[IgorPartola]

My first language is Russian. I learned English from 12 to 14 to a basic level and from then came to the US and learned the rest of what I know here. Some thoughts:

1. English has a very simple, pre-defined sentence structure. Run-on sentence are discouraged. The language has almost logical decisions regarding the use of the verb “be”. Words are rarely skipped because they are implied. By contrast Russian is much more contextual and free flowing. “I love you”, “you I love”, and “love I you” are all valid sentences with slightly different meanings. “To be” is often skipped. “I hungry” is valid because what else would you put between those two words other than “am”?

2. English has almost no conjugation. The only word changes that happen. Are for present to past or past perfect tenses (go/went/gone). By contrast in Russian you end up conjugating loads of words depending on the relationships between the object and the subject based on direction, action, possession, and gender.

3. English has nine tenses plus the infinitive. Russian has 3+1, which encapsulate the meaning of the 9+1 in English with implied context.

4. English used articles the/a/an to indicate specificity. Russian has no such concept.

5. Word munging is uncommon in English. When a new word is coined it is mostly atomic (app, tweet, selfie). You rarely can take two existing words and combine them with a prefix, a suffix, an ending and get a new word that is grammatically correct. In Russian “protoplanotraincycled” would be a word you could coin and use on the fly.

Those are just some of the more glaring examples of differences. Aside from the extra/more specific tenses and the articles, Russian contains all the complexity of English. Therefore as someone who knows Russian, I think it’s easier to learn English. This is like if you know Haskell you probably have an easier time learning Basic but not the other way around.

Where the drudgery of English comes in is vocabulary. Anyone that tells you that the SATs are not biased towards native speakers is full of putrescible waste. I used to play this game when I was in high school where I would hand a sizable English/Russian translation book to a friend and tell them to pick any Russian word and I could translate it to English. I had a nearly perfect success rate. The vocabulary just isn’t full of obscure $5 words. And before you object that this was simply because the book didn’t contain all the words in usage, not so: the Russian language is just a smaller language where words’ meanings are changed with prefixes and suffixes more than by using entirely different words.

In English why do you need to say “exacerbate” when you can say “make worse”? Or “defenestrate” when you mean “toss out the window”? The usual answer I hear is that it’s because it makes the language more beautiful and precise. I think it makes it inflexible and inconvenient in the same way that it’s easier to have 26 letters combined in arbitrary patterns than 5000 kanji that each represent one or more things.

P.S.: this is why cursing in English is so simple and stunted while in Russian I can have a conversation with someone using nothing but the word “dick” and it would be not only perfectly understandable but also quite expressive.

P.P.S.: “dick off the dicks over the dick and re-dick them dickwards” is close but not close enough. Russian is a nightmare to learn, 0/10 would not recommend.

[inkyoto]

In English why do you need to say “exacerbate” when you can say “make worse”? Or “defenestrate” when you mean “toss out the window”? The usual answer I hear is that it’s because it makes the language more beautiful and precise. I think it makes it inflexible and inconvenient in the same way that it’s easier to have 26 letters combined in arbitrary patterns than 5000 kanji that each represent one or more things.

You have to thank the British and the social class system they have invented. A person who can exacerbate a matter by virtue of defenestrating something (or someone) is at least of the middle class social status, and by listening to their speech accent in person, you will also be able to reason about how posh was the school they – naturally – attended (low class people went to a school but did not attend it). «Exacerbate» vs «make worse», «defenestrate» vs «throw out of the window», «attend a school» vs «go to a school» are examples of social register words that are specific to a particular social status of the person or a social group they belong to. Middle to upper class people tend to use more words of French and Latin origin to stand themselves apart from people of a lower social class who tend to use more words of the Anglo-Saxon / Germanic origin.

Social register embedded at the language vocabulary level is not unqiue to English (for instance, Korean, Thai, other SE Asian and some native North/South American languages also have multiple registers that require switching to the most appropriate vocabulary depending of how old, how regal, how well known etc the receiver of the speech is), but the clear indication of socioeconomic background is likely a rather unique trait of the English language.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Bah, we have this in Greek also. How "cultured" one is can be seen in their speech. In Greek it's not speaking with big words ("exacerbate" vs. "make worse") but how many old Greek words one uses. For instance, pretentious twats that fancy themselves to be educated above the common folk will use words that sound like something Solon would have said to his slaves or Konstantine II to his horse.

Then there's the matter of diacritics. Hellenistic Greek used to have a panoply of diacritics, of two kinds, one kind to change the pitch of vowels and one to indicate a soft or hard sound (occasionally used on consontants, particularly rho, ρ). These could even be combined together to make Greek text something that looked a little like a vim regex. With time, Greek pronounciation lost its pitch accent and the diacritics became irrelevant to spoken Greek. Yet they were kept on in written text until the early 1980's when they were finally abolished from the school curriculum so most people today don't know how to use those. Unless of course they make a point of writing in the "polytonic" system that includes the diacritics, which they will invariably tell you is because "that's more correct". In truth, it's not more correct, it's anachronistic and archaic, but it marks the person out as someone who is e r u d i t e.

So it's not just English, sorry to say. In fact it's easier to see how you'd have classism in the UK, which is, after all, a United Kingdom, with a monarch and hereditary (?) lords and all. In a place like Greece it's harder to justify because there everyone is basically middle class, with small variations- and we booted our last king out in the 1970's. So here it's even more pathetic when people put on airs. In the UK it's more a political thing, they're trying to put you in your place. But in the UK, it's not the language that's the problem, it's that society is rigidly stratified and language is only the symptom of the awful inequalities.

