Re:How Africans Are Changing French – One Joke, Rap and Book...
by twixfel on Monday December 18, 2023 @03:44AM
(#38680396)
English famously has relatively complex verb conjugation. What we don't have are cases (only a few words decline). German has cases for example, but much simpler verb conjugation.
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Re:How Africans Are Changing French – One Joke, Rap and Book...
by acjohnson55 on Monday December 18, 2023 @05:51AM
(#38681065)
By complex, I assume you mean highly irregular?
Re:How Africans Are Changing French – One Joke, Rap and Book...
by twixfel on Monday December 18, 2023 @07:32AM
(#38681597)
I think I was being vague in my terminology. I wanted to say more broadly that German verbs are generally simpler than English ones because there are fewer tenses and aspects. There are however a greater number of strong verbs in German than in English.
Re:How Africans Are Changing French – One Joke, Rap and Book...
by acjohnson55 on Monday December 18, 2023 @10:56AM
(#38684182)
I'm not familiar enough with German to evaluate. But when I think of Spanish, you've got 6 conjugations for every tense, and a whole bunch of different tenses. That makes for many dozens of different inflections, just for verbs.
English, by contrast, only has 8 regular inflections, across all parts of speech: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection#Examples_in_English
English does have a rich ecosystem of compound verbs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compound_verb), but if this is taken to be part of the complexity of English verbs, I don't know how this stacks up to other languages.