The pros and cons of something are its advantages and disadvantages.

Languages don't have advantages and disadvantages. They just have features (and from an outside perspective, variation).

Advantages and disadvantages only exist in a context. If a language is insufficient for the purposes in which it is used, it will surely be adapted and expanded to become sufficient. I suppose you might think of some features are more convenient than others as a learner (or maybe just simpler to learn), but I don't agree with the premise of this. This really is part of what having the perspective of a linguist will do: we pick up a different perspective on languages that results in different questions.

Now, there certainly can be some conditional advantages or disadvantages. Having a language that distinguishes gender can be extremely useful in some cases, and extremely unfortunate in others. For example, if you want to distinguish between a male friend and a female friend, Spanish "amiga" and "amigo" are useful! But if you don't want to specify the gender of that friend (or their gender identity is non-binary) then you're going to be stuck! In English we just say "friend", for better and worse. It depends on context. One fundamental ability that language speakers have and use is vagueness, which isn't always available in some languages. That's interesting. Translators face this all the time, when something isn't specified (or is intended as a mystery) in the original text, but a choice must be made in the new language!

Hi,

You are right. The name of the topic is not right.  I have changed it.


---
 “Snatch” (2000)

“Bullet-Tooth Tony: A bookie's got blagged last night.
 Cousin Avi          : Blagged? Speak English to me, Tony. I thought this country spawned the f***ing language, and so far nobody seems to speak it.”

{Cousin Avi ( Dennis Farina  )is an American who has just arrived in London
{Bullet-Tooth Tony ( Vinnie Jones ) is British


P.S.

panini   : " ... "Advantage" is about goals, which is a thing that living beings have."
Daniel   : " Advantages and disadvantages only exist in a context. ..."
waive15: I understand. In a way this was meant as English version of (The) Three trifles in/of/about Russian

Thank you for the interest.

Hi,

Participles are verbal adjectives (adjectives which come/are made of/ from verbs).


Past participles in "English". I suppose it is no big deal  for anyone to figure out when it is past active and when it is past passive participle.

---

"-ing (2)

suffix used to form the present participles of verbs ... "
" ... The vowel weakened in late Old English and the spelling with -g began 13c.-14c. among Anglo-Norman scribes who naturally confused it with -ing (1)."

https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=-ing

The question is if the suffix is used for the present active or the present passive participle.
Is there present passive participle anyway in English?

Let's see what's in "Latin":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OcJXc_jGrQ

Is there present passive participles in Russian? - Yes.

In the "logic" of ("Indo-European") "Languages" one has to have past active and passive, present active and passive and future active and passive participles (past, present, future as exact moments in 1d Time).

or (in other words)

According to any exact moment of/in Time (1d: now; then: past; future) participles (active and passive) are: past, present, future. In a "Simple sentence" (when it is needed) one has two verbs - the 2nd is RELATIVE to the 1st (which "has/takes" the exact moment in 1d Time). In 1d one has 3 possibilities: before, "during", after. Participle is the 2nd verb and it takes form of :

* adjective - after the 1st verb "be". One is ACCUSTOMED in "Simple sentence" after the INTRANSITIVE verb "be" (is') to PUT/PLACE second Quality(adjective). "Apple is' red'."/"He is' gone' (past active participle) (dead')." {after transitive "be" (is'') one puts NOUN (Man is'' animal.)}

* adjective before missing noun (which is always meant) and this way adjective becomes a "noun"(or its "name"). This happens after "has" as the 1st verb (after "have" one has a noun or its "name" (the possessed)).

/tenses' formulae could have been way, way, ... complicated(exact) but one is a simple creature and that is why one uses the very simplest of the possible tenses' formulae/

===

Let's say it once more ...:

* according to a TRANSITIVE verb ("directed graph") one has 1st (doer) and 2nd (sufferer).

* (but) let's see: "Someone_1 give present (to) Someone_2 / Someone_1 give Someone_2 present."
   Now we have: doer, sufferer (in Connection) and direction (in another Connection (the 1st 3 (doer, sufferer, connection) with direction). So we have to have 3 participles: active, passive, directive. And 3 "pieces" (exact moments) of Time. ...

===

The term "copula verb" means nothing.

