retired_princesspouty

I don't think Eddie can speak the lingo - I think he learnt the phrases for this purpose only.

He is ffffffffffffbbb though.

retired_boy_0429

Yes, one theory is that the Norse languages are to blame (or thank!) for the fact that English lost the Germanic inflectional system, and of course Norman French added a lot of new vocabulary.

retired_mnw_cna

I read that about Norse. Apparently the Old English system of grammar was horrendously complicated. But then some modern languages still have a huge number of cases and use inflection, so it is clearly capable of being coped with.

I do think that the freedom English has in terms of syntax is a great advantage to it. I know the spelling is ghastly if you're a non-native speaker, but at least verbs are relatively straightforward and word order is a lot less vital than in some languages.

retired_boy_0429

I don't think Old English grammar was significantly more complicated than, say, modern German. In both languages you've got three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter) and four main cases (nominative, accusative, dative and genitive, plus instrumental in some OE dialects). OE did have "dual" pronouns specifically for two people, in addition to the usual singular and plural. I think it had a couple of different verb declensions (strong and weak); I can't remember what German has.

Modern English verbs are straightforward in the present tense, but I imagine the the number of semi-regular and irregular past tense formations are tricky for foreign-language speakers (and sometimes for natives). We also use three different present tenses where a lot of European languages would use the simple present ("I run"/"I am running"/"I do run") - I remember trying to pin down the rules for which to use for the benefit of a Chinese speaker. And even apparently simple things like the difference between "a" and "the" turn out to be more complex than they seem if you try to explain them to a Russian.

In some ways inflectional languages have more freedom in word order than English, because English uses it to replace the information conveyed by the case system. E.g. if you have "the dog bit the man" and want to emphasise who was bitten, you can't just reorder it to "the man bit the dog". An inflectional language can.