It may come as a surprise if you’ve ever tried to master Spanish imperfect tenses or figure out why German verbs keep leaping to the ends of sentences, but language systems are actually pretty simple.
It may come as a surprise if you’ve ever tried to master Spanish imperfect tenses or figure out why German verbs keep leaping to the ends of sentences, but language systems are actually pretty simple. Futrell explains: “Imagine if you had to memorize 20 million different words, each of which expresses a very precise meaning. That would be really hard. Instead, we have languages with 10,000 to 50,000 words and a simple set of rules that allows us to combine words to form sentences.”