Which of these languages is the least logical?
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  Which of these languages is the least logical?
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Question: Which of these languages is the least logical?
#1
German
 
#2
French
 
#3
Spanish
 
#4
English
 
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Total Voters: 34

Author Topic: Which of these languages is the least logical?  (Read 1539 times)
politicus
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« on: December 03, 2014, 10:04:51 PM »

I would say English.
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Goldwater
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« Reply #1 on: December 03, 2014, 10:12:06 PM »

English (native English speaker)
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Nathan
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« Reply #2 on: December 03, 2014, 10:12:48 PM »

English has a single-syllable prefix derived from a basic vocabulary term that changes the meaning of the word it modifies to 'a shape-shifting monster consisting of a human who turns into a/n [stem word], typically on a lunar cycle'.
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Sol
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« Reply #3 on: December 03, 2014, 10:19:03 PM »

This is a really stupid question--What the heck is logical supposed to mean? Is this the "park in the driveway/drive on a parkway" nonsense?

English has a single-syllable prefix derived from a basic vocabulary term that changes the meaning of the word it modifies to 'a shape-shifting monster consisting of a human who turns into a/n [stem word], typically on a lunar cycle'.
Not a particularly odd thing. See some of the prefixes in some of the polysynthetic languages of the Pacific Northwest.

Things that seem weird to speakers of European languages are often not that weird in the grand scheme of things, and vice-versa.
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angus
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« Reply #4 on: December 03, 2014, 10:19:52 PM »
« Edited: December 03, 2014, 10:57:20 PM by angus »

Among those, I might tend to agree with you if I had more knowledge of French.  English is my native language.  Also, I lived in Germany for a year and studied German for about six months before living there, so I have some familiarity with that language.  I studied Spanish for many years in high school and university and have worked as a Spanish/English interpreter and have traveled extensively in at least 12 hispanic countries, so I am also quite familiar with the Spanish language.  Among those three, I'd agree that English is the least logical.  English, for example, has at least two words for everything.  One Latin, and one German.  (We get our German roots largely from migrants from Jutland, by the way Wink + Tongue)  Take Free, for example.  We say Liberty--like Liberta in Italian, Liberté in French, Libertad in Spanish, etc.--but we also say Freedom, like Freiheit in German, or Frihed in Danish.  Also, we usually arrange our verbs like the Latin languages, but we can keep them at the end, like they do in German, especially if you're Yoda or a Yiddish New Yorker:  e.g., "A real comedian, you are."

As for French, I have very limited understanding of that language.  I know enough to order a beer in a bar in Paris, or ask where the restroom is, and I can say things like "how much does that cost?" and "we have a reservation for three under the name of angus" but I really can't keep up a serious conversation in French.  French pretty much sounds like you have a big hacker caught in your throat and can't quite cough it up.  Other than that, I know little of the French language.  Therefore, since French is one of the options I cannot vote in this poll, but among the three languages you listed with which I am familiar, English seems terribly illogical.  Especially spelling rules in English.  Don't even get me started on spelling.  English spelling is a beast.

There is a linguistics expert who posts here regularly.  His handle is Ilikeverin.  Maybe he will chime in and give us his expert opinion regarding the illogic of languages.  I suspect that the newer a language is, the less logical (and more technical) it will be.  Chinese, therefore, will be very logical.  English, on the other hand, will be very illogical.  "Is there an app for that?" sounds pretty stupid, but actually has a very precise meaning.  The phrase evolved somewhere in the vicinity of San Francisco--a relatively recent city with a spanish name in which most of the residents speak either English or some variant of Chinese--but a phrase which probably sounds pretty much the same in just about every known language.  What does a Sherpa call an app, anyway?  My guess is, an app.



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Mr. Smith
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« Reply #5 on: December 04, 2014, 12:53:04 AM »

English by a narrow margin.

German seems prone to a good number of syntax issues as English, and it has so many conjugations and arbitrary article/adjective changes.

However English wins by lack of a "you" in plural, so many borrowed words, inconsistent spelling, and if one thinks about it "split infinitives", oh and accents you can't see in words like cliche or naive.
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Sol
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« Reply #6 on: December 04, 2014, 10:16:09 AM »

English by a narrow margin.

