Inflectional Simplicity

A second feature that English possesses to a preeminent degree is inflectional simplicity. Within the Indo-European family of languages, it happens that the oldest, classical languages—Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin—have inflections of the noun, the adjective, the verb, and to some extent the pronoun that are no longer found in modern languages such as Russian or French or German. In this process of simplifying inflections English has gone further than any other language in Europe. Inflections in the noun as spoken have been reduced to a sign of the plural and a form for the possessive case. The elaborate Germanic inflection of the adjective has been completely eliminated except for the simple indication of the comparative and the superlative degrees. The verb has been simplified by the loss of practically all the personal endings, the almost complete abandonment of any distinction between the singular and the plural, and the gradual discard of the subjunctive mood. The complicated agreements that make German difficult for the nonnative speaker are absent from English.
 

It must not be thought that these developments represent a decay of grammar on the one hand or a Darwinian evolution toward progress, simplicity, and efficiency on the other. From the view of a child learning a first language, these apparent differences in complexity seem to matter not at all. As Hans H. Hock and Brian D.Joseph put it, “the speakers of languages such as English are quite happy without all those case endings, while speakers of modern ‘case-rich’ language such as Finnish or Turkish are just as happy with them.”

However, it is worth trying to specify, as ongoing research in second language acquisition is doing, those features that facilitate or complicate the learning of English by adult speakers of various languages. To the extent that the simplification of English inflections does not cause complications elsewhere in the syntax, it makes the task easier for those learning English as a foreign language.