---


There are holes in "logic" of any "language". What holes in "English logic" from the "English" point of view are there? English orthography is a "small change", it is not a problem at all.

Have a nice day.

There are holes in "logic" of any "language". What holes in "English logic" from the "English" point of view are there?

"Logic(al)" is not really a helpful word to use in describing any language. The word can have different shades of meaning according to context. The basic meaning indicating valid reasoning is certainly not appropriate, nor really are any uses suggesting coherence, consistency or reasonableness. The thing to ask in respect of any language is what you can and must do, and not why it cannot do what some other language can do.

Hi,

Grammatical gender

You may or may not have it (in "your language").

Grammatical gender is (simply) a feature/aspect/dimension/... . One could live with and without it. It is just another layer of encoding (among others), nothing special.

"pro": English is simple (simplified): no endings signifying Grammatical gender - every noun (with very few exceptions) is in neuter.   

/English   - simplified, logical
 Russian  -  complicated, logical
 German  -  out of hand
 Turkish   -  nice, logical/


Thank you and have a nice day.

People are still not agree if English has a grammatical gender or not. Though it looks like we – you and I – believe in grammatical gender in English.

That has to depend on what you mean by grammatical gender. It seems to me that there are two possible definitions:

The first is to say that a language has grammatical gender if it has the ability to distinguish between things male and things female. Since distinguishing between things male and things female is very important to humans I would be very surprised if there is a language which does not do so. I think we can say with some measure of confidence that under this definition all languages have grammatical gender.

The second is to say that a language has grammatical gender if its nouns are divided into two or more classes and it has a system of agreement which requires words associated with the noun (articles, adjectives, pronouns or verbs) to change their form according to which class the noun belongs.

English has words to distinguish males and females, such as "man" and "woman", "boy" and "girl" and "actor" and "actress", but no system of agreement. The fact that it has "he", "she" and "it" does not mean that English has three grammatical genders any more than having the words "man", "woman" and "thing".

Linguistics is a real science even if for the most part it is not a hard science. Linguistics does not and cannot have axioms because it starts by looking at stuff rather than from abstract principles. Anyone postulating that grammatical gender should be a basic axiom of linguistics is likely to have as his mother tongue a language with grammatical gender. It is entirely understandable that the native speakers of a language consider all its features to be natural and necessary. When learning a language which lacks a feature their language has they may consider it defective, and if it has a feature their language lacks they may consider that it makes unnecessary distinctions. Whatever features a language may have or lack it will be an adequate vehicle of communication for it speakers.

Whether or not you believe in universal grammar, actual languages come in all shapes. Whilst every language is best described in its own terms technical terms are still needed. That may lead to terms perfectly suitable for one language being applied to another. In that respect many linguistic features come on a continuum. To descibe English as an inflectional language would not be incorrect as it has inflections (nine on most counts) but it would nevertheless be misleading.

if a language has a feature you have to ask the degree to which it has it before you insist that the feature is a significant aspect of the language. I recall a discussion I had on another forum with a Chinese speaker who insisted that English had classifiers because of phrases such as "a herd of cows" and "a bunch of grapes". She wanted English to have classifiers because a language without classifiers did not seem right. The point is though that whilst a language with classifiers may require you to use a classifier if talking about more than one cow or grape, English is quite happy with "four cows" and "many grapes" without further elaboration.

Insisting that English has grammatical gender is like insisting it has classifiers. The essence of grammatical gender is not that nouns are grouped in different classes, but that there is a system of agreement based on on the classes. Chinese may be said to have different classes of nouns according to which classifier is required, but it does not have grammatical gender because it does not have a system of agreement.

It is stretching things to breaking point to say that there is a system of agreement in English. The use of "he", "she" and "it" is entirely predictable according to whether what is being talked about is male, female or inanimate. Referring to ships and cars using "she" is metaphorical or fanciful and no different from giving such a thing a name. Using the right word is a question of semantics and not morphology or syntax. Even if you insist that in some sense using the correct word is a question of grammar, it is not sufficiently pervasive to justify classing English as a language with grammatical gender. If you tell someone starting to learning English that it has grammatical gender and they know a language Like French, German, Russian or Arabic, it will not be long before they declare: "I thought English was supposed to have grammatical gender."