Quote:
Originally Posted by cridgit001
Could you explain how it's illogical?
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Books could be written on this, but just to give a few small examples...
The third person singular present tense conjugation typically ends in 's', right? "He buys the item", "She goes to school", "The teacher likes to play basketball"... pretty regular, right? What happens if we change our simple statements to questions? The 's', for some inexplicable reason, disappears: "Does he buy the item?", "Does she go to school?", "Does the teacher like to play basketball?" The fact that we're asking a question has made our third person singular verb change to a second person singular one, for no real reason! And don't get me started on these silly little auxiliary words at the beginning of questions, like "does", which other languages simply eliminate.
This is just the beginning of verb conjugation randomness in English; it's probably the hardest part of the language to learn. Just look at the past tense, it's a complete mess; I'm a native speaker and I couldn't even come up with a verb that uses the "standard" -ed pattern within a few seconds, everything is irregular like "came", "bought", "went", "shot".
On the subject of not following patterns, there's a way in most languages to determine if a word is a verb: Spanish verbs all end in -ar -er or -ir, Japanese verbs end in -u, and so on. English verbs don't end in anything in particular.
I have to give the English verb system credit for its use of modal verbs to change tense more often than conjugations, but that's about its only positive point. And that's just one aspect of the language; we still have to go through spelling, noun cases, adjective conjugations, and plenty more before we've uncovered all the nasty little surprises English has in store for us.
In conclusion: English is a completely illogical language, due to its heavy use my many groups of people throughout history, and I feel sorry for foreign children who have to learn it.