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In my language "Farsi", "Verb" is the most essential thing in a sentence. The thing is it can be a sentence without anything else like:

"رَفت /verb/" means He/She/It went.

When we want to understand a paragraph has how many sentences, we will check the number of verbs.

In Farsi the order of parts of speech is like this:

  1. Verb: Can be a full sentence.
  2. Noun: After verb, the most thing we use is noun.
  3. Adverb: Less important because we can remove it frome the sentence.

I want to know in English, what kind of part of speech (verb, noun or adverb, etc) is more important.

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  • Basically, Nouns/pronouns(As a subject/object/complement)and verbs are very important. Others(Adjective, Adverb etc.)are important if one want to make a sentence more comprehensive and detailed.In such cases prepositions and conjunctions also play a more vital role.
    – Sam
    Commented Sep 6, 2023 at 5:08
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    I don't think it's possible to say which is the most important, if that is what you are asking. A sentence must contain a verb, but in English a verb must have a subject, even if it's only a 'dummy subject', as in 'It's raining'.
    – Kate Bunting
    Commented Sep 6, 2023 at 8:02
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    As I understand it, Persian/Farsi verbs include a suffix that indicates the subject. This would cause them to be important in the same way that the combination of the subject and verb has an importance in English. We are therefore not comparing equal things, and your question cannot be answered other than by opinion.
    – user81561
    Commented Sep 6, 2023 at 9:43

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In English, a complete sentence must have a subject and a verb. Therefore verbs and nouns are equally important to create a sentence.

Subject + Predicate

"In English, a complete sentence or clause requires two parts: an action and the person or thing that’s performing the action. While the subject describes who is doing the action, the predicate describes the action itself. Along with subjects, predicates are a necessary part of English sentence structure. " - Grammarly

Other parts of speech including adverbs, adjectives, and prepositions are optional from this perspective. All of them would be of secondary importance.

Comparing to Farsi, "Persian verbs are inflected for three singular and three plural persons." - Wikipedia. That means in Farsi the information about the subject is embedded in the verb form, possibly allowing the subject to be omitted. Logically speaking, Farsi includes the idea of a subject + verb in sentence structure so it's very similar.

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  • Syntactically, the head of any clause is the verb.
    – BillJ
    Commented Sep 7, 2023 at 7:01
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I don't think it's possible to categorise parts of speech as more or less important.

It is possible to make a complete utterance that is just a verb (if the subject is understood, such as in an imperative:

Go!

It is possible to make a complete utterance that is just a noun or just an adjective, if the other parts of the sentence are understood from context

What's your favourite sport?

Tennis.

There are things that I can't express without adjectives or adverbs:

Joe writes quickly.

Prepositions, pronouns, conjunctions, determiners: These are all necessary. So they are all important.

Ultimately this is like asking, "What is more important to a car, the engine, the wheels or the chassis? Well they are all important.

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  • We usually say that the verb is the most important since it is head of the clause.
    – BillJ
    Commented Sep 7, 2023 at 6:58
  • Depends how you define important. Look at children's speech, it is often nouns that they start using first. If I was to be left with only one class of words, I' think I'd keep the nouns.
    – James K
    Commented Sep 7, 2023 at 17:18
  • I was thinking syntactically. Semantically we might need to identify the theme, which can be virtually anything.
    – BillJ
    Commented Sep 8, 2023 at 6:15

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