Re: OT: English and schizophrenia

> > There are dozens of verbs like that. Also, you got the weird
> plurals: "cat"
> > becomes "cats", but "mouse" becomes "mice", "goose" becomes
> "geese", while
> > "sheep" remains "sheep" and "fish" is still "fish". And "child" is
> not "childs",
> > but "children".
This line of argument always ticks me off.  All languages have irregular
plurals and irregular verbs.  Many of them have more irregularities than
English.  As John Cowan mentioned:

> And that's just about *all* the irregular plurals:  I think there
> are a total
> of 10-15.  As for strong verbs, we have maybe a hundred left,
> whereas in German
> IIRC about 40% of all verbs are strong, and many of the weak ones
> are
> mildly irregular.  German plurals are 99% irregular, and in 9
> different
> patterns!
It isn't really accurate to say that German nouns are 99%
irregular--better simply to say that there are many different patterns,
with no predictability as for which nouns belong to which patterns.  And
aren't there more than nine classes?  In my morphology class we
identified 15 or 16 classes, maximally defined, which we then whittled
down to 8 by some clever use of inflectional classes.

But verbs--ho, boy, English verbs are about the easiest you'll ever see.
In Latin and Greek, for example, the concept of 'regular verb' isn't even
applicable; each verb has several different forms that serve as the stems
for various tenses and moods, called "principal parts."  But the
principal parts aren't predictable from each other, so they must be
memorized--four parts in Latin, and six in Greek, for every single verb.
And then there are truly irregular verbs, which form certain specific
tenses differently than they ought to, throwing the system off even
further.

There are other examples of extreme feats of memorization necessary learn
languages.  Finnish nouns, which each have three stems (I think--Finnish
speakers correct me?)  Romanian plurals, which come in four flavors that
aren't very predictable.  And Quechua, I think has universal suppletion
between the singular and plural forms of verbs.

So English is nice, in that respect.  Don't diss it.

Jesse S. Bangs     Pelíran
jaspax @juno.com
"There is enough light for those that desire only to see, and enough
darkness for those of a contrary disposition."  --Blaise Pascal

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