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This is true of the whole Sotho-Tswana branch of languages. They mention it for Tswana, albeit briefly. It is also one of the reasons why English is taking ove

This is true of the whole Sotho-Tswana branch of languages. They mention it for Tswana, albeit briefly. It is also one of the reasons why English is taking over (and in less serious cases, borrowed from). English is fully developed for social, scientific, technical, complex, specialised and precise communication to an extent rivaled maybe by only a dozen other languages. On the Northern Sotho radio stations you often hear kids say, when asked about colours, "Ke ye blue" ("It is blue"). The radio presenter would sometimes correct the kid and say "Aowa, ka Sesotho re re ke ye tala." However, there is something deeper at play and something perhaps unassuming yet complex: the kid is more accurate. The value of languages like these is not the ability to convey or store technical or scientific information. But if a language disappears is like losing in one shot the whole of Beethoven's work (and a bit more than that). Sotho may have less colour words (yellow=brown too) and also it doesn't have delimiters in the sense of "far, further, furthest" (having only "far", "further", and then emphasis) but it has... verb modifiers! For example: use = to cause to work. Repair = to cause to be good. Understand = to cause to hear. Wow, am I telling you that verbs convey and encode causality in these languages? Yup, that's right.

ak39 7y ago
Thank you, this was a lovely explanation.
rvense 7y ago
> It is also one of the reasons why English is taking over (and in less serious cases, borrowed from). English is fully developed for social, scientific, technical, complex, specialised and precise communication to an extent rivaled maybe by only a dozen other languages. I don't think this would be accepted by very many linguists. Complexity and precision is a function of vocabulary, and vocabularies are easily transferred, as your own example shows. English often proves itself deficient when it is taken over by new peoples. Especially for describing the social realities of the non-English speaking world - but of course, non-native speakers will patch up these deficiencies. Finally, I am very sure that no linguist would agree that English is taking over the world because of this or that aspect of its vocabulary or the (supposed) simplicity its grammar. It is doing so because it is useful and has a high status due to social and political factors.
- mikorym 7y ago
  English is deficient in context, absolutely. But the advantages of English is in a "modern" society, whatever that may be. There are deficiencies in these languages even that are not just about vocabulary. Things like "I have never" or "I would never" are a strange example. In the dialect where I come from, you say in Sotho: "Ga ke tsebe ka ya kua." This means: "I don't know about going there." But contextually it means that you have never been there. I am not saying you can't write a scientific paper in these languages at all, but I am saying that you need to standardise the languages better before you can do that. At the present state of things, esssentially, you can't write scientific papers. By the way, Afrikaans was wittingly and deliberately developed into a scientific language. It did have a significant head start though, having been mostly derived from Dutch. An example of superiority of Sotho is in idiomatic language. There are running metaphors that don't even come close in English. It kind of makes sense, because if you think about it, precision of meaning trades off idiomatic richness. There was a funny meme that essentially illustrated how different Sotho grammar can be, and how your figurative use of language can essentially hide meaning through ambiguity. [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCU2Uh42qS4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCU2Uh42qS4. Explanation: She is actually just saying that she stole her mom's money that should have been used to make pots with for people that had paid. Literally: "I did the thing that made that the pots couldn't be made."
  - yorwba 7y ago
    > I am not saying you can't write a scientific paper in these languages at all, but I am saying that you need to standardise the languages better before you can do that. The way to make a language fit for writing a scientific paper in it is to write a scientific paper in it, and whenever you're at a loss for words, either make them up as you go along or take them from another language. The latter option is usually chosen by people already fluent in that language, which is how English scientific vocabulary got its multiple layers of Arabic, Greek and Latin loan words. However, loanwords can render the underlying logic incomprehensible. For example, I recently watched the Japanese series アンナチュラル annachuraru (Unnatural [Death]) on a Chinese streaming platform (because that one didn't have region locking blocking European IP addresses). When the word エチレングリコール echirengurikōru (ethylene glycol/ethane diol) came up, obviously someone had to ask to repeat it, because it's such a long and complicated foreign word. The Chinese commenters reading the subtitles were very amused by that, because the Chinese translation is 乙二醇 yĭ èr chún and has a systematic composition: 乙 yĭ is used like the Roman numeral Ⅱ or the Latin letter B in enumerations and indicates here an organic molecule with two carbon atoms. 二 èr is the number two. 醇 chún indicates alcohol. Essentially a mirror image of "ethane diol" that even someone without much knowledge about chemistry can understand.