______________

[1] Wikipedia has the works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_diacritics

[dragonwriter]

> In Greek it's not speaking with big words ("exacerbate" vs. "make worse") but how many old Greek words one uses

To be fair, in English it's not really “big words”, either, it's also old (but not particularly English; Greek, Latin, and French are pretty high on the list.)

Exacerbation (from which exacerbate is a back formation) is a fairly direct import from Latin. Defenestration was from (IIRC, at the time—and this was 400 years ago—already archaic) French. sic, which is definitely not a big word, is often perceived this way, again a Latin import. &c.

[orthoxerox]

Some write "coöperate" in English, which looks like the same kind of pretentiousness.

[fader]

I'd argue that it's less pretentious and more helpful to non-native speakers, as it indicates pronunciation. It's a marker that the word is pronounced "co-op-er-ate" and not "coop-er-ate". The diaeresis works much like vowel markers in Hebrew to make the words easier to pronounce for people reading a word they might not have heard pronounced.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-curse-of-...

[onemiketwelve]

So why don't they just leave the dashes in, you know, like co-operate? I think a dash is much easier understood than an umlaut. Especially for native speakers

[euroderf]

AFAIK it's only The New Yorker that does that. They have their own standards I guess.

[anticensor]

> Unless of course they make a point of writing in the "polytonic" system that includes the diacritics, which they will invariably tell you is because "that's more correct". In truth, it's not more correct, it's anachronistic and archaic, but it marks the person out as someone who is e r u d i t e.

Indeed, Greek language definitely needs a spelling reform.

[goodcanadian]

To be fair, once upon a time, England was full of English people. The educated would know Latin as that was the language of the church and of international correspondence. Then, the Normans arrived and the upper classes rapidly became somewhat French. So, the difference in speech between upper class and commoner as well as between educated and less educated (England had remarkably high literacy rates even among the commoners) has a strong historical basis. I also haven't even mentioned the influence of Danish (Viking) on the language. I would guess that part of the richness of the vocabulary is down to the fact that English is an amalgamation of several languages.

[inkyoto]

It is deeply rooted in history, indeed; however, the British class system is a much more recent invention, and came along to become solidified with an onset of the industrial revolution, if I am not mistaken. The social divide had become so stark that good education became a privilege of middle and upper classes. Commoners could no longer afford paying for their education, hence they had no way of learning «fancy» Latin and «Greecian» words.

As for the Old Norse influence on English, I believe it is still a thing in Orkney Islands and in the local dialect locals speak. Danes at the time, when they took a questionable joy of raiding and pillaging villages and towns across British Isles spoke, essentially, the Old Norse

[lordnacho]

> In English why do you need to say “exacerbate” when you can say “make worse”? Or “defenestrate” when you mean “toss out the window”?

This is the thing about English. Everyone can learn intermediate English, but there's a long tail of vocabulary that comes from other languages. Often you find there's an English word, a French work, and a Latin word for something. You'll then discover that there's some subtlety of meaning between them. For instance, if someone has only figuratively been booted out of a position (politics), they've been defenestrated. You'd never say they've been tossed out the window.

Part of me suspects the French and Latin imports are to do with the elite who wanted to check if someone had been educated at the right places.

[tim333]

You only get defenestrate in quite pretentious literary essays. I'm English and only came across it recently. I think the availability of Google has made that sort of stuff more common writers can use obscure words and rather than have 90% of their readers not understand, now they can google it. English has a vast stock of words like that that some writer probably made up a centuries ago - there's a lot of old literature out there.

[smitty1e]

English's jumbo vocabulary makes it great for doggerel, because so many ideas can be phrased with multiple rhymes and syllable counts.

[ghaff]

And punny and other wordplay headlines. For example, I could absolutely see, if there were a politician named Fenwick who was fired, a headline writer doming up with: Fenwick defenestrated.

[brigandish]

It's not an uncommon word, even in speech. I did a quick check and the Times, Telegraph and Guardian all have plenty of examples of its use, too, across different sections of the paper. Even the Daily Mirror had 4 entries.

The Sun, however, came up blank.

[smitty1e]

The fact that English has an "eye doctor" and an "ophthamologist" is a direct result of the Norman invasion of 1066.

[gerdesj]

Ophthalmologist is derived from old Greek. I have never visited an eye doctor but I get my specs from an optician. Eye doctor makes sense as a concept and I have said it myself but is not routinely used.

The Normans brought Old French with them and that became the court language. Old English was more Saxon based. The classic examples of the effect of that invasion are meat vs animal names eg beef (French) and cow (Saxon).

[ghaff]

>I have never visited an eye doctor but I get my specs from an optician.

You sure? At least where I live, you get an exam from an "eye doctor" (typically an optometrist) when you get a prescription. An optician fits and sells glasses. Ophthalmologists are M.D.s who have broader latitude in prescribing medications, etc.

[timthorn]

This is one of the differences between UK and US English. In Britain, the term "eye doctor" just isn't used.

It's of a type with legislator vs law-maker; it's only really in the past few years that politicians in the UK have occasionally been referred to as law-makers.

[smitty1e]

Sure, I could have offered a better example, but the point is that English has enjoyed some wrenching integrations over time, Hastings having caused a big one.

