Some examples of language features alien to English speakers:
* Conjugated adjectives, as in Japanese. To say "it was delicious", you need to say "it is delicious-ed" (oishikatta desu).
* Agglutinative languages, like Finnish or Hungarian, where word order is largely irrelevant and conjugations, not word order, determine meaning.
* Topic/subject languages, like Japanese, where previously defined context can radically alter meaning. "Watashi wa hamburger desu" can mean "I'm a hamburger", "I'll have a hamburger", "If you ask me, it's a hamburger", etc.
* Grammatical gender, as in a whole lot of European languages.
* Tones, as in Chinese, Vietnamese, etc.
Here's a fun survey of the "weirdest languages", defines as those that exhibit the most features from the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS):
> Hungarian, where word order is largely irrelevant
Not exactly irrelevant, but very flexible. There are some rules to word order in Hungarian, but you typically rearrange the sentence to emphasize the important part by putting whatever is important in front. For example, if you ask a question, the question word that you expect an answer to always goes in front, "What should I wear?" and the answer should start with the word that answers that question, "The red dress, you should wear". Without delving into an entire Hungarian grammar lesson [because 1) I'm not qualified and 2) It would take several months], you can think of word order in Hungarian like the word order that Yoda uses. Yoda might say "Patience you must have my young Padawan." but he would never say "Must have you young Padawan patience." Why? Because he's putting emphasis on patience, so he starts the sentence with that, and then the rest of the sentence falls into an order behind that, but isn't random.
Also, while Finnish and Hungarian both have flexible word order and are both agglutinative, a language being agglutinative has little to do with word order and is about the fact that rather than using multiple words, you add prefixes and suffixes to words to add meaning. For example, "I play with my dog" is only two "words" in Hungarian: "kutyámmal játszom" which is basically "dog+my+with play+i", but because of the agglutinative nature, the boundary between what is a "word" and what is a sentence is a bit fuzzy and the words can get very long, for example: "megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért" which roughly translates to "because of y'all's continued behavior as if you could not be desecrated".
Because of agglutination Hungarian also has a very fun tongue twister: "Te tetted e tettetett tettet? Te tettetett tettek tettese, te!" which basically means, "Did you do this pretend deed? You doer of pretend deeds, you!"
Something that has stuck with me from a writing class in college (English) was that you should try to start and end sentences with important words. The professor emphasized that you shouldn't try too hard—readability is paramount, and you don't want to mangle the sentence—but where you can manage it, it makes writing more powerful.
It sounds like Hungarian effectively built this into the language, which is super interesting!
Yes, Hungarian has this kind of emphasis built in. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_grammar#Emphasis for examples of how varying the word order can change the emphasis and thus effectively the meaning of a sentence.
Because it really affects the meaning, I also think that your parent's statement that "you typically rearrange the sentence to emphasize the important part" is not strong enough. You don't just "typically" do this. You do it because you must, because most permutations of a given set of words -- although perfectly grammatical, and referring to the same event -- are simply pragmatically incorrect in the context of the conversation or text.
> you can think of word order in Hungarian like the word order that Yoda uses
Absolutely. So much so that in the Hungarian dub of Star Wars Yoda speaks normaly, like any other character. His vocal weirdness thing completely gets lost in the translation.
This is misleading. The translation could trivially make him use incorrect word orders. "Lost in translation" suggests that it would be difficult to make him speak in a quirky way, but that's not the case at all. The translator just couldn't be arsed. They couldn't even be arsed to give him a non-human voice. It's just a shoddy translation/dub, not a statement about the Hungarian language.
The thing is, Yoda doesn't simply use an "incorrect" word order. He uses a word order which emphasizes the focus of his sentence by putting it first. Since Hungarian already does this, there is nothing different in Hungarian about the way Yoda talks.
>Agglutinative languages, like Finnish or Hungarian, where word order is largely irrelevant and conjugations, not word order, determine meaning.
I'd argue that word order is just as relevant (and indeed constrained by meaning) in Hungarian or Finnish as it is in, say, English, though the details of how each language's syntax works are very different. Also, there are plenty of languages not usually characterized as "agglutinative"(e.g. Russian) in which affixes rather than word order are the primary determinant of the role that a word plays.
"Agglutinative" is really just a way of saying that meaning-bearing morphemes in the language tend to be more closely bound together: where in English, for example, we'd express "in our houses" with 3 words, whereas in Hungarian, these would form a single word "házainkban" (ház[a] "house", -i- plural, -nk "our," -ban "in"). We know they're separate words in English because other stuff can come between them ("in each of our big houses"); not so in Hungarian. (So arguably agglutinativity is more about constrained morpheme order than it is about free word order!)
>Topic/subject languages, like Japanese, where previously defined context can radically alter meaning. "Watashi wa hamburger desu" can mean "I'm a hamburger", "I'll have a hamburger", "If you ask me, it's a hamburger", etc.
Of course context can radically alter meaning in English too; think of the waiter who says "which one of you is the hamburger?" ("Me, I'm the hamburger, and he's the Caesar salad.")
Almost all language classifications exist along a spectrum, or perhaps it'd be better to talk about a high-dimensional space. Different languages rely more or less on different strategies, but there are almost no linguistic features for which analogues can't be found in most languages.
> I'd argue that word order is just as relevant (and indeed constrained by meaning) in Hungarian or Finnish as it is in, say, English, though the details of how each language's syntax works are very different.
I agree; GP didn’t choose the best examples for this. But there are languages like Yimas, Tiwi and Dyirbal for which word order truly is insignificant, so the point still stands.
Latin would be an example that more people might be familiar with.
There's a difference between "free ordering of constituent phrases", where you may rearrange subject noun phrases, object noun phrases, adverbial phrases and the verb into any order depending on emphasis etc., and completely free word order - like in the languages you mentioned - where "the little man walked through the big door" could end up as "man door through walked big little the the" or something like that, completely breaking apart what we'd consider "constituent phrases" in a language like English, where "the little man" etc. always move together in a sentence.
You’re completely right — indeed, Latin would have been a much better example than the ones I chose. (But I had been reading about Yimas a few hours before posting and it was on my mind.)
> There's a difference between "free ordering of constituent phrases", where you may rearrange subject noun phrases, object noun phrases, adverbial phrases and the verb into any order depending on emphasis etc., and completely free word order - like in the languages you mentioned - where "the little man walked through the big door" could end up as "man door through walked big little the the" or something like that, completely breaking apart what we'd consider "constituent phrases" in a language like English, where "the little man" etc. always move together in a sentence.
But how common is it to have the former without the latter? Most languages I read about have either both or neither.
> But how common is it to have the former without the latter? Most languages I read about have either both or neither.
Many language seem to have at least a somewhat flexible ordering of constituents. It may often depend on emphasis, information structure, etc. German for example can be quite flexible in that regard, and the effects this has on information structure are rather subtle (however, the verb always has to go in the second position, so it's not totally free). There are probably languages where it's even more free, but I don't have any examples off the top of my head. By contrast, there are languages where word order is very rigid (even in English, while you can rearrange constituents up to a point, it's not nearly as common as in German, and I would argue that it can often sound slightly archaic)
archaic might have been a bad choice of words, although it probably depends on the exact sentence. I do think it sounds more formal, though, I think I'd be less likely to hear your first sentence in everyday conversation. Then again, I'm not a native speaker of English.
My native-speaker intuition tells me the opposite — I’m probably more likely to use such constructions in colloquial speech than in formal written text. My second sentence does seem more formal to me though.
My mental model is that all human languages try to distribute some extra redundancy over the duration of the uttering to make transmission errors recoverable. Unfortunately, none of those checksum patterns are easy when you have to learn them as a secondary language.
> To say "it was delicious", you need to say "it is delicious-ed"
The "desu" isn't strictly necessary. You can just say "oishikatta".
With that said, Japanese does have a bunch of curious features, like different words for ordinal numbers depending on what you're counting (e.g. "one, two" can be translated to "hitori, futari" for people, or "ippon, nihon" for long objects, or "ippiki, nihiki" for small animals, etc), a plethora of onomatopoeias even for things that don't actually make any sounds - notoriously, "pika" (as in pikachu) is word for the "sound" of sparkling, politeness conjugations (e.g. "da" vs "desu" vs " de gozaimasu"), and many other things.
Counters are often depicted as a unique feature in Japanese but I think it originated in Chinese, as their use of counters are more systematic (e.g. instead of saying "this book", you can say "this [book-counter]" in Chinese, which is not allowed in Japanese "*この冊"). Also many onomatopoeic words exist in English, but they just exhibit in a different way (e.g. "glitter" or "slippery" sounds very onomatopoeic to me). Politeness is indeed an interesting feature, and I see a lot of Japanese natives (especially in their teens) struggle with it.
Disclaimer: I'm a Japanese native learning Chinese.
A very singular feature of Japanese, if not a unique feature, that stands out to most learners of it, is the variation in the numbers with the counters and the sound changes for how the counter sounds vary with the number sounds.
