After quite a while studying French, and with memories of studying its predecessor language in school, I am now firmly convinced that aliens exist and Latin Grammar (and the grammar of derived languages) is the proof. Granted, proof by “OMG this could only have happened because we were being trolled” but, y’know, take the proof where you can.
@wordshaper
After having had to deal with French, German, Russian grammars, I happened to end up learning a language with an agglutinative grammar (SOV), and what a relief it was after Indo-European grammars:
no grammatical gender
no grammatical singular/plural
no articles ("a", "the")
no count/mass nouns (blech, English grammar)
no agreement subject-verb (even though pro-drop)
no ablaut
trivial sandhi
about 5 irregular verbs
no subjunctive mood
no future tense
consistent head-final word order (a "postfix" language), no relative pronouns
...
Unfortunately, it has its own set of other complications but at least the grammar is simple.
@PeterLudemann Heh. I admit one of the fun things about learning other languages is you get to play the "guess their native language" games when non-native speakers make mistakes based on which mistakes they make. (OK, fine, you could use that as an opportunity to recognize the mistakes you're likely to make speaking another language but where's the arrogance in that?)
@wordshaper
One's native language "primes" the mental process ... for example, I have little trouble remembering French or German irregular verbs because English has many of them; but I have trouble remembering gender of nouns because English lacks that.
@PeterLudemann Oh, yeah, absolutely. It's aways funny to see the mistakes my husband makes with gender pronouns and gender-shifted nouns in english. (Chinese does have gendered pronouns but only when written -- the masculine, feminine, and generic? pronouns are pronounced identically) And I get noun gender enthusiastically wrong in French class though at least I get the pronouns right which is something I guess.
@wordshaper
The most common word for "he"/"she" in Japanese is literally "that person" (あの人 ano hito, written the same way for masculine/feminine) ... and Japanese speakers have a tendency to make mistakes with English he/she, his/her.
The Japanese translations for "he" and "she" are a reuse of ancient words for "that person", revived by translators of European books in the 19th century (彼 kare; 彼女 kanojo). Mostly I've heard them used with the added meaning of "boyfriend" or "girlfriend" - pronouns aren't much of a thing in Japanese and can be often avoided (the fashions for pronouns change over the centuries; one of the common ones for "me" nowadays literally means "slave" and one word for "you" literally means "prince").
I wonder what the mental process is that causes these kinds of he/she mistakes? Even though Japanese has no grammatical gender, the way men and women speak is quite different (it's tricky to pick up words/grammar from hearing people; I never know if I'm picking up something that's appropriate for my gender/age/position).
PS: Do you get the tu/vous correct in French? I try to avoid it by using "on". German, unfortunately, has no such escape.
@PeterLudemann I don't generally have issues with tu/vous, but mostly because my conversations are either with my husband (so stilted but tu) or public in which case it's either reflexive stock phrases or brain freeze. :)
Production as needed is... an ongoing improvement task.
Seriously the simplest explanation by far for the ridiculously complicated grammatical structures of Latin that child languages inherited is a couple of Beavis and Butthead style alien linguists just messing with the natives.
@wordshaper Take latin, add more cases, add more tenses (like aorist), add the dual number, add ridiculously long compound words like in German, add rules about vowel inflections on the root when the number changes (also like in German), and you get Sanskrit. Now we're talking
@rgs It's possible we were being trolled multiple times! Or, possibly, we're just a giant A/B experiment where some alien linguist was trying out a number of different variants for their pet conlangs and we've been filing the ridiculous edges off for the past millenia.
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