Adding Declensions to English

[Kekui]

Has anybody worked out an extensive system of extensions to English, adding declensions, for gaining familiarity with the ideas involved in declension? I know I would benefit from a play language like this. Thanks!

[bedwere]

Maybe you could learn Old English

[Barry Hofstetter]

Maybe you could learn Old English

You beat me to it! Old English was highly inflected and loads of fun from what I hear. My suggestion is learn something real, not something made up.

[BrianB]

We don’t even have numbered conjugations in English. If you wanted to, I suppose you could classify *sing, sang, sung* and *sink, sank, sunk* as one conjugation and *bring, brought, brought* and *think, thought, thought* as a different conjugation. But would that actually help anyone to learn English, either children at home in an English-speaking country or adults abroad who are learning it as a foreign language? I don’t think so.

[smitterle]

Not sur-ως, as oppose-μενον abov-οις opinion-οις αν enjoy-οιο this-ον gibberish-ον;


XD XD XD

Personally, I find it easier to start with easy texts and reading a lot, gradually getting used to how certain things are expressed, trying to detach from how another known language works. I found that even knowing declensions and conjugations, recognizing them in Ancient Greek is a different thing and I very much rely on my "Sprachgefühl" that I build by reading.

The proposal of learning Old English is not bad, as isn't either, I find, a word by word translation like "all-nom-pl-neut flows".