Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "RobWords"
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Sound a bit similar to Finnish. The written form was mostly designed by a single person and it makes sense. However, learning the language is really really hard because it uses multiple suffixes instead of prepositions. For example, word "istua" meaning "to sit" can be modified to "istuisivatkohan" meaning "I wonder if they would sit", or "istuivatkohan" meaning "I wonder if they did sit". The first example "istuisivatkohan" actually has 5 suffixes -i, -si, -vat, -ko and -han at the same time and you have to use these suffixes in this specific order or the word doesn't make sense. I think every verb can be modified to over 3000 different forms just by using different suffix combinations.
On the plus side, there are no silent letters, no vovel modifications nor special hyphenation rules.
I think English – if it had spelling fixed to match pronounciation, or pronounciation fixed to match spelling – would be much better language overall. Unfortunately, there's no single entity in the world that could fix the language called English. If British were to try it, everybody else would just ignore such change. If the USA were to try it, everybody else would just ignore such change.
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This was first introduction to Anglish for me, but it seemed to make much more sense than modern English. Anglish seemed to have a lot less discrepancy – probably because all the words have the same logic instead of mismatch between different languages.
At least for somebody like me, to whom English is non-native language, Anglish would be an easier language to learn. It also seems that the pronounciation of the Anglish words has much less weirdness.
I would love to see Pale Blue Dot speech in Anglish but I cannot do it myself. It appears that ChatGPT is not fluent with Anglish either. However, I was able to get it to emit following:
"Look at that speck, that is us, all man-kind, on that mote of dust, in the vastness of space. That is the Earth, our home, a speck in the cosmic ocean, no bigger than a pixel in a photograph."
I would guess "photograph" should be something else, though.
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Finnish is way more advanced here. Not only it doesn't have gender for nouns, it also doesn't distinguish between he vs she in 3rd person references. In Finnish, the 3rd person is referenced as "hän" and it can refer to any human being: man, woman, child, elder or baby. Finnish still has "se" meaning "it" which is used for all non-human references such as dogs, cats and bees.
Finnish also doesn't have the concept of definite nor indefinite article which makes English harder to learn for Finns because it takes really long time to figure out any logical reason to use "a" or "the" for any reason. (As a Finn, I still think definite and indefinite articles are equally needless as silent letters.)
As an another twist, Finnish doesn't have future tense either. It's expressed with alternative ways, such as "aion matkustaa huomenna junalla" which would be translated directly as "I have a plan to travel by train tomorrow" instead of "I'll travel by train tomorrow".
All the above doesn't mean that Finnish is an easy language by any measure. When we have over 3000 different inflection forms for every verb thanks to ability to combine multiple suffixes in the base form of a verb, it'll be pretty hard to learn that when your own language has nothing similar. Thanks to inflection forms the word order is mostly stylistic choice. For example "aion matkustaa huomenna junalla" is same as (more poem-like style) "matkustaa junalla huomenna aion" or "huomenna aion matkustaa junalla" (which would put more emphasis that the travelling will be done tomorrow). As a general rule, word order is used to express emphasis and the most important thing is put in the front.
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