Consider the examples offered: ..."hitori, futari" for people, or "ippon, nihon" for long objects.... The "number part" varies considerably: one and two are "hito-" and "futa-" in the first case and "i-" and "ni-" in the second. In the second example, the counter is "-ppon", with a plosive stop; in the second, it's "-hon" with an affricate. The combination of varying number pronunciations and the
Japanese shares many, many grammatical features with Korean, including much of the politeness grammar system; however, when I looked over a Korean grammar linguistics book recently, I wasn't able to find anything to indicate that counting was as complicated as this.
I don't think it's as complicated as you're describing. There are just two systems; the regular case with regular numbers, and irregular cases using hito/futa/etc. One has to learn which counters use which system, but there are just the two of them.
Note also that ~hon changing to ~bon/~ppon is a general feature of Japanese compound words, it's nothing to do with counters specifically.
All the things described are real features of Japanese counting and are real examples drawn from the Japanese language.
There is sometimes variation where a person needs to learn which each number for which thing uses which system. For example, with people, a common way of counting is "hitori", "futari" (your irregular cases), and then "san nin", "yo nin", ... (your regular cases). It's not always that way; but the flexibility exists and that is quite different from Chinese.
The sound change -hon to -ppon and similar sound changes are not actually regular in Japanese -- there's not a clear phonological rule for them. Although counters don't generally vary in pronunciation for each count of the counter, many of the common ones do; and these variations must be learned per number, per counter.
The earlier commenter spoke to characteristics of Japanese that might seem unique to a student. Counters certainly are shared with Chinese; but these other things -- the variation in the numbers and the variation in the counter, itself -- are not.
Sorry, but I don't follow what you're disagreeing with. For the numeric stems there are two systems, and one learns which to use when, as I said. For the sound change, I didn't say it was "regular" (and I don't know what you mean by that here), I said that it's not specific to counters.
> The sound change -hon to -ppon and similar sound changes are not actually regular in Japanese -- there's not a clear phonological rule for them.
There is a loose rule for compound word contractions (adding tenten to the first letter of the second word), e.g. "sakura" gains a tenten in "senbonzakura". However, as you said, this is not universally the case. For example, "ehon" (lit. drawing book) is simply "e" (drawing) + "hon" (book), not "ebon".
Although "glitter" and "slippery" may sound onomatopoeic, neither one is actually onomatopoeia.
The latter case is perhaps the easiest, since "slippery" is an adjective derived from the verb "slip", still in use. (The word "glitter" is also derived from a verb, but this verb is no longer used.) Generally, words that are onomatopoeia don't have an etymology like that; if they did, then the sound would not be the result of trying to create the impression of something. For example, the "-y" in "slippery" is there because it's an adjective. The extent of onomatopoeia in Japanese is indeed quite different from English (and Chinese).
My girlfriend told me that keigo is so complicated that even for Japanese adults like her who have been working for foreign companies and using another language for too long, going back to work at a Japanese company can be too difficult, as they have forgotten a great deal of it.
I'm trying to learn the language, but man it's difficult.
ippon, nihon, and ippiki, nihiki are numbers with counter units added (different from hitori, futari). Counter units exist in English. It's common to say "I have 600 head of cattle" vs "I have 600 cattle". "600 head of cattle" is exactly the same in Japanese, "牛６００頭". The counters in Japanese are also often similar to the way we use the words in English. You don't say "I have 12 wines". You say "I have 12 bottles of wine". "12 bottles of wine" is very similar to "ワイン１２本”. I think "5 loaves of bread" also fits. You'd never say "I have 5 breads". You have to say "I have 5 loaves of bread"
I get there's a subtle difference but it's not that far off. We also say "I have 6 meters of rope". "meters" is the counting unit, which is the same concept as all the Japanese counting units.
As for the onomatopoeias, at some point you get used to them and they feel like they fit and you can start to pick them up without having them explained. Even the ones that don't seem like the make a sound, start to make a sound, at least in my mind once I've internalized it.
Not the same but in some sense similar, dogs don't say "bark" but with enough repetition many people perceive "bark" instead of the actual sound the small dog is making.
I think the difference (and what makes Japanese harder in this case) is that you can't stumble into the correct number suffix for a large number of mundane nouns. For example, "12 bottles of wine" uses words that are used in other contexts ("bottles", "wine"), so if you mash these English words together, you get a proper sentence that doesn't sound weird. This is because you have to use "bottles" to provide context. In Japanese, you have to know about the rule even to say "botoru wa ippon" ("one bottle"); "botoru wa ichi" stands out as broken Japanese as much as saying "me likes".
There's nothing context-wise that suggests one is supposed to suffix "hon/pon" (lit. "Book") when you're counting carrots, while tomatoes are counted with "hitotsu, futatsu". The rule for flat things is to suffix "mai", but while postcards are "ichimai, nimai", magazines are "hitotsu, futatsu" and pamphlets are "isatsu, nisatsu". Having to remember these seemingly arbitrary rules as a Japanese learner is often considered a bewildering experience.
I agree there are more counters in Japanese. I'm just pointing out the concept exists in English. Another example is "I have 6 pairs of pants and 7 pairs of socks" is the same in Japanese. 足 as a counter means pair so "靴下７足" is 7 pairs of socks (14 individual socks). You wouldn't say "I have 14 socks" in English. You say "I have 7 pairs of socks".
IIRC 冊 ＝ bindings (very similar to the concept of pairs of socks, we have bindings of paper). So you count "sheets of paper" (枚）and "bindings of books" (冊）.
All I'm saying is there are lots of place in English were without a counting unit it's often awkward or ungrammatical. I agree it takes take some getting used to all the counters though and even Japanese have trouble with it as there's a game you play where you call out a thing and the next per says that thing +1 +the counter.
Example player 1: "Apple", Player 2 "apple ik-ko. banana", Player 3 "banana nip-pon. car", Player 4 "car yon dai. house", Player 5: "House go-ken" Player 5 might have just gotten that wrong and then everyone would laugh.
Nitpicks follow. Tomatoes are counted in 個 (ko). The counter 本 for carrots and other things does not mean book in that context. The character just also means book, but has other meanings. Both magazines and pamphlets are counted in 冊(satsu) or 部(bu).
To me the most annoying thing about Japanese counters is not so much that there are so many, but that you also have to remember when the numbers that go with them will need on-yomi or kun-yomi (ichi, ni... vs. hito, futa...) (well, okay, that essentially depends on the counter itself being on or kun. Makes me wonder if there are jūbako-yomi or yutō-yomi cases, never looked it up). And if that wasn't enough you also need to remember when e.g. いち becomes いっ and when a h becomes a b or a p (ippon, nihon, sanbon...)
Edit: and there are the fun cases where it's not always on or kun: ichinichi, futsuka... or other fun exceptions.
Whether you want it or not, you'll end up encountering them, not necessarily with enough context to tell you what they are. Example from regular news: 1000軒停電.1000世帯停電.1000戸停電.(and they all point to something slightly different)
Yes, it does depend. My recommendation would still be to follow up with what I said and master the common ones used for basic conversation first. Then work on the rarer ones that pop up in the news or when you're renting apartments or whatever.
Edit: Since I am being downvoted it would be great if they understood the reference first. It is the Mark Twain humorous article on trying to learn the German language and in response to the above Mark Twain German language reference.
I’m pretty sure there’s no such thing. My understanding is that Fula, with ~24 noun classes, is widely agreed to have the most number of genders. A language with several hundred genders really would be unlearnable!
“Gender” is related to “genre”, and means merely a group of nouns lumped together for grammatical purposes. Linguists talk instead of “noun classes”, which may have to do with shape or size, or whether the noun is animate, but often rules are hard to see. George Lakoff, a linguist, memorably described a noun class of Dyirbal (spoken in north-eastern Australia) as including “women, fire and dangerous things”.
To the extent that genders are idiosyncratic, they are hard to learn. Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 of them.
> To the extent that genders are idiosyncratic, they are hard to learn. Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 of them.
Interesting. Wikipedia says that Bora has more than 350 "classifiers", but that doesn't seem to be the same concept as genders. There is a specific section at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classifier_(linguistics)#Noun_... contrasting classifiers and "noun classes", of which grammatical genders are a special case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_type_of_g... lists one language with "50–140 noun classes", several Bantu languages with 16-20 of them, and apparently all other languages of the world have significantly fewer. (I am not a linguist.)
I’m not a linguist either, but I’d say most of this is correct, though incomplete. There’s a bunch of different ways of classifying nouns, including those you mention. A complete list:
• Noun classes/genders: usually a fairly small set (<7 in most cases outside Africa), are marked on multiple words at once, commonly distinguishes male/female or animate/inanimate
• Noun classifiers: commonly small (<20) but may be a larger set, most commonly occur as free words next to the noun
• Numeral classifiers: can be a very large set, occur next to numerals to specify what you’re counting
• Possessive classifiers: occur in a possessive construction to show the exact relationship between two nouns
• Verbal classifiers: incorporated into the verb to show what kind of object it’s acting on
• Deictic classifiers: incorporated into deictic words (like ‘this’ or ‘that’) to precisely specify the kind and orientation of the object you’re referring to
And then of course these overlap somewhat. Tuyuca — the language with ‘50–150 noun classes’ — has a set of classifiers which act simultaneously as numeral classifiers, possessive classifiers and deictic classifiers, as well as modifying adjectives. GP’s example of Bora seems to use numeral classifiers.
