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Comment by abeppu | Hacker News Reader

But not all complexity that we see is needed for precise expression. Like, if romance languages like Spanish and French did not require nouns and adjectives to agree on gender, but instead only the noun needed to carry gender info, that would not obligate the vocabulary to get more complex.

Similarly English has rules about the order of adjectives (Clifford is a big, red dog, not a red, big dog) and the presence of those rules didn't simplify the vocabulary.

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> Similarly English has rules about the order of adjectives (Clifford is a big, red dog, not a red, big dog) and the presence of those rules didn't simplify the vocabulary.

The rules do have at least two functions though:

First, they increase redundancy without noticeably decreasing expressiveness. That's good for communicating in noisy environments. (I suspect the same can be said for your example of Romance language genders.)

Second, and less important: by deliberately breaking the adjective order in English you can bring special emphasis on specific aspects of your description.

> Clifford is a big red dog, not a red big dog

Speaking of which, I've yet to see a similar description of tightly structured adjective order for any language other than English. I can't believe that English is unique in this regard.

In fact, strong preferences on adjective order are extremely common, and languages including English are often in agreement about what order (or proximity to the noun) adjectives ought to have.

https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/10.1146/annurev-lingu...

Thank you for this!

Some other Germanic languages have specific adverb order:

- German adverbs are time-manner-place.

- Swedish adverbs are manner-place-time.

fixed order simplifies grammar/orfography. look at russian moving verbs - thats what happens w/o the order. and not all forms are even achievable! f.e. russian can not say 'i will win' w/o using hacks such as 'i will get win'.

I think that's more a peculiarity of Russian than a necessary quality of flexible sentence order. For example, many deviations from the standard sentence order in Japanese can still be understandable and grammatical because particles denote the parts of the sentence.

I don't speak Japanese, but you are talking about fixed order, allowing deviations. Russian language doesn't have this kind of deviations because of there is no order at all. If you take any Russian sentence (better not to take a too long one) and mix words in random sequence, the sentence became mostly the same but with other words nuanced.

Roughly example of conception of "other word nuanced" from Russian:

1. explosion happened - I waited for the explosion and it happened.

2. happened explosion - I waited for arriving of my girlfriend but what arrived first is the explosion.

Verbs like "победить" (used for serious competitions, conflicts, wars) are closer to an exception like irregular verbs and often in such cases people use synonyms like "я выиграю" (usually used for games). Sometimes "я побежу" can be used, especially by kids, but because it sounds "unnatural", it is not recognized as part of the literary language.

There is the well-known list of irregular verbs, no surprises.

Forms which I claimed as "not achievable" are random, they suddenly happen in conversations and such situations require knowing synonyms which I name as "hacks".

Um, я выиграю? Победить doesn't have the first person form so you have to use одержу победу, but that's not because the form isn't achievable, it's just a weird conventional feature of that word that the usual pattern doesn't apply.

You are right in every word but I keep having an opinion that this is because of not-fixed order. I am not out of examples, imagine describing something to the some person in singular second person for (regular discussion with anyone) and in plural second person form (discussion with somebody having higher status or age).

It is very uncomfortable to have an extra sillable which encodes plurality in EVERY verb (except of infinitives, of course). Посмотрите когда сможете, уже посмотрели? The last Russian word in sentence has an ambiguity - it means both a state when the companion looked at something alone and a state when we both looked at something. That's why I hate to discuss anything in such a "respectful" style.

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