tmb@tardis.UUCP (Thomas M. Breuel) (01/25/86)
||English grammar has been simplified a lot as compared to, say, ||German grammar. |Can you explain what you mean? What's left out? 'Left out' is probably not a good way of expressing the 'simplifications' of the English grammar vs. the German grammar because it carries negative connotations. Clearly, both languages are 'general' in the sense that they allow the expression of ideas common to speakers of English and German. One of the most distinguishing features of English is the (virtual) absence of gender and inflection. This is not to say that the English language does not have a notion of 'case' or 'mode' or 'aspect', it is to say that these grammatical functions are realised in the language practically exclusively in the form of sentence particles and word order. Since German employs word order, sentence particles, *and* inflection to realise these functions, and since simplification means abolishing the non-essential, I would call, in the absence of major examples of the opposite phenomenon, English grammar as a whole 'simplified' when compared to German grammar. (The meaning of derivation implied by the use of 'simplification' is also justified, since modern German is much closer to the common ancestor of the English and German languages than English). The practical consequence of this simplification is, again, not that English can't express certain ideas which could be expressed in German, but rather that speakers tend to express ideas differently in English. Probably the most striking influence of grammatical differences on usage can be found in poetry. I believe that even in colloquial language, differences in grammar change style and content of speech significantly. It appears to me, for example, that in the colloquial language, speakers of English are much less careful to express their attitude towards a statement, because, I presume, the expression of attitude frequently introduces subordinate clauses or, at least, requires the use of extra words. Likewise, the resolution of referents of relative clauses is aided much by the requirement for agreement in gender, number, and case between referee and referent in the German language (in the English language, this agreement still exists, but it does not help as much to resolve referents), and perhaps this is the reason why Germans tend to use more complex sentence structures than speakers of English. A few examples can also be given for grammatical constructions developed in English but not in German. One of these is the progressive tense. It came into use in the English language only during the 19th and 20th century. German expresses the same idea analogously by nominalisation and statement of existence, but the construction is felt to be more awkward than a straightforward statement and therefore avoided unless required for clarity. Altogether, I believe that an argument can be made that German grammar is, in a certain sense, more complex than English grammar. Thomas.