[stevesimmons]

> In English why do you need to say “exacerbate” when you can say “make worse”? Or “defenestrate” when you mean “toss out the window”?

In English, the short, common words are the oldest ones, from Old English and Anglo-Saxon origin, the language of everyday people. The long, flowery and poetic usages came later, via French, Italian and Latin, the language of the French invaders from 1066.

You see these two distinct forms a lot in Shakespeare. Indeed he popularised many of the borrowings. Here is one great example from Macbeth:

"Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red."

Back in 1606, when Shakespeare wrote Macbeth, only the best educated could understand "... will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine". So Shakespeare finishes with "making the green one red", which everyone got.

* multitudinous - from Latin "multitudo"

* incarnadine - from French "incarnadin", via Italian and originally from Latin.

* red - from Old English "read", similar root as the German "rot" and Dutch "rood".

* green - from Old English "grene", similar root as the German "grun" and Dutch "groen".

So short words = old, Germanic; complicated words = newer, Latin or French/Italian.

[fennecfoxen]

> Anyone that tells you that the SATs are not biased towards native speakers is full of putrescible waste.

> The long, flowery and poetic usages came later, via French, Italian and Latin, the language of the French invaders from 1066.

My wife (nonnative speaker, European, Romance language) started looking at GRE vocabulary at one point. She found most of the hard words were super easy; it was the everyday ones that proved tricky.

[danjac]

The hardest things I found in Russian were the mobile stress - the way the stress on the noun or verb moves around depending on tense/case etc - and the sheer amount of irregularity in the inflections. The vocabulary is smaller though and it's also shared among other Slavic languages - I can get at least the gist of a newspaper headline in Polish or Bulgarian based on my knowledge of Russian, and I can imagine if you're a Slav native speaker it will be much easier than English.

That all said I found Finnish far easier, consistent and logical, even though it's not even in the same Indo-European family.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

I'm Greek, so not a Slav, technically, but once I was in Plovdiv in Bulgaria and I realised I could read all the store signs. Not only where they in an alphabete very similar to the Greek alphabet (compared to the Latin one anyway), the words themselves were also often similar. For instance, I remember looking at a grocer's shop and the sign that said "Oranges", which looked very much like "Πορτοκάλια" in Greek.

Normally Slavic languages don't have Greek roots or vice-versa, so I was a bit surprised by those similarities.

>> That all said I found Finnish far easier, consistent and logical, even though it's not even in the same Indo-European family.

Isn't Finnish the language with 50 noun declensions or something mad like that?

[tsimionescu]

The balkan countries have a long history of mutual cultural influence which mostly exolains this. In particular, there is a large Trukish influence common for things like exotic fruits and foods. The name for oranges is similar in Romanian (a romance language - portocală/portocale), Bulgarian (a slavic language - Портокали / портокали), and Greek (Πορτοκάλι / πορτοκάλια), all borrowed from Turkish (a Turkic, far-eastern language - Portakal / portakal).

The same is true for tea (Ceai, Чай, Τσάι, Çay), but it is not true for older local foods - for exmaple cheese is Brânză in Romanian, Сирене in Bulgarian, Τυρί in Greek and Peynir in Turkish; apple is măr, Ябълка, μήλο, elma.

Interestingly, while they don't generally share much vocabulary, the Balkan languages all share certain grammatical traits despite their very different origins origins (some examples are the use of articles even in slavic languages, a preference for the subjunctive instead of the infinitive, the lack of a proper future form for verbs, using a compound with "want" instead).

[danjac]

I think the term for this is Sprachbund[1] - where a number of languages in close geographical proximity pick up each others' grammatical and other traits despite belonging to different families.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprachbund

[danjac]

> Isn't Finnish the language with 50 noun declensions or something mad like that?

I think you mean cases? These are mostly simple suffixes you attach on the end of the noun/adjective: for example talo (house), talossa (in the house, i.e. house-in). There's some rules around vowel harmony (same as with other Uralic languages like Hungarian, as well as Turkish) and consonant mutation (so a t becomes a d in a closed syllable) but these follow regular rules with a few exceptions for some foreign loanwords.

Vocabulary is quite small with lots of compound words - however other than some aforementioned loanwords (mostly from Swedish and more recently English) the core vocabulary is pretty alien to an Indo-European speaker. Spelling is completely phonetic (everything written as it's spelt) although as with most languages there are strong regional dialects.

Finnish has a lot of up-front rules to learn, but for the most part it's pretty regular with few exceptions (there's also the lack of grammatical gender, another feature of Uralic languages). Russian on the other hand is exceptions all the way down.

[euroderf]

Seconding this. Endings are very regular, much more so than even (say) in Estonian. The base vocabulary is small (compared to English) and is acquired by sheer repetition (both active and passive). You need to retune your ear from English though, because both vowels and consonants differentiate between single and doubled (think: I scream, ice cream, ice scream).

[nfg]

> For instance, I remember looking at a grocer's shop and the sign that said "Oranges", which looked very much like "Πορτοκάλια" in Greek.

And interestingly to extend this chain of connections I just read your comment and through my basic knowledge of the Greek alphabet gained through maths, and a rough proficiency in pronouncing Cyrillic I could spot that the word is very close to the Turkish “portakal” (I know a few words from spending some time there over the years).

[stevekemp]

I moved to Finland, and find Finnish quite hard.

