[Naijoko]

many languages have this feature. For example Russian or German. You can put in the words, with most words missing, in any order and somehow someone will get it. France cant do this. Why... I dont know why. Maybe because the are more desciptive.

[danjac]

Russian is a heavily inflected language, so the order of words matters less. For example, in English you can say "the cat ate the bird", but if you reversed "cat" and "bird" this would be a different sentence entirely. In Russian "cat" would have the nominative case and "bird" accusative, so you can swap the words around and it would mean the same, though perhaps with different emphasis.

French doesn't do this; as with English only the pronouns have vestigial accusative, and in any case most inflections are lost in speech because French drops consonants from the end of words. So you have to depend on strict word order to preserve meaning.

[kergonath]

> France cant do this. Why... I dont know why. Maybe because the are more desciptive.

Oui oui. Je français parle très bien. Je entends français très bien aussi. Facile comprendre. Peux parler entre nous très bien juste mots simples. Français très bon.

Is just as understandable as the English original. French is much more forgiving than German in that regard, with a more flexible sentence structure. German and Russian the advantage of declension, which is a redundancy mechanism to indicate the role of a noun, but it’s an advantage over English just as much as over French. Also, it’s something a non-native will get wrong most of the time initially, so it’s not really helpful to help understand broken German.

Basically, I don’t think this is right and I tend to agree to “ many languages have this feature”, although I would say “most”.

[jackjeff]

I agree French could do this as well as English.

In fact, many Creole language derived from French have this kind of simplified French structure as a core feature

[watwut]

Declention makes it harder to learn the language tho. Keeping fixed words order is waaaay easier then keeping all those suffixes correct.

[adev_]

> France cant do this. Why... I dont know why. Maybe because the are more desciptive.

I would bet that a part of it can probably be blamed more on Parisian being Parisian than on the French themselves :)