What doth English?

>isn't it weird that we start sentences like this?
What is "it?" Is "it" the action described? Wouldn't that be redundant? Couldn't we just say "That we start sentences like this is weird?"
Do other languages do this?

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Bump. Serious question

"It" is a pronoun that labels an understood subject. This is basic middle school English, user.

In the example that you began the OP with, "it" refers to "the fact". If that's the phrase that had been used instead of the word "it", then the sentence would be a slightly-strange but still grammatically-correct variant of,
>Isn't the fact that we start sentences like this weird?

In other words,
>"Isn't it weird that we start sentences like this?" = "Isn't THE FACT weird THAT we start sentences like this?" = "Isn't the fact that we start sentences like this weird?"

it certainly confuses most Portuguese speakers who are catching up with English later in life. I don't know about the other languages though

I feel like I remember some similar juxtapositions in spanish, like "eso es"

in Portuguese you can say "Isso/isto é", but "isn't it weird?" for example would be "não é estranho?", and using isso/isto (or it) would actually be wrong

We also have an extra "do" at the start of some questions that doesn't add any information.

"Do you eat sandwiches?" could easily be "Eat you sandwiches?"

Sounds like shit w/o 'do' and collapses the entire language desu.

"Do you or do you not eat sandwiches?" into "Eat you sandwiches or no?" Of course, a ""better"" way to phrase your sentence would be in ebonics, "YOU EAT SANDWICHES?" and "YOU EAT SANDWICHES OR NAH?"

Hmmm, we appear to have cracked the code.

You CAN, but do you? Is that common practice?

That "or not" clause is unnecessary. In other Indo-Aryan languages, like Spanish or German, it works like the "eat you sandwiches?," and some languages use verb endings to condense it even further.
"Esst du bratwurst?" - transliterated as "eat you bratwurst?"
"¿Comes cerdo?" - transliterated as "eat [you] pork?"
Took me forever to think of those. I'm getting rusty :(

Es

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And this is why English is speaken and not spechren, ok thanks. long live the king

Comes cerdo could be translated, archaically, as "eateth (thou) pork?"
We need to bring back our informal second person

1. Yes, they also do this
2. It's called "dummy it". There is a nice wiki article about this if I remember.

Bigger puzzle is why does English have single negation and not double like all else?

>single negation
Are you talking about how double-negatives cancel out in English while they reinforce themselves in other languages?
I'm pretty sure that's just a hallmark of Germanic languages in general, but I could be wrong.

>that doesn't add any information
*that adds not any information

fixed

**that addsn't any information

It's not really a matter of option, it's just that there are situations that the rules for using them are different from the ones in English. You use it when it could be replaced with "this" (structurally) in English. So you'd use it here:
>Isso é legal (this is cool)
>Pegue ela na escola (pick her up at school)
>Vou pensar nisso depois (I'll think about it later, with nisso being a mix of em + isso)
And not here:
>É certo fazer isso? (Is it right to do this?)
>É sabido que fumar não é saudável (It is known that smoking is not healthy)

but you could also say, for example:
>Isso é certo de se fazer?
>Isso é sabido (replacing fumar não é saudável for isso)

I'm sleepy sorry about the broken English

Russian does that too

That's how it's said in Finnish, and Swedish, don't know about other languages. Though the verb gets conjugated