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by a-l-c-o
3847 days ago
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> Comparisons about one language being more verbose/complex/harder than another never seem to really hold up under scrutiny. I've been 'scrutinizing' both for quite long (not bilingual though) and the more I do the more I am convinced of my point. French is definitely more 'verbose/complex/hard'. And unnecessarily so. > Usually when comparing two languages, one exhibits simplicity in one area where the other exhibits simplicity in another and it all roughly balances out. Sorry jordigh, but in what area ? English appears to me simpler in maybe all areas.
- le soleil, la lune / the sun, the moon. Things should have a gender ? What for ?
- so-leil : 2 Syl. Sun : 1
- lune : mute 'e'
- ... > I'm not even sure English tends to have fewer syllables than French, as their common Celtic roots seem to prefer fewer syllables. On global conciseness (whole text-wise) English is a clear winner. Do the test in Google Translate. I comment all my code in English despite not being a native speaker because it's just shorter. Words like 'get/set' are unbeatable. |
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You are focussing just on gender. There are many other parts that make up a language.
I gave an example which you ignored. English has pretty complicated consonant clusters, such as in "angsts". It has two liquids, r and l, which many other languages do not distinguish. Depending on the dialect, it has 12 to 14 vowels, not counting diphthongs (okay, fine French has 16 vowels).
That's just phonology. Let's discuss some syntax. Here is something I hear French speakers mess up all the time in English: number agreement. Why does the verb "run" have to have an "s" in some cases but not in others? While French also has conjugations, large parts of them are only written, not pronounced. Thus, French speakers have trouble with number agreement in "the cats run" and the "the cat runs".
English has a pretty complicated phrasal verb system. For example, knock up, knock out, and knock over all mean completely different things and are unrelated to the meaning of ordinary "knock". English has a completely foreign usage of the verb "do", which is used for affirmation in a way that no other language does, for example "I do mean this".
I can keep on going. If I am allowed to compare English with Russian (for example, English has a complicated system of articles, which Russian very simply lacks), with Japanese (Japanese only has 5 vowels), or with Chinese (English has complicated inflexions for nouns and conjugations for verbs, which Chinese lacks), I can find lots of other relative complexities with other languages.
And all of this without talking about the weird spelling systems (there are more than 2) that English has cobbled together from all of the languages it has borrowed spellings from over the centuries.