On the one hand it is very consistent and regular, on the other hand the suffix-approach means it requires a lot of concentration in speech. (Which then often results in Finnish people replying to me in English.)

Russian I love to hear, and I love the Russian naming system (Anna -> Anya).

[dghf]

> Word munging is uncommon in English. When a new word is coined it is mostly atomic (app, tweet, selfie). You rarely can take two existing words and combine them with a prefix, a suffix, an ending and get a new word that is grammatically correct.

Prequel. Tweetstorm. Brexit. Clusterfuck. Omnishambles. Freegan. Romcom. Stagflation.

> Or “defenestrate” when you mean “toss out the window”?

The word usually appears in its noun form, defenestration, for which there isn’t really a handy alternative. You can’t really talk about The Throwing-out-of-the-Window of Prague when discussing the Thirty Years’ War, for example.

> “dick off the dicks over the dick and re-dick them dickwards” is close but not close enough

“The fucking fucker’s fucking fucked” is perfectly grammatical and comprehensible English, if somewhat colloquial.

[pja]

> “The fucking fucker’s fucking fucked” is perfectly grammatical and comprehensible English, if somewhat colloquial.

“Come the fuck in, or fuck the fuck off.”

[pipingdog]

Fuckin' who the fuck do you fuckin' think you're fuckin' fuckin' with you fuckin' fuck? Fuck!

[d1sxeyes]

2. Two short sentences here don't accurately convey the horror of Russian's case system, where not just verbs but also NOUNS must change (decline) into one of 6 main cases (potentially more depending on whether you consider the locative, partitive genitive, vocative, etc. as distinct cases) :D, but yes absolutely - basically, you only ever have the possessive form in English 'add 's, or for pronouns just learn 'his/her/their' and even verbs have a maximum of 8 forms (be - am - is - are - was - were - been - being), with the vast majority having just four or five.

3. 9 is an odd number to pick, most people agree there are 12 or 16, but you have (multiply as appropriate) past, present, future, simple, future-in-the-past, continuous, perfect, perfect continuous, indicative, imperative, subjunctive, active, and passive forms.

Russian on the other hand has 2 grammatical tenses (past and non-past), and 2 aspects (perfective and imperfective), as well as a couple of forms constructed using auxiliaries (immediate future, conditional). It also has gerunds and participles, and all of this before we even start thinking about verbs of motion.

4. Russian does have the concept of specificity in some cases - in particular there are some cases where the genitive can be used instead of the accusative to indicate indefiniteness.

Definitely 0/10 for recommending learning Russian, except as an exercise in masochism (10/10).

[inkyoto]

Definitely 0/10 for recommending learning Russian, except as an exercise in masochism (10/10).

Hardly a 10/10 for the BDSM part. Whilst the Russian language has retained many grammatical features of the Proto-Indo-European language, it has also dropped many (i.e. perfect tenses, the aorist, a number of noun cases, merged long, short and ultra-short vowels into same quality vowels and lost all nasal vowels and the list goes on). Russian, whilst having its own share of linguistic quirks (but, hey, what language does not?) is no more complex than, say, Sanskrit.

For the purpose of inflicting severe bouts of pain in the rear orifice, give Basque (an absolutive-ergative language) or Georgian (a Kartveli language with the split ergative) a go. Both have no known language ancestors, both are highly agglunative languages with some serious phonetic challenges and with a wealth of deliciously mesmerising grammatical peculiarities.

Or try native highly agglunative North / South American (e.g. Navajo for agglunative and fusional delights and the tenseless verb conjugation by 7x modes and 12x aspects of each mode and Quechua for reversed concepts where future is placed «behind» the past which is always «ahead»), or Innuit, or North-Caucasian languages. Russian will feel like a godsend and a breeze after that.

Then, there are Klingon and Lojban.

[d1sxeyes]

Those all sound super exciting. I'm in Hungary at the moment and the language here is also pretty agglutinative, so that's not so scary, but the idea of seven modes and twelve aspects is... well, next level.

I revise my 10/10 downwards, based on what you've mentioned here to somewhere around a 6.

[tablespoon]

> Where the drudgery of English comes in is vocabulary. Anyone that tells you that the SATs are not biased towards native speakers is full of putrescible waste.

How much of Russian's vocabulary is "native"? My understanding it that English's vocabulary is pretty messed up because it's a mongrel language: Germanic substrate with substantial portions replaced or augmented by medieval French, with lots of Greek/Latinate vocabulary for "educated" topics. That's made even worse because it tends to adopt words complete without translating foreign spelling systems (notable recent example: Pinyin). Things would be a lot simpler if the vocabulary had evolved from the original Anglo-Saxon substrate.

[dehrmann]

English also holds onto gender for some French loan words (fiancée, blonde), accent marks, Latin plurals (cacti), the Latin notion of the word (viruses because viri is bad Latin), and occasionally Latin gender and plural (dominatrices). But not Greek plurals, so it's octopuses, not octopodes.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> But not Greek plurals, so it's octopuses, not octopodes.

With the exception of (one) phenomenon, (many) phenomena, hopefully?

Also, now that I think of it: pegasus/pegasi, prolegomenon/ prolegomena, lemma/ lemmata, schema/ schemata, etc etc. There's one ending in -omenon that I keep forgetting...

