[wk_end]

(background disclaimer: native English speaker; can read Japanese and French reasonably well; German somewhat less so; have also lightly studied Latin + Russian + Spanish; Chinese not at all)

Chinese sounds more like the exception than the rule.

I feel like if you're going to say "It just feels like an inefficient language for communication. Why does it have to be so complicated?" you should come for the Indo-European languages first; exoticizing Japanese as this bizarrely complex, weird language just isn't accurate.

In fact, even with the various things you listed, Japanese grammar is still relatively simple compared to most European languages, for instance. No genders, few tenses, only two irregular verbs, a word order system that's both pretty consistent (SOV) and flexible...meanwhile, a lot of what's called "grammar" in Japanese language pedagogy feels more like what European languages would call idiomatic expressions.

Even keigo, which is definitely a pain point...English, for instance, has all sorts of subtle ways of communicating tone and politeness, it's just not quite as explicit. In a way, the strict manner in which it's codified in Japanese makes those nuances somewhat easier to grasp.

[gerdesj]

I think you have it right and OP doesn't. For example: "Exotic-sounding grammar features like the subject-object-verb sentence structure"

There is nothing exotic about SOV vs any other order.

Latin (and all Romance languages French, Italian int al): SVO, German: SOV. English: SVO. All of them are complex enough that word order can be re-arranged and the meaning remains and often enhanced.

All human spoken languages are Turing complete (not enough room in this column for a wonderful proof I came across tomorrow). All humans have the same set of hardware and software (I hate the term wetware) and facilities. There are some variations in how they are used but in the end I refuse to allow for concepts that are "untranslatable".

I do allow that some people have, say, four colour vision instead of three and so they can experience a colour spectrum beyond the norm. My Mum had better than normal visual acuity - she could see much further than the rest of the family.

Regardless of sensors, we all have largely the same set of equipment to process and convey our ideas and notions.

Creative use of that equipment and deployment of the same should be applauded and encouraged. However, don't get yourself hung up on the idea that your ideas are somehow different or unique or even worse: better, due to some sort of racial alignment or language.

I'm a massive fan of vive la differance but I also like to see vive la meme.

[thaumasiotes]

> Latin (and all Romance languages French, Italian int al): SVO, German: SOV. English: SVO. All of them are complex enough that word order can be re-arranged and the meaning remains and often enhanced.

Latin is definitely not SVO. Those roles are marked explicitly enough that they can occur in any order without really causing any problems (and in poetry, they do), but to the extent that an order applies to Latin, it is SOV.

This is one of the features that is felt to result from simplification. As you note, Romance languages tend to be SVO. It's also true that Mandarin is SVO where other Chinese languages tend to be SOV. And that creoles tend to be SVO even when every source language uses some other order.

So the theory does float around that SVO order is in some sense more intuitive than the others, and that's the reason for its appearance in Romance, Mandarin, and creoles.

[psychoslave]

This led me to read https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.... which was rather interesting

[gerdesj]

Not sure why I put Latin in as SVO, given that the second Latin lesson I received (aged 10), went into some detail about word order. The first was amo amas amat ... moneo monas monat.

However, all languages tend to be flexible, as required: "Gaul as a whole is divided into three parts" or as JC said: "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres".

[pilaf]

> only two irregular verbs

This is what textbooks often say, but it's kind of a soft lie. Besides the typical する and 来る (which are strongly irregular), there's:

ある → ない (negative form)

行く → 行って instead of expected 行いて

くれる → くれ (imperative form) instead of expected くれろ

And a number of others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_irregular_verbs

[glandium]

I'll go pedantic, but ない is technically not an irregular negative form of ある. The negative form of ある is the regular あらぬ/あらない, but it has been substituted with ない, which is an entirely different word. You'll often hear あらへん in Kansai dialect, which is derived from ある.

Edit: there are idioms that use あらず which is also a standard negative form of ある, like なきにしもあらず.

[actionfromafar]

O this!

English is like a runtime typed language, and Japanese sounds like a statically typed language.