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Comment by beeforpork | Hacker News Reader

“a language where nobody knows how to conjugate the verbs.”

   minä nauran   - ich lache  - I    laugh
   sinä naurat   - Du  lachst - you  laugh
   me   nauramme - wir lachen - we   laugh
   te   nauratte - ihr lacht  - you  laugh
   he   nauravat - sie lachen - they laugh
   hän  nauraa   - sie lacht  - she  laughs(!)

To speakers of other languages than English, this is a weird way of insulting an English dialect.

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Not only that, the more you learn about other languages, the more weird than ‘insult’ becomes! Some representative examples from outside Europe:

    (Murik)
    g-a-kərə-na
    3P.NUM-1S.ERG-hit-PRS
    ‘I hit them’

    n-umbwa-ŋa-kərə-ŋa-na
    INV-3P.ERG-1S.ACC-hit-INV-PRS
    ‘They hit me’

    (Yimas)
    ma-mp-nanaŋ-yawra-kia-na-ntut
    3S.ACC-3D.ERG-DUR-gather-NIGHT-DUR-RM.PST
    ‘They both were getting it during the night’

(All examples from The Languages and Linguistics of the New Guinea Area. And yes, all those are single words.)

And it gets even worse… pity the poor language learner who wants to conjugate verbs in Isirawa:

            SG.M  SG.F  DU      PL       3PL
    ‘kill’  sən   sin   nonɪn   trevrun  trevroun
    ‘give’  vrɪn  vrun  ninɪn   rirɪn    nəniyəun
    ‘see’   maun  main  makaun  marɪn    maun

(Foley says ‘The accretions that individual verb roots take to form stems seems unpredictable’, which to me seems to be putting the situation mildly!)

And, on the other extreme, there’s plenty of perfectly respectable languages with no inflection whatsoever, making the ‘insult’ even weirder. Lao, for example:

    kap² maa² maø laang⁴ tiin³ laang⁴ mùù² …
    go.back come DIR.ALL wash foot wash hand …
    ‘[We’d] come back and wash [our] feet, [and] wash [our] hands, …

    … qanaa²maj² lèkaø khùn⁵ tiang³ tii³ kaleeng¹ nòòn²
    … clean.up   C.LNK ascend bed   hit  bell     sleep
    … clean up, and then get into bed, [when they’d] ring the bell to go to sleep.’

(Source: Enfield’s A grammar of Lao)

And pity even more so the one who has a language where all words have declension.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension

I must admit to being confused by this comment. What do you mean exactly by ‘all words having a declension’, and why would it complicate learning a language moreso than anything else? My confusion arises from the fact that the concept of a ‘declension’ is typically only applied to noun-y things, rather than to all words (the verbal equivalent is ‘conjugation’), and by this definition a ‘declension’ doesn’t even have to be very complicated — the English plural is an example.

(Unless you’re talking about declension classes, as in Latin or Russian… but from what I can tell, those are actually surprisingly rare outside IE.)

I am a native Czech speaker. We have lots of declension classes that mostly feel natural for us (about twenty or so), but for learners whose native language is Germanic or Romanic, they are a nightmare. This is one of the things that makes Czech genuinely hard for Westerners.

It is not as hard for other Slavic speakers, because they are at least used to such a thing, even though their classes are not necessarily the same.

Of course, such a situation is difficult for anyone to learn! That’s what I was trying to get at with that Isiwara example above, which shows a language with even less regularity than Czech. The point I was trying to make was that mere ‘declension’ isn’t enough to make a language difficult to learn… you need to actually have some kind of irregularity to ensure that.

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