[michaelt]

As far as I can tell, the English rule is "sometimes we take the loanword's pluralisation, sometimes we don't, just memorise every single case and don't worry if you get it wrong sometimes"

For example, Samurai and Kimono are both loan words - but we import the pluralisation of Samurai (Seven Samurai) [1] whereas Kimono pluralises with an s on the end (Seven Kimonos) [2].

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/samurai [2] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kimono

[blackshaw]

"Criterion/criteria"

[YeGoblynQueenne]

Thank you! Yeah, that's the one I keep forgetting, though it doesn't end in "omenon".

[blackshaw]

Another one I just remembered: "automaton/automata".

This site lets you search for English words by suffix, and the only words it can find ending in "-omenon" are "phenomenon" and... "superphenomon". What a phenomenal result.

https://www.litscape.com/word_tools/ends_with.php

[dragonwriter]

IIRC, octopus, while Greek in origin, came into English mainly through scientific Latin, which probably plays a role in it not having a Greek-derived plural, or at least not dominantly (you will encounter both octopi and octopodes in English sometimes.)

[datastoat]

> But not Greek plurals, so it's octopuses, not octopodes.

Though Australia is in the antipodes (to the UK), not the antipuses.

[suncherta]

> How much of Russian's vocabulary is "native"?

I don't know either percentage estimation or comparison with other languages, but significant portion of Russian common vocabulary comes from other languages. Major influences are Greek, Tatar, Turkish, latter, French, and, most recent, English.

[out_of_protocol]

> How much of Russian's vocabulary is "native"?

About the same %, i think. The only difference is russian language can absorb almost anything, applying usual rules - so newly imported words are feeling native almost immediately

[tablespoon]

> About the same %, i think. The only difference is russian language can absorb almost anything, applying usual rules - so newly imported words are feeling native almost immediately

That's probably it: it's not the origin of English's vocabulary that makes it difficult, but its bad habit of not adapting borrowed words to conform to the English system.

If English speakers would rework spellings and plurals to match English when borrowing a word, it would be a lot easier for everyone almost all the time (the only exception I can think of is the rare situation (of questionable utility) where an English speaker can recognize a borrowed word in its foreign context).

[donogh]

I’m learning Polish (from English), which is very similar grammatically and even allows for some understanding of Russian (with many false friends of course).

Going back to an earlier point re English speakers understanding beginners/non-natives, I find Polish to be the opposite — I imagine it’s similar with Russian? Examples of errors that cause Poles to look at me like I have two heads:

1. Mistakes in declination: granted changing an ending can dramatically change the meaning of a noun/adverb/adjective, but the ability to infer the intended meaning seems to be largely absent.

2. Mispronunciation of syllables: neglecting to pronounce an accent, for example “mnóstwo” (plenty) vs “mnostwo” (meaningless).

3. Using a wrong conjugation with verbs or slightly mangling the conjugation, e.g., “napisałem list” (I wrote a letter) vs “napisem list” (meaningless).

4. Not breaking up a word correctly —- it’s not always obvious where one syllable ends and another begins, e.g., pronouncing “zadzwonić” (to call) as “zadz-wonić” vs “za-dwonić”.

5. When not accenting the correct syllable (usually second to last in Polish but I understand there’s no general rule in Russian).

My best guess as to why there is little natural tolerance for mistakes is because of lack of immigration. Poland is nearly entirely homogenous, and the biggest immigrant population is Ukrainians, who also speak Slavic languages.

Anyway, personally, I still find it fun to learn, and I look forward to the day I can confidently wear this t-shirt: https://www.amazon.com/Speak-Polish-Whats-Superpower-Shirt/d...

[cromka]

I'll just add for anyone interested that you could replace “Russian” here with pretty much any Slavic language and most (if not all) of your observations would still stand.

As for the needles redundancy in vocabulary in English, this letter, which was discussed on HN recently, sums it up perfectly:

https://theamericanscholar.org/writing-english-as-a-second-l...

[HideousKojima]

For Czech all of them apply except for Russian's omission of "to be," which Czech doesn't have

[tarsinge]

> In English why do you need to say “exacerbate” when you can say “make worse”? Or “defenestrate” when you mean “toss out the window”?

You would love French (coincidentally these words are of french origin). I learn (or at least remember to use) words nearly every day.

[yesenadam]

> these words are of french origin

It seems they are derived from Latin, not French.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/exacerbate is from Latin or from:

https://www.etymonline.com/word/exacerbation

https://www.etymonline.com/word/defenestration

[williamdclt]

Almost all of latin-based words in English have been imported from French (which itself is almost entirely latin-based), including these 2. There's not much historical reason for English to pull vocabulary directly from Latin I think

[yesenadam]

Do you have evidence for that? (that these words came from French)

Your other claim doesn't seem right either, about most (let alone "almost all") words from Latin in English coming from French. Stats[0] seem to give about equal numbers of words in English from Latin and from French, 29% each. As for

> There's not much historical reason for English to pull vocabulary directly from Latin

"English has also borrowed many words directly from Latin, the ancestor of the Romance languages, during all stages of its development. Many of these words had earlier been borrowed into Latin from Greek. Latin or Greek are still highly productive sources of stems used to form vocabulary of subjects learned in higher education such as the sciences, philosophy, and mathematics."

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_language#Vocabulary

[yellowcake0]

To be fair, I've never heard someone use the word defenestrate unironically.

[dijit]

Depends on your social circle.

It’s used among the gentry in the UK when referring to board members of various types if they are ejected with force.

