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What are some heavily regular languages? | ||
Tags: Easiness | Choosing a Language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Dtmon Newbie United States Joined 3381 days ago 6 posts - 9 votes Studies: Georgian, English* | Message 1 of 21 08 February 2015 at 2:42am | IP Logged |
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The idea of "regular" languages always interested me. When I say regular I mean languages with high amounts of patterns that rarely have exceptions. Languages like Esperanto or Turkish. Besides these two what are some others? Others that I have heard of being regular are Finnish,Hungarian, and Persian but I could be mistaken. I have also heard that Tamil has word gender but it is extremely regular. Is there anything else out there?
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| Lakeseayesno Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico thepolyglotist.com Joined 4131 days ago 280 posts - 488 votes  Speaks: English, Spanish*, Japanese, Italian Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 2 of 21 08 February 2015 at 6:56am | IP Logged |
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Japanese is incredibly regular--almost all parts of a sentence have a limited number of conjugations, and it has so few exceptions you can probably count them with one hand.
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| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6394 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 3 of 21 08 February 2015 at 1:47pm | IP Logged |
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Finnish is pretty regular and logical, yes. To me it honestly makes more sense than Esperanto.
Latin does have exceptions, irregular verbs etc but it's still more regular than the modern Romance languages. Edited by Serpent on 08 February 2015 at 1:49pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| ellasevia Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2011 Senior Member Germany Joined 5939 days ago 2150 posts - 3229 votes Speaks: English*, German, Croatian, Greek, French, Spanish, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Catalan, Persian, Mandarin, Japanese, Romanian, Ukrainian | Message 4 of 21 08 February 2015 at 7:32pm | IP Logged |
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Swahili is extremely logical and very regular, there are only two irregularities I can think of in the whole language. I've also found it to be easier to learn overall than Turkish so far.
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| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4241 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 5 of 21 08 February 2015 at 9:11pm | IP Logged |
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Chinese like Japanese has no subject-verb conjugations. The numbers are straightforward from 1 to 99.
Eleven is ten & one together, twelve is ten & two, etc. The thing that get people intimidated are the characters. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Sizen Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4136 days ago 165 posts - 347 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Catalan, Spanish, Japanese, Ukrainian, German | Message 6 of 21 08 February 2015 at 9:14pm | IP Logged |
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Japanese definitely has irrgularities, just not as many as in European languages, I would think. Here are a few irregular verbs off the top of my head:
"Iku" (to go) which is only irregular in the te-form and past informal. "Kuru" (to come) which is mostly irregular in every form but follows certain patterns. "Suru" (to do) which is also irregular in every form but follows certain patterns. "Kou" and "Tou" (to ask) which are both irregular in the te-form and past informal. "Kureru" (to give) which is irregular in the imperative form. "Irassharu" (to be, to go, to come) which is irregular in all masu-forms. "Ossharu" (to say) which is also irregular in all masu-forms. The verb "aru" (to be, to have) could also be considered irregular as the informal negative form of the verb has been completely replaced by an adjective. All Japanese verbs that end in "u" could also be considered irregular in their informal negative forms. The Japanese copula is also irregular. As for gender and the likes, Japanese does not have grammatical gender or plural forms of its nouns. There are, however, plural suffixes that see little use, but they are regular. Another irregularity of Japanerse would be the readings of its characters. Certain grammatical particles are written in one way but read another ("wa" which is written using the character for "ha" and "e" which is written using the character for "he"). Chinese characters in Japanese can also be irregular. Sometimes it's because one character has multiple ways of being read, such as 生 which has at least 9 readings that I can think of: Sei, shou, jou, u-mu, i-kiru, ha-eru, o-u, nama, na-ru. Some have arbitrary readings, such as 果物 which is read "kudamono" when in all logic, it should be read "kabutsu" or "kamotsu". It's debatable as to whether these phenomena can truly be called irregularities, however. There are also certain sound change rules for words made up of 2 or more kanji, but these are fairly regular. All in all, Japanese is considerably more regular than the Romance languages, for example. However, I would think there are much more regular languages out there. Edited by Sizen on 08 February 2015 at 9:34pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| kristinepeterso Newbie United States ccjk.com/ Joined 3394 days ago 5 posts - 6 votes | Message 7 of 21 09 February 2015 at 8:19am | IP Logged |
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I think Chinese, Japanese and Korean languages are most regular languages.
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| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6379 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 8 of 21 09 February 2015 at 9:09am | IP Logged |
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*Surpresses the instinct to yell "Chinese is not a language"*
I think the concept of "regular" vs. "irregular" is a bit eurocentric, or at least based heavily on Standard Average European. If we take it to mean "unpredictable", we need to look beyond features that are prominent in Indo-European languages, such as tense and case. Is Mandarin irregular because it has 一匹马 where one would expect 一只马? Or because you can make 孩子 plural as 孩子们, but not 汽车 as 汽车们? If we look to conjugations and declinations, an isolating language like Cantonese will of course look regular, possibly the only irregularity being that the negative of 有 is 冇 and not 唔有. But what about all the expressions that follow the grammar of Literary Sinitic instead of Cantonese? Is the fact that 今日 is often pronounced as "gam1 mat6" instead of "gam1 jat6" irregular? Or the fact that the verb "to give" is written in at least three different ways (比, 俾, 畀) by different writers (or at different times by the same writer)? I think the notion or "irregularity" is very useful when comparing different features of a single language. "This is a regular verb, but that is an irregular one". But when comparing languages to each other, it just doesn't make sense. As someone pointed out, we could easily claim Japanese is relatively regular, or extremely irregular, depending on whether you count the multiple readings of the kanji as an irregularity or not. 10 persons have voted this message useful |
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