Some interesting findings about the relationship between complex grammatical rules, vocabulary size and speaking community size: http://news.cornell.edu/stories/2018/01/simpler-grammar-larger-vocabulary-linguistic-paradox-explained #linguistics
@benhamill Interesting! But none too surprising: this sounds a lot like how creoles arise. Take two mutually unintelligible languages, put their speakers in close proximity, watch a "simplified" pidgin emerge; wait a generation or two, and novel language structures arise to cope with ambiguities & loss of nuance.
Kind of the opposite of my usual language learning habits, though. I tend to pick up on grammatical structures far more quickly than vocabulary. So before long I'm at the stage of "She verbed the adjective noun before verbing adverbially", where I know *how* the words fit together, but not their meaning!
@Qwyrdo Yeah. Same. When I was studying Latin I got to the point where I was failing tests because I didn't know WHAT that person was going to have done. 🤦🏻♂️
@benhamill Curious; I had a bit of the opposite problem with Latin! Mainly because I was already competent in French & between that & English, I had ~67% of the vocabulary already transparent to me. But couldn't quite wrap my head around declension. 🙃
@Qwyrdo Yeah. That makes sense. I just have English, so a lot was new.