Re: English compared to other European languages

Richard Fangnail (or somebody else of the same name) wrote thusly in message
<1114278537.588825.266730@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:

> I've noticed that Italian and German have a lot of conjugations to
> memorize, and a lot of masc/fem/neuter endings. Maybe I'm biased
> because I'm an English speaker. Why does there seem to be more
> grammatical suffixes in those languages than in English?
>
> I wonder why only German has the capitalized nouns.

Pre-Conquest English was a recognisably Germanic language and was as
complicated then as German was then. Grammar and vocabulary in perfect
harmony.

Then William came over and forced the language to accept an entirely new
Latinate vocabulary. These new words did not blend with English grammar at
the time and the only way out was to simplify the mass of conjugations,
declensions and whatnot. Rather than adopt a hybrid of German-ish and
French-ish endings, English compromised by chucking nearly all the
declensions and conjugations out and using "little words" instead.
Case-endings became prepositions, verb-endings became personal pronouns for
the subject and auxiliary verbs for the tense.

Relics of the old endings give English all the quaint irregular plurals we
know and love today. We have oxen, but what ever happened to eyen or shoon?
Does "child" take -er or -en? Can't remember, let's tack both on, we're
*bound* to be right.

Plural by vowel-change was once far more widespread in the language, as it
still is in German, but how many French words form their plurals thus? Only
a few instances remain in English, in very old Germanic words (man/men,
woman/women, mouse/mice, foot/feet).
--
Paul Townsend
Pair them off into threes

Interchange the alphabetic letter groups to reply
.

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