(All this is taken from Aikhenvald’s Classifiers, which is probably the best resource if you want to know more about this.)
linguists rarely agree on definitions, unfortunately.
Greville Corbett, for example, who has written a textbook about "Gender" (in the linguistic sense), defines gender as a type of noun classification which triggers agreement. In that sense, he doesn't require that it be centered around male/female or animate/inanimate. Other linguists will use different terminology.
> linguists rarely agree on definitions, unfortunately.
Aargh… I don’t want to think about it. Just don’t get me started on the literature on SVCs, alright?
(My favourite linguistics quote, from Anderson’s A-Morphous Morphology: ‘Linguistics will become a science when linguists begin standing on one another's shoulders instead of on one another's toes.’ Oddly enough, he spends the rest of the book stepping on the toes of everyone else.)
> Greville Corbett, for example, who has written a textbook about "Gender" (in the linguistic sense), defines gender as a type of noun classification which triggers agreement.
Aikhenvald concurs, though she prefers the term ‘noun class’ over ‘gender’.
> Just don’t get me started on the literature on SVCs, alright?
Yeah, that seems like a huge minefield. Another one is anything related to aspect, Aktionsart and any combination thereof. Or, one of my favourites, active-stative/split intransitivity/split-S/semantic alignment.
> ‘Linguistics will become a science when linguists begin standing on one another's shoulders instead of on one another's toes.’
That's a nice quote. One reason why I became annoyed with linguistics is exactly this feeling that there wasn't enough progress because people couldn't even agree on basic definitions.
> Another one is anything related to aspect, Aktionsart and any combination thereof.
Oh yes, that confused me for a very long time. Thankfully I mostly understand it now (with the help of the good people at https://www.verduria.org/index.php), but no-one seems to be able to agree on terminology.
> Or, one of my favourites, active-stative/split intransitivity/split-S/semantic alignment.
Ooh, I wrote a whole series of essays on that! [0] Morphosyntactic alignment is a favourite topic of mine. (I perhaps didn’t spend as much time on split intransitivity as I should have… I really should write an addendum or something which properly covers split intransitivity. Know any good resources, by any chance?)
I wrote my master's thesis about split intransitivity.[1] You can find some resources in the bibliography, although I'm sure there's tons more.
I'll have to check your essays too!
edit: just had a quick look (not in detail yet). I love that you're using basically the same example sentences from Dixon that I also used in my thesis.
Oh, wow, this will be so useful — thank you! I don’t have any formal training in linguistics, so it’s always nice to confirm with an actual linguist that I’m understanding everything right.
(And, yes, there’s only so many example sentences to go around :) )
Well, if you check my thesis (and can make sense of the convoluted sentences), a big part of it was wading through the mess of terminology and also quite imprecise definitions. I think Dixon's descriptions are a good first order approximation to understand the concepts, but they lack a certain amount of rigour, at least if we want to use them meaningfully for cross-linguistic comparison. That's why I attempted a definition more centred on Lazard and Haspelmath.
It's quite impressive how much you know without formal training. I spent years learning about these subjects. However, since graduating in 2013, I haven't really done anything with linguistics.
> I think Dixon's descriptions are a good first order approximation to understand the concepts, but they lack a certain amount of rigour
Oh, I completely agree. I personally quite like Deal’s ‘ergative’ and ‘absolutive properties’ [0] as a first attempt; but I haven’t yet seen Lazard and Haspelmath, so I should look into that more.
> It's quite impressive how much you know without formal training. I spent years learning about these subjects.
Why, thank you! But I don’t think I’m so different in this respect: I spent a good portion of my spare time last year reading everything I could find about ergativity, and had read lots about linguistics even before that. (What can I say; it’s an interesting subject!)
This really confused me when I was starting to learn German — naturally I incorrectly inferred that “das” was feminine rather than neuter.
When I learned that “-chen” is a diminutive („Hund” = “dog”, „Hündchen” = “puppy”), I assumed there must be a “Mad*” as a non-diminutive alternative word for women. Turns out, there’s an archaic root in „Magd”, which also became the English “maid”.
Many people confuse the grammatical genus (as used in practice in contemporary German) of German words with the biological concept of sex. This is made even more complicated by SJWs who confuse these two unrelated concepts (genus, sex) with their concept of gender.
So, it is better to imagine the genus of German word as something like the "'color' of a word" ("color" in the sense of the "color charge" of quarks).
> This is made even more complicated by SJWs who confuse these two unrelated concepts (genus, sex) with their concept of gender.
People described by their opponents as SJWs are more likely than, well, pretty much everyone else on the planet to distinguish biological sex, gender identity, socially ascribed gender, and grammatical gender.
The people who use “SJW” as a dismissive epithet, on the other hand, are most likely to fail to distinguish those things.
And people who see all non-praising use of "SJW" as "a dismissive epithet", on the gripping hand, are 100% likely to miss the odd case where it's just used as a handily descriptive piece of shorthand.
It wasn't handily descriptive. They reversed the positions.
People described by their opponents as SJWs don't describe themselves as SJWs except ironically occasionally. People who want a neutral or positive tone use other terms like social justice advocates.
friend of mine went to live in germany and for a hot second tried to just use diminutives for everything so he didn’t have to learn gender forms.
this lasted as long as it took for someone to tell him he sounded like a toddler. “do you have any mitten-wittens? my handsie-wandsies are coooooold” was i think what convinced him otherwise.
I'm very skeptical about some of the attempts to change the German language to be more "gender-neutral" due to a number of reasons, but I feel it's not correct to frame this as a misunderstanding between "genus" and "sexus", as I've now read a number of times.
If people really confused grammatical gender with "the biological concept of sex", then we'd have a lot more arguments about random nouns needing to have feminine gender instead of masculine (there's this famous joke about "die Salzstreuerin"). But that's not really what happens. Nobody seems to care about the table being masculine.
What the argument is mostly about is that we use words that, by themselves, refer to masculine people and pluralise them to denote a possible mixed-gender group. This has everything to do with semantics (and so with how concrete biological/social gender expression is encoded in the words of a language), and isn't really that much concerned with grammatical gender, which after all disappears anyway as a distinctive feature once you're in the plural.
Your point is unclear to me. Gender doesn't mean genre in contemporary English. And context is enough to distinguish grammatical gender from other meanings usually.
Nouns that describe persons with social genders have matching grammatical genders usually. And you have to distinguish when talking about both at once obviously.
> And then people usually get very huffy about which non-sentient nouns “share” “their” “gender”.
Thanks for the clarification. I would like to further add that "das" is the definite article for Neutrum/neuter gender and "die" is the definite article for Femininum/feminine gender.
“Watashi wa” is actually not the subject of the sentence in Japanese.
It’s what is called a theme, as in: this is what we are going to talk about, the topic.
Example:
“Watashi ha hamburger desu”:
With regard to “Watashi” = me/I (i.e. concerning “me”), “it is” a hamburger,
Which ends up translated to:
I am a hamburger.
Or:
For me, it will be a hamburger.
So the “wa” particule (actually “ha”) introduces the theme or topic in the sentence, rather than the subject. Very different from English.
The great vowel shift happened after the Norman conquest, and there is no way that an infusion of French would create a language in which there is phonetic spelling.
Middle English (and Early Modern English) was spelled as it was spoken, to such an extent that there wasn’t consistent spelling, and people would just write whatever sequence of letters would get pronounced as the desired sound.
No, there is no such thing as "spelled as it was spoken" when everyone has inconsistent agreements on how to spell sounds and when a new language comes in with its own Latin spelling conventions that differ from the previous language.
>* Topic/subject languages, like Japanese, where previously defined context can radically alter meaning. "Watashi wa hamburger desu" can mean "I'm a hamburger", "I'll have a hamburger", "If you ask me, it's a hamburger", etc.
It also works for "I have" as in "Watashi wa korona da" or "I have Covid 19".
"be" and "have" can be quite quirky from language to language. For example, in portuguese, "I am healthy" can be translated to "eu sou saudavel" (meaning, the person lives a healthy lifestyle) or "eu estou saudavel" (meaning, the person is currently temporarily healthy). "I am 20 years old" translates to "eu tenho vinte anos" (or "I have 20 years of age")
Similarly, in Portuguese you can "have" or "be with" various nouns reflecting physical, mental, or emotional states which would be expressed with adjectives in English, like "I have hunger", "I have fear", "I'm with fear", "I'm with jealousy", "I'm with yearning for him".
I know German also uses "have" this way quite a lot (at least for hunger, thirst, fear, and desire, probably for many other things).
I thought French mostly just had être (and occasionally avoir) for “to be”, and you’d need context to determine if “Elle est heureuse” means she is happy now or generally.
That's more about contextuality. You can articulate "watashi wa korona wo kakatteimasu" or might even be fine with "watashi korona" when speaking with suitable intonation.
Doesn't Japanese have different words for numbers depending on the shape of the object (e.g., "one" for flat things, "one" for cylindrical things, etc...)? Some languages (Hindi, Japanese, Chinese) I can't even figure out where words begin/end (or sentences), even with a dictionary. (I'm looking at you, Japanese particle).
