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Does Arka resemble English?

Translated from the original Japanese on 2021-01-04.

Although this is a very old subject, it has been said that Arka resembles English.

Perhaps the people saying this seem to want to say that Arka is not a priori.

Because Japanese people know English, it seems as if they think that it is a posteriori just because it looks like English.

It very much seems that one reason is its SVO word order. However, since SVO is the next most common word order after SOV, Arka shares its basic word order with thousands of languages on Earth. Therefore, this argument has no ground.

Adjectives in Arka come after the noun, and Arka already differs from English on this point.

Rather, it is more understandable to claim that it is like French.

In addition, Arka does not have an English-like sequence of tenses.

When both the main and subordinate clauses are put in the past tense, the subordinate clause describes an action that had happened before that of the main clause. This aspect differs from that of English.

The pronouns are not divided by gender1, and there are pronouns up to the fourth person. Moreover, the third-person pronouns are divided into proximal and distal pronouns.

Furthermore, the first- and second-person pronouns take many forms according to the register; the parts where Arka and English coincide are fewer than the parts where they do not.

Most words corresponding to English conjunctions are beginning or ending particles; even comparisons are expressed not in terms of casers (prepositions) but rather conjunctions.

Adjectives do not have any comparative degrees.

The passive voice, instead of using “be” or “by”, uses yu.

Although Arka has a structure analogous to the it-structure in English, it differs in not taking a for-phrase in the middle.

Although Arka has a basic SVO word order, it does not have the five sentence patterns of English.

Then if we reject English, then what about French?

Arka and French agree in adjective order, but other than that, French, like English, matches Arka poorly.

Arka was also verified against Chinese, but they do not resemble each other. It is natural that they are dissimilar because Arka had no relation to Chinese to begin with.

However, one could now feel uneasy about the fact that Arka does not resemble other languages as such.

In other words, the fear that Arka might not function as a human language is born.

Nevertheless, that is a topic that belongs many years ago; there is no worry today, now that Arka is spoken in real life.

You can rest assured, understanding that Arka is Arka.

Arka is not similar to English, nor is it to any other language. After all, it is an original language as expected.

  1. Before the more recently-added gendered third-person pronouns (see the entry for luum).