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Jul 2020
12:39pm, 13 Jul 2020
50,983 posts
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Diogenes
Just out of interest, why when there is one of something does it use a plural type of word*, and when there are two or more, it takes a singular?
For example:
1 incident remains under investigation.
2 incidents remain under investigation.
Is it because the s in on the end the noun? (*and, what type of word is remain in these sentences?)
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Jul 2020
12:56pm, 13 Jul 2020
27,952 posts
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macca 53
It’s a verb isn’t it, so a singular incident would be “(it) remains” whilst more than one incident would be “(they) remain”.
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Jul 2020
1:06pm, 13 Jul 2020
50,984 posts
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Diogenes
You're right macca, about verb, but why isn't it "it remain" and "they remains"? I guess that's just the way the syntax has evolved rather than any particular rule.
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Jul 2020
1:32pm, 13 Jul 2020
6,582 posts
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Northern Exile
Yes, I'd agree with that Dio - it's one of the peculiarities of English and something that drives people aspiring to learn [English] mad with frustration 
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Jul 2020
2:20pm, 13 Jul 2020
19,517 posts
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ChrisHB
a language with fewer verb forms than English must be very rare?
regular verb
happen / happens / happening / happened
irregular verb
sing / sings / singing / sang / sung
freak verb
go / goes / going / went / gone
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Jul 2020
3:19pm, 13 Jul 2020
27,953 posts
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macca 53
[Dio - because he run and they runs soynd daft, don’t they? 😉]
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Jul 2020
3:19pm, 13 Jul 2020
27,954 posts
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macca 53
Sound!
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Jul 2020
3:20pm, 13 Jul 2020
27,955 posts
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macca 53
To go and to be seem freakishly irregular in most languages don’t they?
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Jul 2020
3:35pm, 13 Jul 2020
11,503 posts
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larkim
It does seem like English just got "lazy" as it simplified stuff. Maybe it did just sound "better" - though I'm sure someone who studied this stuff could probably put me right as to why Old English conjugations didn't "stick" and we didn't up with verb endings more complex than they are.
I think it's one reason why we find French / Spanish etc harder to learn because we're so used to so few conjugations for most verbs (plus the lack of "gender" for nouns), and as macca says, most other languages have a fair few commonly used irregular verbs too.
e.g. French
-er verbs
..e
..es
..e
..ons
..ez
..ent
ir verbs
..is
..is
..it
..issons
..issez
..issent
-re verbs
..s
..s
..
..ons
..ez
..ent
e.g. English
..
..
..s
..
..
..
I can still remember 1st year high school French and suddenly understanding how English verbs worked - I'd just never had to think of it before. (Though my kids are products of the Gove focus on grammar etc, so they are no doubt far better schooled in these things than I ever was!)
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Jul 2020
3:46pm, 13 Jul 2020
6,583 posts
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Northern Exile
macca - "to be" is a difficult verb to translate in a lot of languages, in Russian it's (theoretically) not supposed to exist in the present tense, which gives rise to lots of translation problems for English speakers. I really worked hard on that aspect of the language when I studied it, then for my sins I was sent off to learn Serbo-Croat which DOES have a a present tense of "to be", I really struggled with it and never liked it as a language.
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