this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
457 points (94.7% liked)
Linguistics Humor
1121 readers
1 users here now
Do you like languages and linguistics ? Here is for having fun about it
Share this community: [[email protected]](/c/[email protected])
Serious Linguistics community: [email protected]
Rules:
- 1- Stay on Topic
Not about Linguistics, language, ways of communications - 2- No Racism/Violence
- 3- No Public Shaming
Shaming someone that could be identifiable/recognizable - 4- Avoid spam and duplicates
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
English grammar and conjugation is quite consistent compared to its spelling, and it's quite purely Germanic. It got simplified by it's contact old norse, which resulted in middle english being starkly different from old english.
Sure, sometimes it is. But frequently it isn't. But let's conjugate two very similar words and then pronounce them. How about "go" and "do"?
I do
You go He does He goes She did She went
How about the words "rove," "move," and "shove"? They are all conjugated basically the same, spelled almost the same, but each is pronounced differently.
Knowing how one word is conjugated and pronounced does not necessarily inform on any other. The phrase "sometimes it's consistent" is self-contradictory.
I never mentioned pronunciation. I only talked about the untrue claim that english grammar was inconsistent because it was mixed with other languages. The mismatch between pronunciation and spelling is the fault of the printing press.
Ok, but that's the topic of conversation. And even if we set aside pronunciation, English grammar is inconsistent. There are far more irregular verba than there are rules.