Which grammatical features does English lack, which it is expressively poorer for? [closed]

Question

Which grammatical features does English lack, which it is expressively poorer for? These could be features found in other languages – living, extinct or invented – or even be completely new imaginings. What features deny through their absence utile nuances of meaning? What features might drive us to more elegant and thus profounder speech? And what adaptations could be made to the way the English language is used to achieve equivalent results without creating ambiguity?

Please post each feature as a distinct reply, so that they can be up- (or down-) voted individually.

Answer 1

A way to form causitive verbs
I mean a regular way to form a verb that means "show" from "see" or "look", to form a verb that means "kill" from "die", to form a verb that means the auditory equivalent of "show" from "hear" or "listen" etc.

According to this question Nahuatl has such a system. Esperanto also does:
vidi – to see, vidigi – to show (to cause to see)
morti – to die, mortigi – to kill (to cause to die)
aŭdi – to hear, aŭdigi – to cause to hear
kuri – to run, kurigi – to cause to run
koleri – to be angry, kolerigi – to anger (to cause to be angry)

The question cited gives a perfect example of a situation where such a feature would be useful: "I show you a picture; I __ you a song." "Play" is the best fit, but is not quite congruous to "show". What if I wanted to __ you a sound, not necessarily playing it, but replicating it in some way?

Answer 2

A clear way to clarify binding of negation, especially for modal verbs.

Every child has pretended that "You may not do that" means that "May(You, Not(Do(That)))" rather than "Not(You, May(Do(That))).

Tons of misunderstanding are all about where a given 'not' applies.

Answer 3

The ability to drop unnecessary determiners and copulae
In the Slavic languages (and many other languages) there are no words for "the" and "a", and the word "is" is not necessary in sentences like The car is red or you are funny – in Russian this is "машина красная", (car red) "ты смешной" (you funny). Such speech feels really clumsy in current English, but is in fact very elegant, and if used sparingly could really add conciseness and prosodic flexibility.

The words "the" and "a" should be kept for disambiguation or emphatic purposes, but should not be a requirement every time. The Romance languages often cause frustration amongst learners in the early days for their (in my opinion) drastic over use of the definite article. In German it is necessary because it denotes the case of nouns. In French (and other Romance languages) it denotes only gender. In English, it doesn't even carry that information.

Edit for clarification: I am not advocating the complete removal of "the" and "a", which do perform a useful function – nor even reducing their usage to the point of absolute necessity, using them only where one needs to distinguish definiteness. I am simply saying that it would be great if English-speakers could also get accustomed to article-less speech/writing to make the English language more flexible.

Answer 4

I think English is expressively poorer for the lack of a mood system, which we have let rot to the point where the subjunctive is only useful in very limited idioms.

It prevents us from leaving consideration open to alternative realities and pushes us too far into a logically-positivistic framing of everything.

This has been good for us as a people. We got Boole, Russel and Whitehead, Newton, etc. But clear is not deep.

In particular, it would help if we got a full optative and subjunctive, so that one could easily express what is presumably objective, what is affected by will, and what is simply questionable, without having to say so with full elaboration.

Someone has requested explication:

Languages like ancient Greek have verb forms that are used to deal with situations that may or may not be real, but that one wishes to play out at length without deciding or pretending that they are real. Two common reasons for considering alternate realities are the wish things could be otherwise, or the recognition that two cases are mutually exclusive, so both cannot be actual.

We have two different ways to deal with alternative versions of reality in English -- the subjunctive and modal verbs. But both of these are incomplete, or have so many of their moving parts co-opted by other idioms that they become hard to use consistently. So when you wish to discuss alternative versions of events, they do not even get used most of the time, and the discussion gets framed in terms of explicit separate cases.

Actual application of mood usually continues for less than two sentences, at which point, things get real, even if they are not.

Answer 5

The non-gendered singular pronoun. German, for instance, has'man' as a truly gender-free pronoun, it takes singular verbs and is not easily confused with other meanings.

Actually, following Latin, there could be a bunch of these. Latin legal arguments allow for a lot more parallel processing of alternative positions because it admits not just is/ea/id but ille/illa/illud and hic/haec/hoc as regular pronouns, and even sometimes quo/qui/quod and its decorated relatives can be used for extra pronouns. We translate out is, ille and hoc in Latin legal formulae with 'party of the 1st[, 2nd, 3rd] part' to the great loss of comprehensibility.

They do not feel artificial, or take up a lot of space like creating variable names, introducing featureless people, or referring to 'party of the third part'. It would be nice if somehow, say, 'one', 'you' and 'they' could be used simultaneously without objection for various interacting positions.

The problems with options in English include:

• 'one' has an implicitly modal tone. (We could simply use it until it loses that tone.)
• 'they' does not take singular verb forms. (We could all stop wincing when we hear it with them.)
• 'he' perpetuates stereotypes. (We cannot undo history, so this one, although the current solution, is not acceptable.)
• 'it' is implicitly non-animate (We could just get over the feeling it is insulting.)
• 'hyt' has split into 'it' and 'he' and gone out of circulation when 'its' was invented and 'his' was changed from a form of 'hyt' to a form of 'he'. (We could reverse this split.)
• 'he or she/she or he' interferes with refinement of the main subject and becomes hard to maintain in spoken discourse. Besides, it is not neither gender, it is both. If I say 'he or she' and then need to give them a more concrete existence for an example, it collapses.
• 'you' could also refer personally to the listener. (Though this seldom happens in areas where the usage of 'you' for a third person is common. The objection is largely class bias.)