Re: why the -s in English verbs?

On Feb 29, 12:43 am, ekk...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

Verb/noun confusion is a reality in English.

"It's not a bug, it's a feature."

As I said elsewhere,
pretending the problem does not exist does not make it go away.
Statistically, the -s ending helps to "mark" the verb. It's not the
only device, positional information is the primary clue, but it
sometimes is not enough a clue. If the 3Sg -s ending has survived,
there is a reason.

Perhaps I can put it another way. In long sentences or paragraphs
(written or spoken), often the reader/listener would get distracted
and miss out a few words, and then loses the positional clue. That's
the moment when additional grammatical markers come to help to "re-
synch" our mental parsing mechanism. It's a bit like how German's
Großschreibung works: not strictly a necessary feature, but people
have found it useful enough that it is still being used.

Languages often work based on statistical significance. There are
bound to be exceptions, but as long as there is enough correlation,
that's all what's needed. For instance, in Southern Min (I haven't
checked other Chinese languages/dialects), I know for sure that the
most used transitive verbs have strong correlation with the Qu tone
category. Languages are not mathematics. Language signals are subject
to noises, but a little bit of correlation here and a little bit of
correlation there help the reader/listener to parse and understand the
message correctly.

Sorry, but _your_ problems understanding English are not the fault of
the language.
.

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