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From: robert@cs.arizona.edu (Robert J. Drabek)
Newsgroups: comp.edu,sci.edu,misc.education
Subject: Re: Another thread gone tangential
Summary: more
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Date: 14 Dec 90 16:55:01 GMT
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Bernstein and Lindsley write (for my point it doesn't matter who is who
here) :
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> catch/catches/caught/caught/catching is a *complete* conjugation. What
> other language is so simple? To learn a verb in English you must learn
> just five words.

JUST 5?  I have to learn 5 words to speak ONE meaning?  Yikes!
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> But there is a notable lack of rules to follow when attempting to generate
> the latter four forms from the first (whereas, in Latin, for example,
> this is a trivial task for the majority of verbs).
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> You deleted my assertion to the contrary. In English it is a trivial
> task for the majority of verbs to generate the mere five forms. There
> are perhaps a dozen different verb types, each based on the spelling of
> the word, to cover almost every case.

A trivial task for most.  But those dozen (he said that, I didn't) do
make life difficult for older second-language learner.
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> In French, a verb has dozens of forms. There are at least two hundred
> different types, only loosely correlated with spelling; there are more
> exceptions than in English.

I never considered French to qualify as a natural language. :-)
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  Not on any objective basis. English is both more regular and more
  structured than any other language I know of.

Let's see.  Why don't we try Chinese, Mandarin specifically.  There is
only one form of all verbs.  Conjugation is totally absent.

Also, Spanish is much more more regular than English, in case you only
want to consider Western languages.

--
Robert J. Drabek                            robert@cs.Arizona.EDU
Department of Computer Science              uunet!arizona!robert
The University of Arizona                   602 621 4326
Tucson, AZ  85721