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kleinbl00  ·  2840 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Teaching is Fulfilling: what TFG's been up to #3

So take German. Ich bin, du bist, er sie es ist. Depending on the gender of the word, its conjugation is gonna go one of three ways, pretty much no matter what. Meanwhile, a foreign vocab word is much less likely to be adapted because it doesn't fit into the structure - Germans don't have carburetors, they have dopfelvergassers, a compound word made out of existing simple German words.

English, on the other hand, has pate and emoji and piroshkis and all sorts of other borrow words going back to Harald the Great and those words tend to get used the way they were in their original languages. And because there is no rigid structure to it, the plural of "potato" is both "potatos" and "potatoes", which caused a minor political scandal.

Counterbalance that with the fact that you clearly haven't been studying English for twelve years, yet your grasp of the language is impeccable.