Japanese and Chinese uses counting words. Saying how many bottles of beer you have and how many sheets of paper you have use the same number but a different counting word. These are analogous to the following English sentences: "one bottle of beer" vs "one sheet of paper" except you cannot drop the counting word, saying "one beer" or "one paper" is incorrect.
I always wondered why my Japanese friends taught me the form "X-san oshiri wa suteki desu" rather than "X-san wa oshiriga īdesu" which is what Google Translate suggests for the English version of the sentence in its most natural form.
"X has a good butt" doesn't sound terribly natural in English either. Also, X ga ii has a connotation of preferring X over other alternatives: X ka Y ka docchi ga ii? X ga ii.
The real roadblock with Japanese, in my opinion, is how kanji makes it impossible to absorb new vocabulary through casual reading. We naturally infer the meaning of words from their syntactical and semantic context, but with kanji there's no "name" to hang the inferred meaning to as you read. You can't pronounce it in your head, or out loud.
Kanji make it possible to sometimes guess the meaning and pronunciation of a completely unfamiliar word, but even in those cases it's just a guess. You can never be certain. And in fact, since you can't be certain, it means you need an entirely separate type of dictionary to look up these words, a reverse-kanji dictionary where characters are categorized variously by the number of lines, the presence of certain components, and other schemes of native and non-native invention. This is because you don't have a name for the word you're looking at, whereas in almost every other language, the "spelling" of the word is the name.
About four years into Japanese, the same point where in my Spanish studies I was picking up Don Quixote and enjoying it, I was struggling to cope with young adult fiction. No, I was completely defeated by it. Every page was a slog and it was impossible to progress without turning it into a study session where I looked up the pronunciation of every single unfamiliar word and repeatedly practiced writing unfamiliar characters.
At some point it becomes simply impossible to progress without active, intentional study. The so-called "osmosis" hits a hard asymptote and it's because of kanji. Reading fiction for 12 year olds means pencil, paper, and two dictionaries to decipher it. Or it used to; I guess mobile apps that can OCR the text and look up words have made this process vastly easier for younger learners.
The article is paywalled so mea culpa if this point is addressed in there.
While I empathise with your struggles with kanji, the language itself provides a solution: furigana. Japanese is wonderful for having a very close mapping between letters and sounds. These easy to read and pronounce letters are often written above kanji for young children.
Admittedly, once children become teenagers they are expected to be able to read a good amount of everyday kanji words and the use of furigana falls away apart from for unusual readings or less common words, and pretty much entirely for texts aimed at adults. Still, if you're content with quite simple content you can pick up a wonderful amount of language by osmosis with the helping hand of furigana.
My impression is that adult learners tend to struggle with Kanji even though furigana exists because age is a strong identity factor in Japanese culture and furigana is usually used in age-specific contexts.
So a Kanji that might be accompanied by furigana in a shounen manga (geared to kids) typically won't be accompanied by it in a seinen novel (geared towards young adults). Needless to say, adults don't necessarily want to read doraemon (a kids series) as beginner Japanese learners.
I always wondered, does Kanji not have a way of breaking things down? I noticed some complex Kanji characters seem to made up of smaller simpler characters. I always wondered if it was a coincidence or not.
These are historically separate characters, and they're meaningful, but it's relatively unlikely that you can use them as a way of learning Japanese or Chinese characters that you don't already know (as opposed to maybe as a way of helping to remember ones that you do know).
Also, in the Japanese case, they were borrowed from Chinese centuries ago and commonly given one pronunciation based on what the Chinese word sounded like to Japanese people at that time, and another based on the Japanese translation of the Chinese word.
So yes, all of this is super-meaningful at an etymological level, but not transparent or reliable, and even trickier with Japanese rather than Chinese, because extra layers like kunyomi were added on top.
Many kanji are composed of symbols that are also kanji in themselves; there are also radicals which are not kanji in isolation but appear in the same form in many characters.
That being said, the meaning (or meanings...) of a kanji cannot be derived from its parts, just like the meaning of an English word cannot be derived from the letters that appear in it.
Also, as a rule, the same character will be read differently in different contexts. E.g. 生きる _i_kiru "to live", 生まれる _uma_reru "to be born", 学生 gaku_sei_ "student".
I agree and the only solution is to memorize a lot of kanji sadly.
There are anki flashcard (spaced repetition) decks that can help drill the kanji into your head.
Finding accessible reading material is challenging especially at the absolute beginner stage.
In my japanese study I make sure I flashcard kanji every day. Without 300+ memorized reading even kids stuff will be hard.
EDIT: Just saw that you are 4 years into studying. That is a bit demoralizing for me that you still can't read adult level stuff. I can only read stuff along the level of "Ayako rides the train", etc.
To be fair, in the English language mentally attaching an unknown sequence of characters to some work-in-progress pronunciation guess can also lead to some serious hilarity.
I suspect that people who grew up with a non-alphabetic script have better "geometry abstraction capabilities" trained into their brains that would make them noticeably more performant in a test involving fantasy glyph memorization/reidentification.
There's a really nice essay by David Moser about why Chinese is so hard to learn for English speakers. It comes down to the hot mess of a writing system:
My Russian professor had an interesting insight about why that language had such a high attrition rate among college learners. It's not possible to say even simple things in a Slavic language without learning much of the grammatical apparatus of noun declensions, verbs of motion, and the perfective/imperfective distinction, all of which are profoundly alien to an English speaker.
So Russian departments end up teaching the material three times through—first years are overwhelmed and try to retain what they can, in second year you are expected to absorb the material, and in third year you're supposed to internalize it. That means you study for three years to reach a level of proficiency other students gain in one.
Sentences like "I took something there with me", for example, are almost comically difficult. Did you go on foot, by vehicle, run, crawl, fly? Was it a habitual action or a one-time thing? Are you stressing the trip or its completion? Did you enter there, climb inside, descend down? Did the trip require overcoming an obstacle? Is the object known to the speaker and listener, known only to the speaker, or unknown? Is it animate and went under its own power? Was it carried in the hands, dragged, or carried on a vehicle?
Meanwhile, fellow students learning German or French can speak proficiently after one year and start reading literature after two. It's a bitter pill.
> Sentences like "I took something there with me", for example, are almost comically difficult. Did you go on foot, by vehicle, run, crawl, fly? Was it a habitual action or a one-time thing? Are you stressing the trip or its completion? Did you enter there, climb inside, descend down? Did the trip require overcoming an obstacle? Is the object known to the speaker and listener, known only to the speaker, or unknown? Is it animate and went under its own power? Was it carried in the hands, dragged, or carried on a vehicle?
Wait, how do these considerations change the sentence? Seems pretty crazy that the method of taking a thing somewhere would change the words.
Slavic languages (not just Russian) distinguish the mode of transportation for verbs of motion. So, there is no single "go", there is either "go by foot" or "go by vehicle" and choosing the wrong one makes you sound like a silly foreigner. Similarly ,there is no single "bring", there is "bring on foot" or "bring in a vehicle".
As a native speaker of Slovenian and a decent speaker of Serb/Croatian this is not true for these particular Slavic languages. I can say "Grem v trgovino" / "Idem u dučan" (I'm going to the store) and it implies nothing at all about whether I'm taking the bus, going on foot or riding a horse for that matter.
There's a kind of default 'to go' verb in all the Slavic languages I know about, but you can't use it in certain contexts. In Polish, for example, you can similarly say:
Idę do sklepu (I'm going to the store)
With no implication about mode of transit. For that matter, you can even say:
Lecę do sklepu (I'm flying to the store), to imply that you're in a hurry.
But you would never say:
Idę do Moskwy (I'm going to Moscow)
Unless you were actually going there on foot. Sometimes the appropriate verb is required.
1. There are separate categories of "to go" in Russian and other Slavic languages for walking on foot, strolling, climbing, running, crawling, flying, going by vehicle, swimming and probably a few more I'm forgetting. The method of locomotion is baked into the verb. You can read some examples here if the nerdery interests you: http://www.russianlessons.net/grammar/verbs_motion.php
2. Each of these verbs comes in a pair. One is unidirectional, the other is multidirectional. The difference in usage is more subtle than these names suggest, but that's the general idea.
3. You have a ton of prefixes you can stick onto these verbs to indicate action into, through, around, to-and-back, and so on.
4. There's other verbs you use if you carried or conveyed something somewhere. Points 2 and 3 apply to them, too.
5. These verbs also have aspect, but you've suffered enough.
So the choice of verb of motion in a sentence like "I took something there" encodes a lot of meaning, and is as intuitive to native speakers as the proper usage of "the" and "a" is to English speakers—you know exactly how to use it correctly, but good luck trying to articulate the rules to yourself or to people learning the language if you haven't gotten special training.
Hm, yeah, that's a lot of context, thanks for the explanation! I imagine it would be hell to translate from Russian to something like English, because you lose all that effortless nuance and have to make it explicit in a way that sounds more forced.
