this will change something conceptual in my answer. | |
| Sep 26, 2020 at 16:56 | comment | added | Yellow Sky | @BillJ - What you're writing is an interpretation of facts, not facts. I can imagine what you can teach if you can't tell facts from their interpretation. It's like I insisted the cake was hideous, you tasted the cake and found out it was sweet and tasty, so what I said was just my interpretation of the taste of the cake, not a fact. Or a fact, but valid just for me, that is, subjective. There's nothing else I can tell you. Bye. It wasn't quite interesting to talk with you. | |
| Sep 26, 2020 at 16:53 | comment | added | BillJ | Most people say English has just two tenses, where the perfect is an aspect. But I think it's better to say that the perfect is a past tense, hence the two systems that I described. | |
| Sep 26, 2020 at 16:46 | comment | added | BillJ | Of course I have! I'm writing facts, not nonsense. Even beginners know that English does not have 16 tenses. | |
| Sep 26, 2020 at 16:44 | comment | added | Yellow Sky | @BillJ - Have you ever taught a language to a layman not aware of linguistics? Have you ever taught a language to anyone at all? Why are you writing all that stuff about English? Are you going to correct the way I teach? | |
| Sep 26, 2020 at 16:38 | comment | added | BillJ | No, I'm not. The system I described is widely accepted among grammarians and linguists. No one talks of English having 16 tenses, except Mickey Mouse grammar websites and old schoolboy grammar books. I would never teach anything else. | |
| Sep 26, 2020 at 16:33 | comment | added | Yellow Sky | @BillJ - You're being too categorical. Don't you know a languages can be analyzed in different ways, not only the way you like? I wrote about the 16 tense forms since that's what should be studied to be able to use English well. Whatever names you use for those forms is your personal business. Believe me, I'm aware not only of the analysis you advocate for, but of no less than half a dozen others, no less extravagant. | |
| Sep 26, 2020 at 16:25 | comment | added | BillJ | The continuous (progressive)is an aspect, not a tense. "I'm writing" is present tense, progressive aspect. "I've been writing" is perfect tense, progressive aspect. | |
| Sep 26, 2020 at 16:20 | comment | added | Yellow Sky | @BillJ - Don't forget about the Continuous aspect, realized as the continuous vs. non-continuous tense distinction, e.g. “I'm writing” (present continuous non-perfect), “I've been writing” (present continuous perfect) vs. “I write” (present non-continuous non-perfect). | |
| Sep 26, 2020 at 16:14 | comment | added | BillJ | English doesn't have 16 tenses! English has two tense systems: an inflectional system contrasting preterite and present, and an independent analytic tense system contrasting perfect and non-perfect, where non-perfect is not a tense but the absence of perfect tense. The perfect tense can combine with preterite and present tense but can also occur in clauses without inflectional tense. Preterite and perfect are both instances of the more general tense 'past. Preterite is the primary (inflectional) past tense, while perfect is the secondary (analytic) past tense. | |
| Sep 26, 2020 at 12:56 | comment | added | rjpond | @wjandrea Correct. | |
| Sep 26, 2020 at 2:27 | comment | added | wjandrea | @rjpond Past and non-past, right? Since the future is expressed through auxiliaries instead of conjugation? | |
| Sep 25, 2020 at 19:21 | comment | added | rjpond | Some linguists have argued that English has only two tenses (i.e. using a morphological definition, restricting the notion of tense to synthetic tenses). But the complexity of the compound constructions is of course still there regardless of the terminology. | |
| Sep 24, 2020 at 22:46 | comment | added | Yellow Sky | @TomHosker - Well, there are, naturally, creoles and pidgins which are more analytical than English, and also some Indian languages I don't know about... Anyhow, I put “perhaps” there. :) | |
| Sep 24, 2020 at 21:42 | comment | added | Tom Hosker | @YellowSky I just want to iron out any ambiguities in your last paragraph. Are you saying that, to the best of your knowledge, English is the most analytic Indo-European language? | |
| Sep 24, 2020 at 16:00 | comment | added | WaterMolecule | This is the beautiful thing about learning languages: languages beyond your mother tongue have features, concepts, and ways of looking at the world that you would never even imagine if only knew your mother tongue. I've spent a lot of time editing the writing of non-native English speakers and I have seen a lot of the things noted here being fiendishly difficult for many non-native speakers (not just native Slavic speakers). Unusual constructions like "I waited for her to sing" and subtle phonetics like the difference between "she can do it" and "she can't do it" are great examples. | |
| Sep 24, 2020 at 13:18 | comment | added | Dan M. | I'm not a linguist so I might be misunderstanding something, but I'm rather certain that "no alveolar consonants at all in the Slavic languages" is wrong. | |
| Sep 23, 2020 at 21:33 | history | edited | Yellow Sky | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Sep 23, 2020 at 21:28 | history | edited | Yellow Sky | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Sep 23, 2020 at 21:13 | history | edited | Yellow Sky | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Sep 23, 2020 at 21:08 | history | edited | Yellow Sky | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Sep 23, 2020 at 20:45 | history | edited | Yellow Sky | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Sep 23, 2020 at 20:26 | history | edited | Yellow Sky | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Sep 23, 2020 at 20:17 | history | edited | Yellow Sky | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Sep 23, 2020 at 19:42 | history | answered | Yellow Sky | CC BY-SA 4.0 |