User blog comment:Mata Nui/Over Seven Thousand Edits!/@comment-433902-20100531160102

Thanks again, everyone.

@Thebioniclelegend: I'm not sure I agree completely. But then again, I'm not fully aware of all English grammar.

But if you compare other Germanic languages, I'd say that at least basic English is very uncomplicated.

For example:
 * 1) English only have one genus, while German has three genus, and Sweden have two genus. (Although there are some rests from nowadays unused genus in Swedish grammar)
 * 2) The infinitive form and the current tense form of English verbs are the same, except in third person singular.
 * 3) The definite article ('the') and/or the un-definite article ('a' or 'an') doesn't change depending on where in the sentence the the noun is located. (However, also applies to Swedish)

But neither of those are what I was think about.

I'll give an example:

"People speak much about it"

Translated to Swedish, that would be:

"Man/folk talar mycket om det" or "Det talas mycket om det"

Now, let's take a closer look at that sentence. (Text within '[' and ']'s is meant to imitate the pronunciation.)

Det [de:t] - Pronoun; First person singular, neutrum. | English translation: It [it] talas [ta:las] - Verb; present tense (Though not the usual one) | English translation: Speak [spi:k], talk [tå:k] mycket [myket] - Adjective; neutrum and (mostly) utrum, attributive form | English translation: much [matʃ], a lot [ö lot], very [very] om [om] - Preposition(?) | English translation: About [öbawt] Det [de:t] - Pronoun; First person singular, neutrum. | English translation: It [it]

The verb, 'talas' (att tala=to speak, talar=speaks, talade=spoke, har talat=have spoken), is the interesting part. As for as I know, you don't have that conjugation in English.

Another interesting thing is the absence of the future tense in Swedish, though that applies to many more languages, including English.

Sure, we can still talk talk about the future, and there is a specific conjugation for verbs which is called "futurum". Which is simply stupid. Because the thing is that when specific auxiliary verbs (Can, will, shall, want (to), must, may, etc.) are present in the sentence, we use the infinitive form of the other verb, which eliminates the future tense, since there's nothing special with using the infinitive form of a verb when shall or will is next to that verb.

Example:

"I will go to school tomorrow."

In Swedish:

"Jag skall* gå till skolan imorgon."

* In spoken language, and sometimes in written, it's only 'ska' instead of 'skall'. It is quite common that the ends of the verbs disappear.

In German:

"Ich soll morgens nach der Schule gehen"

Note: I've only studied German for a little more than a year, so I'm not completely sure. Correct me if I'm wrong. Also note that 'der Schule' is normally 'die Schule', but it's position in the sentence changes this.

See what I mean?

Anyways, lets not argue about this, since it is actually very hard to determine how complicated a language is.