Proficient French after one year is miraculous (German would be realistic for limited domains), it’s an unforgiving language in a lot of unfathomable ways, just matching gender and number in a phrase can be a nightmare
Native English speaker, conversationally fluent German speaker, learning French now. I agree. It seems German gets the reputation of being quite hard, and french easier, but I just don't see it. Sure German can be complex but it seems at least a bit more consistent and forgiving as a native english speaker. French seems to be deceptively simple at first "here is a simple rule to follow" and then hits you on the back side with "and here are the 20 pages of exceptions! "
Proficient spoken French (not necessarily correct but usable) is perfectly attainable in an academic year for a native speaker of English. I watched students at my alma mater, which has a summer language program, go from nothing to conversational fluency in a nine-week intensive course. They still made lots of mistakes, but they could freely interact with native speakers and make themselves understood on most topics.
I get that gender especially is hard on learners coming to French from English, but you also get about a quarter of the vocabulary for free, which is a treat.
It's true that alphabets are easy to learn. But, in my opinion, all of this opining about language differences is navel gazing. Human languages are all fundamentally the same. The differences are cosmetic. That's the Chomskyan hypothesis and it seems true to me.
> Foreign languages really become hard when they have features that do not appear in your own—things you never imagined you would have to learn. Which is another way of saying that languages slice up the messy reality of experience in strikingly different ways.
It does not follow that languages having different features results in "slicing up reality differently". That's only true if you believe some form of Sapir-Worf.
> Danish, for instance, does not have a word for “wood”; it just uses “tree” (trae).
Danish does have a word for wood...it's just the same as the word for tree. This is like saying English is weird because we say "he likes to fish" and "he eats fish" (or "he fishes" and "the fishes are swimming"). Fish is a noun and a verb, how weird! No, it's not weird at all, though it proves that context is important in understanding (no kidding).
> Russian splits blue into light (goluboi) and dark (sinii)
Great, and in English dark blue might be "navy".
All languages are easy to learn if you have to learn them. The people who think "Arabic and Chinese are hard" are people who don't have to learn them, they're doing it as a hobby or for school. If you're thrown into a situation where you need to acquire a language, odds are you'll figure it out.
This topic (differences between natural languages) always ends up as amateur sociology like "foreigners see things differently". It might be true but there's no evidence for it. Or all the evidence is baseless speculation that relies on assuming Sapir-Worf. To me, it all sounds like "inuits have 87 words for snow".
> All languages are easy to learn if you have to learn them. The people who think "Arabic and Chinese are hard" are people who don't have to learn them, they're doing it as a hobby or for school.
The US State department has the Foreign Service Institute, which is its primary training centre. With-in there they have the School of Language Studies, which teaches more than seventy languages, and over the years/decades it has been found that different language take different amounts of time to become proficient in (on average).
* Danish, Dutch, French, Norwegian, etc, take 24 weeks for an English speaker to learn
* German takes 30 weeks
* Indonesian, Malaysian, Swahili take 36w
* Albanian, Bengali, Bosnian, Polish, Urdu, etc, take 44w
* Arabic, Japanenese, Korean, Cant/Mand Chinese take 88w
Different amounts of time for a native English speaker. For instance, languages like Dutch are going to be easier than Korean simply because English is a close cousin of Dutch.
Many of the lower ranked languages on this list are interrelated via proto-indoeuropean and many of the higher ranked languages are not.
I speak both Swahili and Somali. While the two languages are written in Latin alphabet, I find Somali harder than Swahili. Yet, Somali is supposed to be my mother tongue. Thus, this grouping in many ways reflects ny experience too.
> All languages are easy to learn if you have to learn them
Learning a language is definitely not easy and claiming that learning different languages is same level of effort is outright ridiculous.
It’s not to say that one language itself is harder or easier compared to another, it’s a matter of it being different from the one you speak already.
> Or all the evidence is baseless speculation that relies on assuming Sapir-Worf
I would totally blame Sapir-Worf for all the articles
I consistently omit or mixup when writing in English. Something being definite or indefinite is just not a category that I use when thinking about things and it’s existence still makes almost zero sense after more than a decade of practicing languages that have it.
Believe me, native English speakers do not think about the definite-ness of a word. We just knows that "the" comes before some things and not others and it sounds odd when someone gets it wrong.
My argument is that these differences are cosmetic, not that they don't exist. Also, Sapir-Worf is not at all referring to minor grammatical issues of this kind.
Which language are you coming from? Vaguely wondering if I can find a way to concisely frame definite/indefinite in a way that makes its utility to English speakers seem less puzzling.
Edit: oh, Russian? Just wondering. Seen this come up a ton of times with Russian-speakers. For whatever reason it's an especially alien thing coming from that particular language.
Anyway, definite / indefinite is helpful for clarifying whether we're referring to a specific item or a generic item (i.e. any instance of that type of item, doesn't matter which one.)
Hmm, now that I think about it, it seems implicitly clear to me and that limits my ability to creatively explain its utility.
Maybe I should turn this around instead-- could you help me understand why that isn't a way of categorizing things that's employed by Russian-speakers? Why don't you need to make that distinction?
> Vaguely wondering if I can find a way to concisely frame definite/indefinite in a way that makes its utility to English speakers seem less puzzling.
First, it must be understood that English really many nouns tagged with a determiner; which can be articles (the X, a/an X), possessive or demonstrative "pronouns" (his/her X, this/that X, etc.), or others. (The nouns English doesn't want tagged are proper nouns, or nouns that talk about a type of X rather than an instance of X).
The X means that the question "which X?" is possible/relevant, and that the speaker/writer expects the listener/reader to know/care the answer to "which X?".
A/an X means that the question "which X?" is possible/relevant, and that the speaker/writer does not expect the listener/reader to know/care about the answer to "which X?".
It's important to understand that whether to use the versus a/an is controlled completely by the point of view and understanding of the speaker/writer. If the speaker/writer is setting an expectation the listener/reader can't meet, that's a sign to ask questions, pretend you know, or remember and wait until later for clarification.
I know Russian doesn't have articles but I'm not sure why they're "needed" in English versus Russian.
Close enough — Ukrainian. In fact most languages on this planet don’t have articles.
> Why don't you need to make that distinction?
Because you just ydon’t, it’s perfectly clear from context most of time or even completely irrelevant. When you actually mean to make this distinction, you just add this/that/my/your or some/any/whatever, refer to specific object by name or any other way.
> … in a way that makes its utility to English speakers seem less puzzling
I mean I understand the thing, it encodes another redundant bit of information, which I just don’t have when I’m thinking about something.
It really depends. If you spend time in a country, only speaking in its language and reading newspapers in it, you could learn a language in like 3 months. This is especially true if you know another language and already have the mental model for learning them.
I think saying all differences are "cosmetic" undersells them a bit.
Sure, having different words for numbers related to different objects doesn't fundamentally break the world, but to someone raised with a concept of a number being a number universally, it's a pretty big conceptual change.
>> Danish, for instance, does not have a word for “wood”; it just uses “tree” (trae).
> Danish does have a word for wood...it's just the same as the word for tree. This is like saying English is weird because we say "he likes to fish" and "he eats fish" (or "he fishes" and "the fishes are swimming"). Fish is a noun and a verb, how weird! No, it's not weird at all, though it proves that context is important in understanding (no kidding).
Usually the same word is used for wood and tree, but we do have the word "ved", which refers specifically to the woody part of a plant, not the entirety of it. So you would call it "kerneved" for heartwood and "splintved" for sapwood.
It's not really in common everyday use, but very commonly used in the forestry and woodworking trades.
> It's true that alphabets are easy to learn. But, in my opinion, all of this opining about language differences is navel gazing. Human languages are all fundamentally the same. The differences are cosmetic. That's the Chomskyan hypothesis and it seems true to me.
That's not "the Chomskyan hypothesis", it's a statement that can't be proved or falsified, since what "fundamentally the same" and "cosmetic differences" mean is really anyone's guess. Viewed from far enough, of course languages are essentially all the same, same as all living beings are essentially the same.
Nevertheless, I think that looking at any textbook in linguistic typology or just browsing WALS gives you quite an impression of how diverse languages can be, much more than you'd assume if you only speak a number of European languages.
> Or all the evidence is baseless speculation that relies on assuming Sapir-Worf.
Maybe you should look at the data about colour perception or, even more strikingly, spatial reasoning, which uses actual experiments conducted on speakers of different languages (e.g. Dutch vs. Guugu Yimithirr). The results can be interpreted differently, but to say that this is just "baseless speculation" is fundamentally wrong and doesn't agree with empirical data. There's a very strong version of Sapir-Whorf ("language constrains how you think") that probably no linguist takes seriously anymore, but there's still substantial debate about the weak form ("language influences how you think").
> All languages are easy to learn if you have to learn them.
Look up Navajo Code Talkers. Navajo was picked because it is so difficult to learn. I believe, at the time, only two people ever had managed to speak it who were not raised speaking it, or so an old history teacher said.
I believe Navajo was picked because it was obscure and in particular US intelligence knew the whereabouts every academic who had studied or published it.
Other Native American languages which might have been studied by European professors and students of linguistics had to be rejected.
Sure there is a sense in which Navajo is really hard to learn, but that's the same sense in which it's very hard to learn Babylonian/Akkadian. It's hard because no one speaks it, there is no culture to immerse yourself in, no theater or movies you can watch, no music you can listen to, no novels you can read, no friends to speak with, etc etc...
The only way to learn Akkadian, or Navajo, is in a very artificial and academic manner, and learning things in that fashion tends to be very inefficient.
