{"id":2791,"date":"2016-01-15T18:16:52","date_gmt":"2016-01-15T21:16:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oderalon.net\/linguae\/?p=2791"},"modified":"2016-01-15T18:16:52","modified_gmt":"2016-01-15T21:16:52","slug":"verbs-in-english-and-portuguese-or-grammar-vs-morphology","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oderalon.net\/linguae\/2016\/01\/15\/verbs-in-english-and-portuguese-or-grammar-vs-morphology\/","title":{"rendered":"Verbs in English and Portuguese. Or: Grammar vs. Morphology"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n
You can read this post in either Portuguese or English.
\nVoc\u00ea pode ler este artigo tanto em Portugu\u00eas quanto em Ingl\u00eas.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
English<\/td>\nPortugu\u00eas<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n
\n

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Verbs in English and Portuguese. Or: Grammar vs. Morphology<\/h3>\n

I have been asked several times in the last weeks about a facebook post showing how much easier English is when compared to Portuguese. More specifically, verbs. The post in question compares the 5 different forms of an English verb, “do”, to 59 different forms assumed by the corresponding verb in Portuguese, “fazer”. The point being that Portuguese is more difficult because you need to learn more verb forms.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Like a great amount of what we see on the internet, this is not entirely correct. Indeed, when learning any given Portuguese verb you need to deal with tens of different individual forms, while, for English, you need to deal only with between 3 and 5 individual forms – “be” is an extreme case with eight forms. But, if you think that is enough to define how easy or difficult a language is, please, think again.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The problem here is that such a comparison is based on a wrong assumption. The same assumption behinds statements such as “Chinese has no grammar” (which was rather common a few years ago). It is the idea that “grammar” means simply “morphology”. Or, in other words, that idea that the grammar of a language consists only in the different inflections that a word may “suffer” to express changes of meaning or relations with other words.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Well, that is simply not true.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Morphology is just one part of grammar. Grammar are the rules that indicate how words can be connected to form sentences. Morphology deals only with the alterations you make to a word for that purpose. But inflection is not the only method used by a language’s grammar.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Take Mandarin, for example. (You can say “Chinese”, but that is not properly the name of the language.) Mandarin has almost no inflection. Which means, words in Mandarin don’t change their form to express different meanings or to connect to other words. For building sentences, Mandarin grammar relies on things like word order, composition, auxiliaries, particles, word choice &c. Just as an example: although Mandarin doesn’t have definite or indefinite articles such as “an” or “the”, and despite the fact that a noun cannot change its form, it is perfectly possible to indicate whether a noun is definite or indefinite in a Mandarin sentence.<\/p>\n