[_whiteCaps_]

https://magpiebrule.ca/2021/01/12/the-self-defenestration-of...

Andrew Scheer (former Conservative Party of Canada leader) learned this recently.

[nullsense]

Same here. I think we could also coin and use on the fly the word "refenestrate" which would be to throw some back throw someone back into a window they have just been thrown out of and "emphenestrate" which would be to throw someone through a window into a building.

[cpursley]

Do you mind sharing the version of the dick conversations in Russian? I'm one of those crazy people studying Russian.

[inkyoto]

«Эти хуи, на хуй, это захуярили и потом вместе похуярили на хуй» – «this bunch of not very nice men have done a sloppy job (of something) and then have locomoted out of here in a unknown direction»

[j4yav]

You can kind of do the same thing in English:

Those fuckers fucked everything up and then promptly fucked off to fuck knows where.

[inkyoto]

Yes, with this example, it is possible to translate the foul language nearly bidirectionally.

The OP was enquiring upon an example of a dick conversation, hence an example of the use of the word «хуй» (a cock / a dick) to illustrate how productive the word formation can be in the Russian foul language.

Another quirk in the sample sentence is that the direction of the locomotion is not explicitly mentioned anywhere but is rather conveyed by way of a specific verb prefix «по-».

Russian verbs of motion can be uni- or multidirectional and employ prefixes to emphasise motion aspects.

The same sentence can be changed to: «Эти хуи, на хуй, это захуярили и потом вместе захуярили отсюда на хуй» to mean «this bunch of not very nice men have done a sloppy job (of something) and then have locomoted out of here in a particular direction (likely having something specific on their mind)». The prefix of «за-» disambiguates the direction and the purpose of the motion. Also notable that «захуярили» means both, «to have done a sloppy job of something» and «to get out of here / commence the locomotion».

[vbezhenar]

Can you make it with other words? Like "cunt".

Эти распиздяи много пиздят, надо их отпиздить.

Those lazy guys talk too much, we have to beat them.

Btw fuck = ебать.

Эти ебанутые совсем ебанулись, я бы их ёбнул, заебали они меня.

Those crazy guys have gone completely mad, I would beat them, they annoyed me.

Russian filthy language is like a sub-language inside a language, I don't think that normal words could be used like that.

[suncherta]

> Эти распиздяи много пиздят, надо их отпиздить.

BTW, the meaning of phrase above completely changes, depending on where you put stress in the highlighted word. :) With both readings completely legit.

[yesenadam]

Those buggers buggered everything up and then buggered off to buggery. (Australian here, this version sounds slightly more natural than the 'fuck' version.)

[cfn]

Yes, Russian ругательство is legendary.

[WesolyKubeczek]

Looks like typical software development lifecycle to me. Very agile.

[IgorPartola]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_jokes#Taboo_vocabula...

[atxbcp]

here's a poem you might find interesting: Полюбила парня я - Оказался без хуя. Нахуя мне без хуя, Когда с хуем дохуя.

[e12e]

> In English why do you need to say “exacerbate” when you can say “make worse”? Or “defenestrate” when you mean “toss out the window”? The usual answer I hear is that it’s because it makes the language more beautiful and precise.

That's... Not how vocabulary develops. English is a rich language in large part due to the conquest by the French - much like Norwegian is a rich language due to conquest by the Danish.

Although "defenestrate" is probably more like "tweet" than "computer" - I believe it was a bit of a "fashion statement" at the time.

[williamdclt]

> Although "defenestrate" is probably more like "tweet" than "computer"

Not sure I understand your point, but "defenestrate" -> "de-fenestrate" which literally translates (via old French) as "un-window"!

[e12e]

It's from an event I Praha - I mean that there's very little use for the word (as opposed to "kill" or "throw out a window". It's not like sheep and mutton.

Ed: see first part, and the section https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defenestration#Origin_of_the...

It's not from old Latin, but rather from "new Latin".

[Jiocus]

Window is also from Old Norse (meaning "wind-eye") which has replaced fenester in English.

Meanwhile in Swedish, the French origin "Fönster" is preferred.

[veqz]

Wait, what? Norwegian is richer because of Danish?? (Also, what conquest?) I'd say it's the same language, just with lots of different dialects anyway.

What has enriched the Norwegian (and Danish and Swedish) language beyond the Germanic Scandinavian would be the importation of words from Latin, German, French, and English. All happening through trade and cultural influence, in roughly that order.

[Jiocus]

And vice versa. What has enriched English is much of Scandinavian origin[1][2].

An recent example in Sweden involved a politician protesting about anglicanisation of the Swedish language. He wanted to replace some widely used English term with a Swedish equivalent. Tracing the origin easily revealed it was instead the English who are using a Scandinavian expression. Which Swedes are now finding convenient.

[1] English is a Scandinavian language (https://partner.sciencenorway.no/forskningno-history-languag...)

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_Old...

[e12e]

Conquest might indeed be too strong - occupation might fit better. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark%E2%80%93Norway#Langu...

[ghaff]

>Run-on sentence are discouraged.

Sort of. This is a somewhat modern thing. There is various punctuation--parentheses, em dashes, and semicolons in particular--that let you construct fairly long and complex sentences. But the modern style, certainly for basic communication, is to mostly break things up with periods. (To the point where it's sometimes OK if the segments are sentence fragments.)

[gpanders]

> This is a somewhat modern thing.