>All languages are easy to learn if you have to learn them.
I'm pretty sure if you were to hold a gun against my head until I get fluent in french you'll leave me alone far earlier than if I had to learn an Asian language with Chinese characters.
Learning Chinese characters is just busywork, that's all there is to it. It might be easy but it will still take forever.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that language either influences or constrains the speaker's world view. I don't see the author claiming this: English speakers are perfectly capable of seeing the difference between light blue and dark blue, we just happen to use the same basic word for both.
The bit about words not mapping 1:1 across languages is something every learner will run into though, and it's perhaps most obvious in loanwords, which tend to bring across only one meaning of many. For example, in Japanese handoru (handle) refers exclusively to a car's steering wheel, kanningu (cunning) is cheating on a test, and a beisu-appu (base up) is a salary increase.
> English speakers are perfectly capable of seeing the difference between light blue and dark blue, we just happen to use the same basic word for both.
The idea is that English speakers identify light and dark as a variation of the same thing.
Are red and pink the same colour or different colours? What if you call "pink" something like "light red" instead? Are they now classified in your brain as two different things or the same one.
Is dark blue and light blue two colours or one? Does "light blue" become a different colour in a person's brain if it's label as azure as in Italian (etc)?
My own pet hypothesis is that it is not just language but our entire culture that creates an O/S for our brain in our early years.
"Restraining world view" seems harsh IMHO. Sounds a little elitist to me. But affecting world-view is possibly correct.
I suspect the plasticity of the brain can overcome some of the things that the original O/S load affects but it seems to require either a big emotional event or real effort by people to undo the initial programming, like being dropped into a new country where you don't know the language but must learn it to survive. We figure it out.
It does beg the question however what are we missing, as a result of our initial programming, that we might want to download an update for. :)
> Ability to say that certain objects is far from both speaker and listener for example.
Non-native here. I don't quite follow. How about: "The object is far away from both of us.".
The concept is there, but maybe not as a single word. Sure, it might be convenient to be able to say "The object it broscht!", but it would just be syntactic sugar. Not a new concept.
In English — yes. In Ukrainian or Russian I just can’t omit this information without descending into soul-crashing legalize of “french person“.
The point being —- yes, its possible to say exactly that, but it would either be in a wrong register or too much of words where you could have just one.
If you say that languages are how people slice up the world, and this makes different languages harder or easier to learn, you're committing to some form of Sapir-Worf, however mild. "I have the English way of slicing up the world and it's hard to adjust to the Japanese way of slicing up the world".
An alternate explanation is, as I argued, that the differences between human languages are superficial and the underlying (and more interesting) concept of language is the same for everyone. If that's true, the differences between languages are minutia.
> English speakers are perfectly capable of seeing the difference between light blue and dark blue, we just happen to use the same basic word for both.
I remember reading about experiment that proved the opposite in regards to blue color —- speakers of languages with two basic colors for blue were differentiating one from another measurably faster.
In English too. Mesa in English is a plateau, while in Spanish it's just a table (furniture), while sierra is not just a mountain range, but a carpenter's saw too.
you can actually test in various ways if one language is harder to learn than another. For example you ask children to ask for a cheeseburger. If they say "I can has cheeseburger" they are not as far along as "May I have a cheeseburger".
you then sample lots of kids and you find that in some language kids speak the language in the "proper" way much soon than other languages.
However, the things that make a language hard to learn for kids aren't necessarily the same that make it hard for adults.
The article you link is about acquisition of past tense formation in Danish, where some verbs have a past tense ending in -ede, like bade/badede (bathe/bathed) and some others end in -te, like kalde/kaldte (call/called) and yet others are completely different. Those verb endings are frequently reduced in speech, which makes them sound similar or identical. In the study, children who used more different reduced forms were more likely to use a -ede form for a verb that usually goes with -te.
An adult learning a language is more likely to learn the "proper" form in a controlled environment first and then learn to slur their verb endings later when they reach a level where they can have casual conversations with native speakers. Compare also English "would of" vs. "would've," which native speakers seem to confuse a lot, although they're obviously different to someone who first encountered those words in writing.
Aren't children supposed to be better at learning new languages than adults, though? There's supposed to be a critical period where language acquisition is much easier.
It’s not like they are better it’s just repeating everything a million times and talking the whole day without shame of making a mistake is more fun when you are 6.
The fact that vocabulary of a 6 year old child is much smaller and takes less time to remember of course helps
On the other hand, when you are adult , you can actually understand abstract concepts of grammar. It’s just too boring to repeat everything enough times to train your neural network to get it right without thinking.
What children are actually really good at are sounds of language.
Decades ago when I got a degree in anthropology, we learned about a Native American language that didn't share our concepts of space and time. I don't remember the details except they used the same tense for future and dreams, and distances were always expressed as travel time. (That might not sound all that significant but there was more to it.)
Also they tended not to use nouns. They wouldn't say "lightning flashed," just "flashed."
One of my former employers participated in a goodwill project to help Maasai tribes in Kenya build infrastructure like schools and wells.
The Maasai have/had little concept of travel or time. One of their tribesmen came to visit us in the UK and he told of how difficult it was to explain to his village that he had to be at the airport by a certain time. He had to use childbirth as a metaphor - as in told his villagers that he had to be there in time for the airplane to be born into the sky. Their usual perception of time is just one of "when it happens" (like "cest la vie" but explicitly time)
When do we eat? When we're hungry. When do we tend to the goats? When the goats need tending. Etc.
There are a fair amount of langages which interestingly break western assumptions about langage logic and reasoning.
A pretty famous example is Aboriginal Australian langages where directions are always absolute (cardinal), not relative. So in e.g. Guugu Yimithirr you'd tell a guest that the food is in the living room on the southern table, rather than e.g. the table to the left of the entrance, or the table in front of the balcony.
In at least some of these langages, time is also cardinal: where most western cultures order timelines left to right, Kuuk Thaayorre speakers do so east to west.
IIRC there are also cultures where time goes back to front (because you can see the past so it’s obviously in front of you).
> we learned about a Native American language that didn't share our concepts of space and time.
This is almost certainly Hopi, which has been somewhat controversial ever since Whorf made a bunch of astounding claims about its expression of time. There’s a whole Wikipedia page about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hopi_time_controversy
I'd like to see more of this kind measurement expression in our modern vernaculars.
For example, an acre could be defined as 43560 sq ft, or 4047 meters, or .405 hectares, but these are arbitrary and don't tell me much. A more useful definition of acre is "the amount of land that a pair of oxen can plow in a day". Then, as a farmer, I don't really care how many square feet or square cubits or square whatever it is. I have a domain-specific (farming) definition that actually communicates something more useful to me than arbitrary distance units.
How is such a definition more useful? It's certainly not more useful to me. If someone tried to sell me such a quantity of land, the first thing I'd ask would be what the actual size is in standard units. A universal, precisely defined system of units is superior because it works in any context, you just need to know the system.
Expressing distance by travel time is a similarly stupid concept. I can tell someone something is 15 minutes by car, but here I'm expressing time, not distance. If I tell someone something is 15 meters away I'm expressing distance. The separate concepts of time and distance allow me to precisely express whatever I need to.
It's a tool that can be very helpful for describing the logistics of travel.
Depending on where you are and the context of the conversation, knowing that something is fifteen miles away might tell you shockingly little about the experience of getting there. There are places where that distance in one direction might take hours, but in another direction minutes. As you might imagine, this can be important to know.
> Seems like that language would be incompatible with a modern society and would only really work for a primitive one.
I don’t know, it sounds like the exact opposite to me: I rarely care about the distance itself, and disambiguating would be as simple as pairing travel time and travel mode.
That is already a pretty normal thing to do e.g. “the grocery store is 5mn away”, possibly with the addendum that it’s on foot / by car / by bike if’s not obvious from context.
> I don’t know, it sounds like the exact opposite to me
That's a ridiculous statement.
When you tell someone the grocery store is 5 mn away, you're expressing time, not distance, because you think they're interested in the time, not distance.
Yet you don't convert meters to minutes when you're telling someone how high they should build a wall. And you don't say "drill a hole 1/2000000 minutes by car wide".
That's the point of having a well-organized system of units, you can clearly express whatever you need to, always using the same system, and anyone who knows the system will understand it regardless of context.
Not being able to express distance as a separate concept is clearly inferior, since in our system we can express time, like in your example, but we can also express distance precisely when needed.
Although it's not quite the same, _pro_noun dropping[0] is fairly common in some languages and even happens in English under some circumstances (generally in either very informal or highly technical communications). In contexts where inference is easy there's a certain logic to dropping nonessential fillers.
Ok well whatever the opposite of "modern" is then. A language spoken only by Amazon tribes is not going to contain vocabulary for things related to technological advancement like computers
Have any of you learned any Malay/Indonesian? Fantastically easy. Purely phonetic, simple grammar, not tonal or anything else weird.
I seriously think, as an English speaker, it’s easier to learn than German or French or whatever, even though it has no relationship with European languages (unlike Hindi, which is part of the same Indo-European languages... in spite of the “Indo” prefix, there’s no relation). It helps that there are many loan words from English, but it seriously is an extremely easy to learn trade language.
