Pastelland Forum

ENIHCAMBUS wrote:Is there any language that doesn't has any irregular verbs and exceptions to grammar rules?

We don't have any irregular verbs.

Interesting.

We have more complicated stuff...

like what?

ENIHCAMBUS wrote:Is there any language that doesn't has any irregular verbs and exceptions to grammar rules?

Well, as far as I know, Finnish has either none or very few irregular verbs. Except that there's simply just a lot of verb types that conjugate in different ways, though each with their own seperate (though probably similar in many places) rules. Unless you consider the da/desu copula a verb, then Japanese has just a single irregular verb, aru, to be (when speaking of inanimate entities).

But speaking of *verbs* being *irregular* is speaking very much inside the box, being sort of transfixed on Indo-European languages. Consider Chinese Mandarin, which has no irregular verbs at all. Simply because they don't conjugate at all. No part of speech of Chinese does. Where most languages would have an affix, Chinese just has a particle, like 了 'le' for I think perfective aspect, or 吗 'ma' for interrogative mood. It's an analytic language, as far as I know, for which the concept of a morpheme doesn't even exist, because inflection doesn't exist. A lot of grammatical categories are just not there in Mandarin, such as number, gender, tense, case and person, all so dear to Indo-European languages. That is why it was so easy to use Hanzi characters for it - all words have just one form anyway, and it was easier to, say, draw an image of a horse than think of a writing system differentiating between like, what, 10 tones or something and a lot of vowel qualities.

bender wrote:We have more complicated stuff...

OnyxIonVortex wrote:like what?

Vowel harmony, heavy inflection and some weird moods are one of the most distinguishing traits of Turkish, as far as I can tell.

Wow Vurn, you know a lot about languages o_o

Amazing!

Wow Vurn you should become a ... Language...guy.

Like What?

I don't think they have words for them in English

wow you guys, thank you

Pretty much the only exciting thing (that I know of) other than the ones Vurn already said is that it has a special indigenous root word for bat, the animal: yarasa (from Proto-Turkic *jar-). That is surprisingly rare among languages, although many tongues of the Pacific have them too.

The English "bat" is a loan from Scandinavian Languages, by the way, not indigenous. The more indigenous word for bat remains as a special term in heraldry: reremouse.