I just can’t get over how anyone learns English as a second language. It’s enormously impressive anyone has any fluency in this freaking nightmare dialect that makes no sense.
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Replying to @SwiftOnSecurity
As anyone who speaks English as a second language will tell you, it is one of the simplest natural language there is. Try learning Portuguese, Cantonese, polish etc. Now that's a nightmare.
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Replying to @SwiftOnSecurity @cegadede
Confirm (as a 2nd lan learner). English has essentially no grammar complexity compared to Romance languages, nor the sheer number of special/irregular cases of other German languages. It is almost a literate pidgin. Gaelic, on the other hand, I would not dare try.
6 replies 0 retweets 27 likes -
One interesting article I read is about studying pidgins (the way "new languages" are formed in nature) to see what features they have in common, which is as close as we can get to the Chomskyan idea of universal hardwired language rules
1 reply 0 retweets 1 like -
Replying to @arthur_affect @fgcallari and
So like one tidbit is pidgins almost always develop with an SVO (subject-verb-object) sentence order, regardless of what sentence structure the original source languages used Like that's the "primitive" way to make a sentence and everything else evolved from it
1 reply 0 retweets 3 likes
SVO is *not* the most common sentence order among languages, OSV actually is However, English, the one truly global "hyperlanguage", is an unusually strictly SVO languages, with other possible sentence structures often dismissed as highfalutin and archaic ("Would that I could")
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