That’s basically because Standard Indonesian has been artificially Europeanicised, or so I hear:
> In both Malaysia and Indonesia, there is a misguided belief that in order for a language to be able to fulfil the functions of a "national language", it must have a "well-developed" system of grammar. Unfortunately, the only type of grammar that the language planners are usually familiar with is the Eurocentric grammar of European languages.Thus, Standard Malay / Indonesian has had a variety of linguistic features artificially grafted onto it that are reminiscent of European languages, including nominal number marking, verbal active and passive prefixes, and others.
>Malay / Indonesian is one of the world's major languages, with up to two hundred million native speakers. Actually, though, it is not one language, or even two, but a family of languages with about as much internal diversity as the Slavic or Romance language families.
My dad had a gig teaching Indonesian to members of the ADF in the lead up to to their peacekeeping mission in East Timor (INTERFET). Quite logically he taught them Timorese Indonesian, which got him in trouble because they wanted him to teach standard Indonesian.
The history behind the proliferation of Indonesian is wild. As the government developed and Indonesia started to nationalize, choosing a common, sanctioned language was an obvious priority.
And instead of working from the most commonly spoken language/dialect, they chose an obscure language that would offend few.
I suspect one reason Indonesian is often considered the easiest language to learn derived from the fact that it was promptly (and recently) adopted by a diverse group of varying language speakers, and allowed to evolve to suit them all.
When I started learning Chinese the grammar really made think hard about what I needed to say first. Then put it in the right grammar order, then translate the words, which is like a inverted 3D lookup table, sounds/tone/meaning. Memorizing the lookup table which people say is the hard part is actually the easy bit. It’s the restructuring of my thoughts to fit in the grammar. I find English I get you can get away with a lot of thinking while you talk..example; I would generally make up a sentence like this.. “hey why don’t we go for a run, somewhere next Monday maybe around noon, just the two of us. I think there’s a nice track close to my place.” I though of the activity first then the time then the person. Generally that’s how I come up with how to plan activities. In Chinese its subjects, time location, verb. I’m just beginning, but that has been the hardest part for my brain in particular.
I think this is one of those things that teachers tend to make a big deal out of that doesn't matter too much in real life communication.
It's not unusual in Chinese for someone to structure a meandering sentence like "let's go for a run ba, next Monday hao bu hao, around noon we can meet ne, just us two a, there is a nice track, it's my house nearby de yige, what do you think?"
The sentence order is more important when you already have all the information up-front and you are trying to describe it to someone. So if you have three different runs and someone asks "which run?" then you might say "the just us two next Monday at noon my house nearby de track de nage run". Or drop everything but the last de: "us two next Monday at noon my house nearby track de". In reality, that's a bit of a weird thing to ever need to say, you'd probably just say "next Monday at noon de". Or "my house nearby track de". But if you did say "nage track de nage, my house nearby de nage track, next Monday at noon de, just the two of us going ba, nage run, you know ma", you would be understood too.
Personally i think getting the tones right is the most important part of being understood in Chinese. Some Chinese may pretend not to understand you if you get the formal grammar "wrong", but that often comes across to me as a condescending form of ingrained elitism, because it doesn't happen when you talk to working class or poorly-educated Chinese. Much like in English, as long as the general pronunciation (including tones) is recognizable, you should be able to communicate your intent. It won't get you passing grades if you have to write an essay, but if you just want to talk to people on the street, I think focusing on tones and the small sounds that give contextual hints about what you're saying (ma, ne, ba, a/ya, nage/nege, yige, de etc) is a better investment.
> Personally i think getting the tones right is the most important part of being understood in Chinese
yea.
it really doesn't matter where you are from, the UK, the US, Japan, Korea or Hongkong. if you can't get the tones right, you will be misunderstood. If you are of Chinese heritage (like the HKers), you will be viciously mocked.
I am in my third year of Chinese. Ultimately I think it's best to figure out how to say things the Chinese way, and then just say that sentence a thousand times until it starts to feel more natural. If you have to think about it, you're gonna mash it up. That's my experience so far.
I’m about a year in studying Mandarin and feel the same way. All the “exotic” features people say make it hard to learn, like tones and writing characters, aren’t that hard to remember and use. English let’s us have a lot of flexibility when it comes to putting prepositions like “last week” before or after the main clause in a sentence. Maybe Mandarin too has this flexibility and I just haven’t gotten that far in my studies, but it sure feels like I can’t make up what I’m saying as I say it.
Aside from that, I’d say some features of the language are quite nice, and feel like they were created with human experience in mind more than rules of logic. For example, it relies on specialized complements, like 過 guò (past experience), or 完 wán (finished something), to modify the action of a clause. Unlike English which uses the same past-tense grammar to describe that I ate something in the past and a tree fell in the woods. There are even complements to express the result perceiving with ones senses “I looked and saw”, and the result of cognition “I looked and understood.”
ahh! Very cool, thank you. These features at this point seem like something that can be locked into the look up table. Though, the exceptions rule book is getting pretty big. :P I guess that's where it gets complicated. The features approach kind of compliments my programming part of my brain. Which is also juggling between various features of programming languages and packages within those languages. It definitely takes time to lock in the vocab (I spend on average, measured on a weekly basis, between 30 min-1h30min a day learning Chinese). I'm just 7 months in my Chinese learning experience. In general, I continuously discover more and more depth. What's the amount of time you go back and redo some the earlier stuff you learn?
Sounds like you’ve got the commitment to learn it. Are you self-studying, in class, studying in your home country or in a Chinese-speaking country?
I spend 3 hours per day in class, 5 days a week. We learn about 10 new words and about 2-3 new grammatical structures per day. Outside of class it takes me about 5 hours per day to complete homework assignments and memorize vocab (including writing traditional characters). It’s very brisk and I am barely able to keep up. Every day I feel like I am in a pressure cooker.
Since my homework includes a lot of writing, I tend to peek back at previous chapters and continue to fold old grammar and vocab into my writing. Since I live in Taiwan I have plenty of opportunities to practice. I make it a point to try to put new grammar and words to use immediately while texting or talking with friends. Anytime I’m riding the metro or standing in line or something, I am always practicing flash cards in Pleco. I feel like occasional review wouldn’t be enough for me, I actually have to put it to use to absorb it.
Since I feel like my head is constantly just beneath the water in a perpetual state of drowning, I don’t know if I’m in a position to offer advice, but if I’m offering advice I’d say forget the lookup table. Exceptions abound, and when you start getting into complements and directional phrases and stuff it’s just too much. It’s like trying to memorize the rules for the order of adjectives in English. It’s easier to just practice usage and know when it sounds “off.” Try to find people to practice talking with.
I'm committed because I'm part of a Chinese family and don't speak it myself.
This sounds like a quite a lot of pressure, but that time invested will pay off in the long run, you will quickly master the words and sentences. Learning is a decade long process for me. I've set specific goals for my learning. Initially, I want to tell what I(or we) did during the day, what I saw and if it was good or not. That's my 1 year plan.
My 2-5 year plan is being able to have casual conversations and talk about fun/enjoyable things. Then after 5 years I'd like to be able to express what is important to me in raising a child and why certain actions/inaction is important is instilling certain values I hold dear. After 10 years, I'd like to find the art in the language and understand deeper meanings.
I think my goals are achievable, and the timeframe is as well. Chinese is not something I will earn my living with so its fun. I do take classes but only once a week, for about 30 weeks a year.
Thanks for your advise. I think practice is the most important part. I speak with my family once a week and my SO daily. I'm lucky to have conversational native speaking partner that also speaks English (both our second language).
It depends where you are, I guess. What you say is perhaps more true in the Netherlands, my experience in Belgium (particularly Flanders, where I live) has been different. People seem to appreciate my efforts and forgive my mistakes. Granted, this is only possible after you've gained a certain competency level where you don't make your interlocutor impatient, or they notice you making too much effort. And you only have three seconds to make that first impression. ;-)
I've taken two years of night classes, and gained a so-called 'C1' competency[1], but in practice I'm a moderate 'B2'. I strongly recommend taking long-term formal classes; makes life so much more pleasant. FWIW, I try to keep my Dutch relatively sharp by listening to the radio, reading the local newspaper, and importantly talking only in Dutch with some of my local friends, and in everyday interactions with the society.
An interesting (but more effortful) method to improve Dutch is: if you've read and enjoyed a book in English, read its equivalent Dutch translation, while having the English copy nearby.
A shout out to Sanskrit (for European learners at least) - its trick is to be complex on a number of orthogonal axes, with few obvious shortcuts for the learner:
- Writing system (devanagari) - conjunct consonants will keep tripping you up long after you've mastered the basics;
- Vocabulary - the hope of familiarity due to a common Indo-European vocabulary quickly dissipates;
- Noun morphology - approx twice as many forms per paradigm to learn compared to classical Greek, and many more paradigms;
- Sandhi - a difficulty so disruptive that it is often ignored initially, and the GCSE exam has a non-sandhi section, but must be mastered in order to read original texts
I broadly like the idea of "slicing up reality differently". Usually when this it comes up the focus is on grammar, but I think this explains the relative ease/difficulty of learning close/distant languages quite well. You can argue about whether grammar or vocabulary acquisition is more difficult but it's certainly true that there's just more of the latter.
