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Comment by nanochess | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the suggestions! I've updated the article.

I'm delighted to have been of some service.

I'm a native English speaker and the article reads very naturally. I've been learning Spanish over the last two plus years, and I'm jealous of how regular and consistent Spanish is compared to English.

The orthography, maybe? And there are no phrasal verbs, which is nice. But you have gender, you have plenty of irregular verbs, you have a significantly more complex inflection system even for regular verbs (including the subjunctive mood and the conditional tense in the indicative), and its allophonic phonotactics are tricky (though English has a fair bit of mess here too).

Zapotec sounds like it would be a lot more difficult, but I think really all natural languages are equally difficult, because if it takes children more than about five years to master them, they get simplified, and if it takes children less than about five years to master them, they accrete irregularities, idioms, and metaphorical sense extensions to compress the representation of low-entropy concepts.

I don't know as much about language as you do, but hear me out. You can pretty much sound everything out. The irregular verbs aren't that bad; they're limited to THE highest frequency verbs that you'd expect, e.g., be, go, have, see, say, do, give, etc., and they're all irregular in fairly unsurprising ways, except for caber and andar. After about 20 irregular preterite verbs, there's three irregular imperfect verbs, and five irregular subjunctive verbs. Future and conditional tenses follow a similar pattern, and have about 20 irregulars between them. Compared to French and English, which borrows Germanic AND Latin patterns, that's NOT BAD.

"You can pretty much sound everything out" is simply what I was saying about the orthography. It's partly a result of Spanish's phonological conservatism but mostly a result of the orthographic reforms by the RAE in 01726, 01754, 01815, and 01832. But that isn't even a part of the spoken language at all; it's just a property of the writing system. English written in IPA or Shavian (or my own doomed eccentric proposal, http://canonical.org/~kragen/alphanumerenglish) would be equally easy to sound out, but it would still be English. If you were talking out loud to someone who had hypothetically learned English after such a spelling reform, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

As for irregular verbs, there are quite a lot more than 20; https://howismyspanish.com/all-irregular-spanish-verbs/ lists over 270 irregular verbs in Spanish, but it also says that's "over ⅓ of all Spanish verbs", so it may not be the most reliable source. There's a lot more than five irregular subjunctive verbs, and they aren't all very common verbs; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_irregular_verbs#Presen... mentions "moler", for example. Other uncommon irregular verbs mentioned in page include "maullar", "erguir", and "embestir". https://web.archive.org/web/20200807095413/https://socratic.... says that the Manual de la Conjugación del Verbo lists 12'290 different Spanish verbs with 63 different models of irregular conjugations; the number of verbs following one of those models must be in the thousands.

By comparison, English has under 200 irregular verbs, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_irregular_verbs.

I've learned a lot. I wasn't aware of the RAE's efforts to tamp down and standardize spelling in Spanish. I think your alphanumerenglish is pretty cool.

I really thought there were only 5 irregular subjunctive verbs: dar, ir, ser, haber, estar, & saber. I've read a couple of novels in Spanish, and it just seems more regular. I guess that's just my opinion. Thanks for teaching me a few new things.

Aim h4pi te bi ev serv1s!

One more point: my kid is learning to read, and explaining words like "read", "read", "red", "lead", "lead", "led", "cough", "bough", "bow", "bow", "cow", "tow", "toe", etc., gets very old very quickly.

You may be interested in the history of failed orthographic reforms in English; the Simplified Spelling Board https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board had significant popular support, especially among socialists and progressives, but ultimately failed, the only remnant being the "NO THRU TRAFFIC" signs seen in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:English-language_spel... lists a couple of dozen people historically prominent. But nobody in English has ever had the level of political power that the RAE had in even 01815, much less 01726, so it's never happened.

NO THRU TRAFFIC has always stood out to me. I hadn't heard of the Simplified Spelling Board, but I'm interested in minimal subsets of languages, like Ogden's Basic English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_English. I use a variation of this as a model when starting a new language, and it's been pretty fun and effective.

Beware of misleading first impressions... :-)

https://tinyview.com/itchy-feet/2022/06/02/upgrade-required

I dunno, it's not that bad. If you focus on learning the subjunctive through a set of rules, then it becomes very intimidating. If you focus on the fact that you use it to discuss wishes, desires, and opinions, then it's a lot simpler. The command form "uses" subjunctive patterns, because you're expressing a very strong desire that someone f-ing does something right now. If you say, "hey do you want me to go to the store later?" then "go to the store later" is in the subjunctive because I'm clarifying what another person wishes to be done. Describing that in a textbook is hard, but seeing it in the wild isn't that bad because you hear the command form all the time.

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