| If this was a valid argument than Modern English is also a rump language which was vandalized by countless French and Latin loanwords and that lost its grammatical correctness when people stopped conjugating verbs and using grammatical genders. Old English was a way more complex language, akin to German and had a different form for each person. For instance, to shine was "sċīnan", and the present tense was - ic sċīne
- þū sċīnst
- hē sċīnþ
... Nowadays, it's just "I shine, you shine, he shines", without no distinction except the third person's 's'. It's a vastly simpler language, and yet, it allows people to convey concepts as well as any other language. A thing I find ironic is that in certain languages that do thoroughly conjugate verbs, there's a way to mock those foreigners who don't know how to use verbs properly. It often happens that those who lack the knowledge of the proper inflected forms use the infinitive everywhere as a stopgap - for instance, one may say in broken Italian "io avere freddo" instead of the proper "io ho freddo", and every Italian speaker would understand it perfectly, albeit a native speaker would probably scoff it off as a blatant sign of a lack of linguistic knowledge. That's precisely what English went through during the transition from Old to Middle English. People started speaking "broken" English and they kept doing that, and after a while it wasn't broken anymore. Subjunctive tense? That's basically dead in modern English too. The point I'm trying to convey is, what you consider as the rules nowadays come straight from the broken babblings of the illiterates of yesteryear. If those Roman scholars that were complaining about the broken Latin spoken by their contemporaries had their way, the Romance languages would have never existed. Ironically, the moment Europe dropped Latin and started adopting the "vulgar" actually languages spoken by the people is widely considered the moment Europe truly started blooming again, and a crucial first step towards the literacy of the masses. |