One way I look at this to pick a word with many quite different meanings. "Set" can mean a group of things or something to turn hard (like a jelly) along with plenty of other things. Since European languages tend to share ancestors you aren't surprised that these multiple distinct meanings are shared. But with distance languages you have to learn a completely different word for each particular meaning. In fact, I'm sometimes surprised when two different meanings line up between English and Japanese, as I'm so used to them being completely separate.
I'm no expert but I find the hypothesis that all languages are basically a wash in terms of complexity... unconvincing. Some examples:
1. Separable verbs in German. My favourite example is "Ich bringe meine Frau (um)". "Umbringen" means "to kill". "Bringen" means, well, "to bring". So you can't start translating German to English until you hear the whole sentence a lot of the time. I believe this has a name in linguistics. Front loading of information? Something like that?
2. Word order. Again in German, "Ich habe meine Frau gebraucht" (I brought my wife). You don't know the verb until the end. For reference, the kill version is the fairly sane "umgebraucht".
3. Many Indo-European languages have strict requirements where words have to agree in case, gender, number and even article (eg in German this changes based on the definite vs the indefinite article). I have trouble believing this doesn't have a cognitive load. This does allow shortcuts. For example, it seems like it's common to omit the subject pronoun because when it's obvious from the verb conjugation.
3. Writing system. Asian languages are the poster children for complex writing systems that often don't delineate word boundaries and may have thousands of characters. I think I read once that in Taiwan in high school they have competitions for how quickly you can find a word in a dictionary. Oh and don't tonal Asian languages also not reflect that tone in the written form (genuine question)? Semitic languages are a milder version of this where vowels are typically omitted.
4. Suffixes to change word meaning also mean you need to keep that word in mind until you hear the end of it. Word order just seems so much more predictable but that could definitely be native English bias.
I find it fascinating that through a variety of means a lot of this linguistic cruft disappeared between Old English and Middle English.
English really is the red-headed stepchild of languages. In my experience, no one is the least bit concerned loan words in English whereas in French there's a Ministry dedicated to coming up with French words for foreign concepts to keep French "French".
This is why I find the hypothesis that languages constrain cultures so interesting. If your mindset has shifted to preserving your language (in essence, to resist change), how can that not impact your culture?
> 2. Word order. Again in German, "Ich habe meine Frau gebraucht" (I brought my wife). You don't know the verb until the end. For reference, the kill version is the fairly sane "umgebraucht".
"Ich habe meine Frau gebraucht" -> "I have needed my wife".
brauchen -> to need
bringen -> to bring; Partizip II: gebracht
umbringen -> to kill; Partzip II: umgebracht
There is no word "umbrauchen", of which the fictional Partizip II would be "umgebraucht".
>I have trouble believing this doesn't have a cognitive load
It doesn’t for a native speaker, that’s the biggest magic. Same way English has a specific order in which adjectives have to be added, but you don’t stop and think which one of them is first.
> Oh and don't tonal Asian languages also not reflect that tone in the written form (genuine question)? Semitic languages are a milder version of this where vowels are typically omitted.
English also does not indicate pronunciation in the written form, and even more phonetic languages like German and Russian do not indicate stress (like замок (stress on a) = castle/замок (stress on o) = (e.g. door) lock).
> 1. Separable verbs in German. My favourite example is "Ich bringe meine Frau (um)". "Umbringen" means "to kill". "Bringen" means, well, "to bring". So you can't start translating German to English until you hear the whole sentence a lot of the time. I believe this has a name in linguistics. Front loading of information? Something like that?
Well, but you can often translate incomplete German sentences to another SOV language easily.
> 2. Word order. Again in German, "Ich habe meine Frau gebraucht" (I brought my wife). You don't know the verb until the end. For reference, the kill version is the fairly sane "umgebraucht".
Well, it's just a different mental model of incomplete sentences / information. With SOV word order you just infer that the S and O have a relationship and make the nature of the relationship more precise after.
> 3. Many Indo-European languages have strict requirements where words have to agree in case, gender, number and even article (eg in German this changes based on the definite vs the indefinite article). I have trouble believing this doesn't have a cognitive load. This does allow shortcuts. For example, it seems like it's common to omit the subject pronoun because when it's obvious from the verb conjugation.
As you mention, what complex morphology gives can allow someone to waive finding a precise word in a language without that morphology. It's not like these distinctions don't add information on their own, however arbitrary they are.
> 3. Writing system.
I agree that Chinese character-based scripts cognitively heavy, but this is a characteristic of the script, not the language.
> 4. Suffixes to change word meaning also mean you need to keep that word in mind until you hear the end of it. Word order just seems so much more predictable but that could definitely be native English bias.
write vs. writing, writer, rightly, etc.
turn up, turnaround, turner, etc.
There's more nuance to what where these counterpoints are coming from, but I think I've given some food for thought. The points you mention look to me very typical of someone learning a more inflected language.
But consider also the flipside of learning Classical Chinese, which fails to make many distinctions that many languages make. You might, say, struggle with the ambiguity: is the action meant to be in the present, past or future? But perhaps that is not important with respect to the passage (and the language has tools to signify it where important). And consider also that in languages like English where tense needs to be signified, in narrative contexts where tense is not important, we conventionally use the past, but may use the present (historic present) for stylistic effect.
Note on Classical Chinese: of course, it survives only in writing, and beyond Old Chinese it is a separate language from the vernacular, and it is not very friendly to being spoken in the pronunciation of in the modern Chinese languages. But books like the Mencius were dialogues that presumably recorded Old Chinese.
Most languages also have examples of single words that convey concepts requiring many words to express in English. Always fun to discover these gems. Here's one that I learned yesterday in Visayan: "Manginhas ta". This means "Let's go the beach at low tide and turn over stones and collect small shrimp and other edibles."
Less descriptive, but I would think "Let's forage for food at low tide" would convey much the same meaning more succinctly. Still cool, thanks for sharing!
The article states that the hardest thing to learn in a language are structural distinctions which one's native language does not make. Does anyone here have experience of such features that English has, coming from a different language?
Articles, as in "a" and "the". Slavic languages don't have them, and we Russians can never learn to use them properly. Alas. Some languages don't mandate always keeping track of whether something is "an object" or "the object", can you imagine?
> In the end, the “hard” languages to learn are not those that do what your own language does in a new way. They are the ones that make you constantly pay attention to distinctions in the world that yours blithely passes over.
A couple of things that required a mini lobotomy for me while learning Dutch (the Belgian variant, Flemish) as my fourth language. As a Germanic language, many rules that apply to German also apply to Dutch. As I continue to learn many of these, I now feel like a "novice insider". I still continue to struggle after six years of being immersed in the language, and the struggle is great fun, as it forcefully rewires my brain in interesting ways.
• Verb comes at the end ... except when not. A dead-simple example: the phrase "because it is difficult" is translated as omdat het moelijk is. The verb is is here. And omdat means "because" and it has a synonym called want (yes, it's a Dutch word). However, the-verb-comes-at-the-end rule doesn't apply to want, so the same Dutch phrase with want becomes: want het is moelijk (here, the verb sits in the 'normal' position). This subject/verb order can get really complex.
• Split verbs. The verb "invite" (uitnodig[en]) in the sentence "I invite you all" gets split in two: "in" and "vite"; and the first part goes to the end of the sentence: "I vite you all in" The sentence in Dutch reads: Ik nodig jullie allemaal uit (notice the verb split: nodig ... uit).
My frustration here is hilariously expressed by Mark Twain in his essay[1] on German. NOTE! — Before you take offence at the title[1], Mark Twain was an accomplished German speaker, he wrote this in a fun spirit!
"The Germans have another kind of parenthesis, which they make by splitting a verb in two and putting half of it at the beginning of an exciting chapter and the OTHER HALF at the end of it. Can any one conceive of anything more confusing than that? These things are called "separable verbs." The German grammar is blistered all over with separable verbs; and the wider the two portions of one of them are spread apart, the better the author of the crime is pleased with his performance [...]"
• • •
And there are many other subtleties like "inversion", and usage of grammatical articles ("de" vs. "het") is arbitrary enough that there's an entire website[2] that helps you learn which article to use when.
Not sure if you know this, but both of the examples you mention are the same in German: "..., weil es schwierig ist" and "..., denn es ist schwierig" both mean "... because it's difficult", but "weil" and "denn" have different requirements for where the verb goes. And "ich lade euch ein" is also a mandatory splitting of "einladen", "to invite".
* Conjugated adjectives, as in Japanese. To say "it was delicious", you need to say "it is delicious-ed" (oishikatta desu).
* Agglutinative languages, like Finnish or Hungarian, where word order is largely irrelevant and conjugations, not word order, determine meaning.
* Topic/subject languages, like Japanese, where previously defined context can radically alter meaning. "Watashi wa hamburger desu" can mean "I'm a hamburger", "I'll have a hamburger", "If you ask me, it's a hamburger", etc.
* Grammatical gender, as in a whole lot of European languages.
* Tones, as in Chinese, Vietnamese, etc.
Here's a fun survey of the "weirdest languages", defines as those that exhibit the most features from the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS):
https://corplinguistics.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/the-weirdes...