Re: conjugation patterns in Spanish

John Atkinson wrote:
> Yes, and this objection is equally valid for native speakers of Spanish.
Spanish kids aren't born knowing Latin. But somehow they manage to learn the four hundred or so verbs that have /ie/ or /ue/ when the root is stressed and /e/ or /o/ when the ending is stressed. Or, if they internalise this as a general rule, they have to learn the hundreds of verbs which are exceptions to the rule, the ones which don't diphthongise /e/ or /o/ when the root is stressed.

This doesn't faze Spanish kids at all, but it does worry linguists who study language acquisition, who like to think that kids devise internal grammars which consist mostly of rules, with a comparatively small number of exceptions (irregularities) which mostly apply to the commonest words and can be listed individually in the grammar. The idea of several hundred irregular verbs in a language is not easy to fit into the way they postulate children's internal grammar-forming devices should work.

This doesn't seem different from the situation with languages with gender in which the gender of a noun can't readily be discerned (as it largely can in Spanish) from the noun itself.
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