Indeed. Go back and read some speeches from the 19th century (e.g. Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural speech) and you’ll find run on sentences everywhere. Heck, even the US Constitution is full of them.

[FartyMcFarter]

> In English why do you need to say “exacerbate” when you can say “make worse”?

George Orwell wrote a great essay about this, worth a read:

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

[barry27]

You don't _need_ to say exacerbate instead of 'make worse', but it's a cool sounding word, so, like, why not. You wouldnt use it as a replacement for 'make worse' every time, though..there are instances where it just sounds wrong.

Defenestrate, though, is a joke word. You can't say defenestrate without tongue firmly in cheek.

[pja]

P.S.: this is why cursing in English is so simple and stunted while in Russian I can have a conversation with someone using nothing but the word “dick” and it would be not only perfectly understandable but also quite expressive.

Perhaps you just need an education in high quality English swearing? Although I’m informed by my partner that Spanish is a much better language to swear in than English, if you have the choice.

[tobylane]

Informal British English does break a few of those rules, especially comedy.

[davidivadavid]

What you're talking about is declensions/cases rather than conjugation, which English speakers also tend not to be familiar with.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> 5. Word munging is uncommon in English.

Most of what you say above about English boils down to this: English doesn't compose words from parts. And so, without conjugation (in general, grammatical inflection), you need to have different words to represent different versions of the same concept. That's where the gigantism of English vocabulary comes from and where the use of the auxiliary verbs (to be and to have), comes from. The later are needed to slightly tweak the meaning of words to make them express different concepts; and, sometimes, you just need to invent a new word to say a new thing.

So for instance you go from simple "I eat" to more complex "I have eaten" to the cumbersome "I have been eating" and "I would have been eating" or, heaven forbid, "I would have had eaten". In Greek -and, I bet, in Russian or any language that allows inflection- these variations on the basic concept of eating can be expressed by verb terminations, although the occasional auxiliary verb or particle is also used: "έφαγα" (I have eaten), "έτρωγα" (I have been eating), "θα έτρωγα" (I would have been eating) and "θα είχα φάει" ("I would have had eaten) [granted, "τρώω", is an anomalous verb and its different forms sound like different words altogether... but they are composed in the same way as er omalous words, "κοιτάω", "κοίταγα", "θα κοίταγα", "θα είχα κοιτάξει" for "looking" rather than "eating"].

Then there's the thing with gendered nouns, that are absent in English but present in many other European languages. For example, to say "a male dog" in English you have to - well, do what I just did or add a pronoun ("he-dog", I don't know how this practice is called); respectively "she-dog" for female dog. In Greek you say "σκύλος, σκύλα, σκυλί" (skyl-os -a -i) for male, female and neuter (i.e. when gender is not important).

This makes English a language of many small words combined in different ways to give new meaning to utterances. It does really remind of ideographic writing as opposed to an alphabet.

But let's talk about what our languages lack that English has - you say that English has articles to indicate specificity. Most Slavic languages lack those and so native speakers of Slavic languages stand out when they use English. Instead of "the program has a bug", "progam has bug", instead of "search a list of integers", "search list of integers", etc.

In Greek again, we have a single word to indicate the position of an object "σε", as in "_στο_ τραπέζι" ("_on_ the table"), "_στην_ κουζίνα" (_in_ the kitchen), "πάω _στη_ θάλασσα" ("I'm going _to_ the beach") and "_σε_ δείχνω" ("I'm pointing _at_ you"). For me at least, after 15 years of living in the UK and using English every day, the correct use of thse different location-indicators (particles?) is still the last frontier that I haven't fully conquered and I find myself making mistakes when using them. "In the page" or "on the page"? "To the house" or "at the house"? Leaving things unsaid and relying on concept is all well and fine until you need to speak in a language that makes the ommitted information clear. Then you're in trouble and you realise you actually didn't have such a clear idea of the unsaid, after all.

[blackshaw]

> "I would have had eaten"

Where are you from? "I would have had eaten" makes no sense to me (British). I don't think it's a valid construction.

[selimthegrim]

Would have had to have eaten probably?

[simias]

I think there's a lot of bad linguistics in the linked article and in these comments, but your comment being more substantial than most I decided to focus my criticism there, sorry if that comes of as a bit adversarial. I just think that the general point that $language would be objectively easier/harder/more efficient/less efficient than $other_language based on arbitrary factoids is almost always at best irrelevant and at worst wrong. The easiest language to learn is the one that's most similar to yours. A Japanese speaker would find Korean significantly easier to learn than Spanish. Any attempt to go beyond that is IMO a fool's errand that's just going to confirm your own biases based on the languages you know and the languages you don't know.

>English has a very simple, pre-defined sentence structure. Run-on sentence are discouraged. The language has almost logical decisions regarding the use of the verb “be”. Words are rarely skipped because they are implied. By contrast Russian is much more contextual and free flowing. “I love you”, “you I love”, and “love I you” are all valid sentences with slightly different meanings. “To be” is often skipped. “I hungry” is valid because what else would you put between those two words other than “am”?

You make many points that I'm not sure I follow. Most of it boils down to "English is rather analytical, Russian is rather synthetic", which is of course correct but doesn't really mean much.

Chinese is even more analytic than English, Spanish is significantly more synthetic than either of them. What can we extrapolate from that? Not much.