German seems prone to a good number of syntax issues as English, and it has so many conjugations and arbitrary article/adjective changes.

However English wins by lack of a "you" in plural, so many borrowed words, inconsistent spelling, and if one thinks about it "split infinitives", oh and accents you can't see in words like cliche or naive.

French spelling is as bad as English (Although any Northwestern European language is going to have a hard time with spelling their many vowels).

Many English dialects have a 2nd person plural, at least in the U.S., either with y'all, all y'all, you guys, or yinz.
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DemPGH
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« Reply #7 on: December 04, 2014, 10:54:58 AM »

German on sentence structure (with regard to verbs), which is positively bizarre to a native English speaker. French spelling and pronunciation are also strange to a native English speaker but can be gotten used to.
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TDAS04
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« Reply #8 on: December 04, 2014, 11:02:09 AM »

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Bigby
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« Reply #9 on: December 04, 2014, 11:06:14 AM »

English by a narrow margin.

German seems prone to a good number of syntax issues as English, and it has so many conjugations and arbitrary article/adjective changes.

However English wins by lack of a "you" in plural, so many borrowed words, inconsistent spelling, and if one thinks about it "split infinitives", oh and accents you can't see in words like cliche or naive.

We Southerners have a fix for that.
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20RP12
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« Reply #10 on: December 04, 2014, 11:28:09 AM »

In English, their our know rules.
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angus
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« Reply #11 on: December 04, 2014, 11:34:30 AM »


We split them only because we can, and there's no reason that we shouldn't.  In those other three languages, it is impossible.  I like to regularly split them.  (see, I just did it.)
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Mr. Smith
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« Reply #12 on: December 04, 2014, 01:16:01 PM »

Yes dialects, but that's not an official one and it's going to confuse anyone else.

And then there's the death of "thou"/"you" difference.

English sentence structure is actually quite bizarre to though.

German isn't illogical inherently,it's more that it tries too hard to be logical and sets up so many rules that it does end up looking that way.

The Romance languages suck at hypotheticals though and that's important to have.

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anvi
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« Reply #13 on: December 04, 2014, 01:58:01 PM »

Of the choices, I'd say English too.  I guess I'd say that because English is far less inflected than these other European languages, and much of its word-stock has accreted from so many different languages.  But that conclusion is based on the languages being considered here and is not a general rule by any means.  Classical and modern Chinese, for example, have almost no inflection whatsoever, but, contrary to popular belief, the structure of both strikes me as extremely logical, while classical Sanskrit, despite being inflected almost to infinity, can at times be quite arbitrary.  I'm no linguist, but my study of different languages makes it seem this way to me.
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angus
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« Reply #14 on: December 04, 2014, 02:14:41 PM »
« Edited: December 04, 2014, 02:19:38 PM by angus »


The Romance languages suck at hypotheticals though and that's important to have.


Really?  I guess I never noticed that in Spanish.  I'm looking at a Spanish chemical physics text just now, published in Bilbao, and I'm reading the section on Planck's Distribution Law.  It is full of hypothetical statements, conditionals, and suppositions and none of it seems strained or awkward.  In some cases this is achieved with verb conjugation, but mostly it is achieved with what are called conjunctions in the English language, but which are called preposiciónes in Spanish since the "conjunction" doesn't exist as a separate category in Spanish.  

The derivation starts by asking us to imagine a collection of N oscillators, each with the same fundamental vibrational frequency, and walks through the standard derivation and ends up with the same algebraic form of Planck's Law found in English-language textbooks.  It even goes on to refer the reader, in a rather long footnote, to note that if the exponential term in the denominator is expanded as a Taylor-Maclaurin series in frequency and ignore the higher-order terms (which is justifiable for sufficiently long wavelengths), then Planck's Law collapses to the Rayleigh-Jeans Law.  

If I flip over to the section covering atomic structure, I see that the postulates of quantum mechanics are described pretty much as they are in English, and they do not seem strained or awkward either, even though conditionals and hypotheticals are used.  Interestingly, they do not capitalize the H when writing out Hamiltonian operator.  They just say that "Ĥ es el operador hamiltoniano..."  I think I have noticed that before about Spanish.  Adjectives are not capitalized, if they came from proper nouns.  

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Filuwaúrdjan
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« Reply #15 on: December 04, 2014, 03:00:03 PM »

My Taid insisted throughout his life that English was an illogical language. He first encountered it at school and ended up with a better grasp of formal English than about 99% of native speakers, so I'll take his word as authority on this.
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traininthedistance
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« Reply #16 on: December 04, 2014, 03:09:19 PM »

For most people it's probably actually English, but I voted German because I have a personal beef with that language.

And, for all of its admitted phonetical weirdness, English's huge-ass vocabulary picked up from all four corners of the earth and lack of grammatical gender are, I would argue, virtues rather than bugs.
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Sol
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« Reply #17 on: December 04, 2014, 04:06:16 PM »

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is measuring what language is more illogical than what is bunk and unscientific.
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politicus
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« Reply #18 on: December 04, 2014, 04:10:41 PM »

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is measuring what language is more illogical than what is bunk and unscientific.

lol
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DemPGH
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« Reply #19 on: December 04, 2014, 04:19:17 PM »

And, for all of its admitted phonetical weirdness, English's huge-ass vocabulary picked up from all four corners of the earth and lack of grammatical gender are, I would argue, virtues rather than bugs.

Couldn't agree more. The genders and endings of words changing based on what function they play is great not to have. German has three genders - masculine, feminine, and neuter, and there is often no logic whatsoever to it beyond the logical question, "What gender is a given object?" Girl (Mädchen) is neuter, for instance. The capitalization of nouns, though, is to me logical.
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Linus Van Pelt
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« Reply #20 on: December 04, 2014, 07:26:23 PM »

No spoken language is more "logical" than any other in any clear sense.

English does have a fairly indirect correspondence between phonology and spelling.
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solarstorm
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« Reply #21 on: December 04, 2014, 08:10:27 PM »

German on sentence structure (with regard to verbs), which is positively bizarre to a native English speaker.

My English is so under all sow that me that so quickly nobody after make will. Smiley
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Platypus
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« Reply #22 on: December 04, 2014, 11:20:09 PM »

English, but it's no bad thing. The chaos of English is it's greatest advantage.
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ilikeverin
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« Reply #23 on: December 05, 2014, 12:11:36 AM »

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is measuring what language is more illogical than what is bunk and unscientific.

lol

Er, well, it is.

And, for all of its admitted phonetical weirdness, English's huge-ass vocabulary picked up from all four corners of the earth and lack of grammatical gender are, I would argue, virtues rather than bugs.

Couldn't agree more. The genders and endings of words changing based on what function they play is great not to have. German has three genders - masculine, feminine, and neuter, and there is often no logic whatsoever to it beyond the logical question, "What gender is a given object?" Girl (Mädchen) is neuter, for instance. The capitalization of nouns, though, is to me logical.

Ah, yes, "gender is useless", that's a common statement.  Certainly you support abolishing "she" and "he", then.  We can just use "it" for everything.  Finnish and Turkish seem to survive just fine without gender at all.  And "endings of word changing based on what function they play"; shall we abolish case, then, too?  "She saw him with her binoculars" becomes "it saw it with it binoculars"; hmm.
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traininthedistance
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« Reply #24 on: December 05, 2014, 12:13:28 AM »
« Edited: December 05, 2014, 12:15:02 AM by traininthedistance »

Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is measuring what language is more illogical than what is bunk and unscientific.

lol

Er, well, it is.

And, for all of its admitted phonetical weirdness, English's huge-ass vocabulary picked up from all four corners of the earth and lack of grammatical gender are, I would argue, virtues rather than bugs.

Couldn't agree more. The genders and endings of words changing based on what function they play is great not to have. German has three genders - masculine, feminine, and neuter, and there is often no logic whatsoever to it beyond the logical question, "What gender is a given object?" Girl (Mädchen) is neuter, for instance. The capitalization of nouns, though, is to me logical.

Ah, yes, "gender is useless", that's a common statement.  Certainly you support abolishing "she" and "he", then.  We can just use "it" for everything.  Finnish and Turkish seem to survive just fine without gender at all.  And "endings of word changing based on what function they play"; shall we abolish case, then, too?  "She saw him with her binoculars" becomes "it saw it with it binoculars"; hmm.

There's quite a difference between having gendered pronouns for people and animals who actually have gender, and slapping it onto each and every inanimate object for God knows what reason.
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