Regarding the copula "to be" it's an other arbitrary attribute of a language. Some English dialects actually allow it to be dropped, in sentences like "he stupid". Japanese is also zero copula as are many languages from many language families: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_copula , I don't really think it means a lot when it comes to the difficulty of these languages.

>2. English has almost no conjugation. The only word changes that happen. Are for present to past or past perfect tenses (go/went/gone). By contrast in Russian you end up conjugating loads of words depending on the relationships between the object and the subject based on direction, action, possession, and gender.

>3. English has nine tenses plus the infinitive. Russian has 3+1, which encapsulate the meaning of the 9+1 in English with implied context.

Again, what's the argument? If anything it sounds like Russian is easier then?

Russian has verb aspect (perfect and imperfect forms) which is a rather big hurdle for us western learners not used to memorizing verbs in somewhat arbitrary pairs. You also have a huge mess of verbs of motions that are some of the most common ones and require a lot of practice to get right. идти/ехать/ходить/сходить/зайти/пройти... I get PTSD just thinking about it. However Russian conjugations are for the most part rather simple. Meanwhile Portuguese has 12 synthetic tenses (including 3 subjunctives for your pleasure), not counting the compound ones with ter/haver. Aspect is expressed through different tenses, not through different verbs like in Russian. What do we conclude from this? Again, not much IMO.

>5. Word munging is uncommon in English. When a new word is coined it is mostly atomic (app, tweet, selfie). You rarely can take two existing words and combine them with a prefix, a suffix, an ending and get a new word that is grammatically correct. In Russian “protoplanotraincycled” would be a word you could coin and use on the fly.

Just give up. Give in. Give it back. Take me on and attempt to take me over. Take it up with the linguists if you won't take my word for it. That's my take. It's a bit silly that I have to undertake this argument. We should really take it for granted that is is not true.

Some languages like Russian and German like to build compound words, in modern English and French it's a bit less common and productive. Again, so what?

Note that many English word have this compound structure, it's just often less obvious because they've been borrowed from latin or French so it obscures it somewhat. "впечатление" and "impression" for instance have exactly the same structure (в + печать + ~ение", "in + press + ~ion"), it's just probably less obvious to a native anglo than it is to your average drug because the English word is a direct loan from french. "app" is short for "application" which has exactly the same structure as приложение.

>Aside from the extra/more specific tenses and the articles, Russian contains all the complexity of English.

And English contains all the complexity of Russian. It's just expressed differently. I defy you to find an idea or concept in Russian that couldn't be expressed in English, Catalan, Arabic or Chinese. They would just sometimes be expressed differently.

If you're talking purely from a grammatical perspective then I disagree. English tenses are more varied than Russian ones, especially in the past and in the subjunctive. "If he had been there, he would've known". I've seen many Russian speakers with a high level of proficiency in English who still routinely make mistakes in these types of constructions.

>Where the drudgery of English comes in is vocabulary.

лекарь/врач/доктор, состояние/условие, перестать/остановить, вдруг/внезапно/неожиданно, прожить/выжить, идти/ехать/езжать, революция/переворот/восстание, международный/интернациональный, русский/россиский, шофёр/водитель. That's just out of the top of my head.

Interrestingly English and Russian share a similar trait here: English has many doublons like freedom/liberty which are from germanic and latin roots respectively. Russian does the same thing but with slavic and western european roots (generally german and french, nowadays also routinely english).

These faux-synonims that translate to the same thing in your language but carry sometimes important distinctions are always tricky, and in my experience they exist in every language. English has "do" and "make", French has only "faire" but English only has "know" while French has "savoir" and "connaitre".

English has "to put" while Russian has "положить" and "поставить". Russian loves to use very specific verbs where English would just use "to be": находиться, стоять, лежать, висеть and a few others. Similarly Portuguese has "ser", "estar" and "ficar" which can't usually be used interchangeably.

Anyway, I could go on. My TL;DR is that the concept of a language being objectively easier than an other is usually very shortsighted and just demonstrates a certain bias caused by the speaker's own language. Spanish is generally considered to be a relatively simple language by native English speaker, yet it's not grammatically simple. Chinese is vastly more analytic than even English, most learners will tell you that its grammar is usually very easy to grasp, yet it's often considered one of the hardest "mainstream" languages to learn for westerners.

The idea that a language like Russian would be harder to pick up or easier to master than English is laugable to me, as a non-native speaker of either. Russian is riddled with unpredictable stress patterns, irregular declensions and subtle use of word order (“I love you”, “you I love”, and “love I you” only mean the same thing superficially, mastering the nuance is where it gets tricky). English has complicated spelling rules, a mish mash of vocabulary from various origins in common use, conjugations that are only superficially simple (the forms are simple, the usage isn't). It also has phonemes like "th" which are rather uncommon and are hard to pronounce for most non-native speakers.

As for Russian's advanced stuff: after две you put feminine adjectives in the nominative plural and the noun in the genitive singular. But you can also put adjectives in the genitive plural if you want, but it's less common. Unless the stress position in the noun is different between the nominative plural and the genitive singular, in that case native speakers are more likely to use the genitive of the adjective.

That's just one random factoid I have in the back of my brain for having studied Russian. I could go on for a long time.

[sedeki]

I disagree with your view (= that languages are objectively incomparable w.r.t. difficulty of learning them, and instead only depends on your native language), but I'm not going to try and argue about this.

However I am curious to know whether you have the same view on Esperanto?