Juliate 7y ago
It's not due to English own linguistic merits in itself - and it borrowed/borrows from other languages as well. English has taken over because, in our local history so far, because it's been the official language of the last two main world military (hence cultural & business) powers: UK for 19th century, US for 20th century - boosted by WW I & II & furthering globalization. It's been also shaped by this globalization worldwide. In 1, or 2 centuries, it very well may be that another language will have taken over. https://blog.esl-languages.com/blog/learn-languages/english-language-global-number-one/ https://blog.esl-languages.com/blog/learn-languages/english-...
- henrikschroder 7y ago
  > It's not due to English own linguistic merits in itself Well, English is a pretty simple language, grammatically. Compared to its Germanic neighbours, it doesn't have gendered nouns, it doesn't have the funky word order of German, nor the funky word order of the V2 Scandinavian languages. It has fewer letters in its alphabet, and it has fewer phonemes. It does have a very large vocabulary, mostly due to the French influence, and it's in dire need of a spelling reform to fix all the accumulated crap, but those are hurdles for writing English or mastering English. When it comes to speaking simple English, the bar is lower than what is required for speaking simple German, or simple Norwegian, for example. It's also pretty forgiving when it comes to word order, which means understanding bad English is also easier. So I think there's some sort of lowest common denominator merit to it that made it easier for it to take over.
  - Juliate 7y ago
    That's seen through your own lens. Just compare the delicacies of the differences between British English & American English, if not only for the different understated meanings. The "funky word order" of German makes sense from a German perspective (and back to ancient Latin & Greek). Mandarin is not simple, comparatively to English. Yet, you can be quite assured that, would China, for instance, get the military & cultural influence UK/US had for 2 centuries, by 2200 they wouldn't have spread something else than a globalized Mandarin worldwide (as it happened for English; and French and Spanish before them).
thaumasiotes 7y ago
> it has... verb modifiers! > For example: use = to cause to work. Repair = to cause to be good. Understand = to cause to hear. > Wow, am I telling you that verbs convey and encode causality in these languages? Yup, that's right. This isn't really a feature of modern English, but it certainly isn't something exotic. It was a feature of earlier English, and the effects of that are still obvious today. For example: raise = cause to rise. Fell = cause to fall. Lay = cause to lie. Drench = cause to drink. (Causative verbs are alive and well in modern English, but they are more likely to be zero-derived than to use a separate overt grammatical form.)
- yorwba 7y ago
  That earlier form of English was Proto-Germanic, where the grammatical regularity of causative verbs in Proto-Indo-European was still recognizable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causative#Proto-Germanic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causative#Proto-Germanic
- mikorym 7y ago
  What is the furthest that the modified verb can be from the original verb? In Northern Sotho it gets pretty far: nyaka = want nyakišiša = investigate
throw0101a 7y ago
> It is also one of the reasons why English is taking over ... There are various reasons why a language may become a lingua franca (LF). If anyone wants to more about the history and process of this, I recommend The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel by Nicholas Ostle: * https://www.amazon.com/Last-Lingua-Franca-English-Return/dp/0802717713 https://www.amazon.com/Last-Lingua-Franca-English-Return/dp/... * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8366156-the-last-lingua-franca https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8366156-the-last-lingua-... * https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/dec/04/last-lingua-franca-ostler-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/dec/04/last-lingua-fr... He goes over past LFs like Persian, Aramaic, Ancient/Koine Greek, and how they waxed and waned over the centuries, and what may happen to English in the future.
jhanschoo 7y ago
Ah, and before English today, the educated said that French was the most precise language, and before that, Latin. I agree that English vocabulary is very well-developed for concepts in the modern world, but I hope that readers will recognize that it is not this way because of some essential superiority of the language, but because many people are using it for precise communication. Imagine for example that the entire population speaking English were to die off but for a few rednecks who don't understand much of the world, and you will find that English as is spoken by them is too imprecise to apprehend most things. Or when a casual conversation steered into specialist territory, and those of a different profession felt like the conversation was Greek to their ears. English speakers would need to be trained in your profession's jargon and idioms to be able to understand what is being discussed. Here the value of English is that there is already a community of people who understand this idiom, whereas to discuss the same matter in another language would require fixing jargon and idioms that nobody is already conversant in. That is, it is the existing communities of speakers that understand specialized English that makes it developed for precise communication in a variety of advanced topics, and not some essential superiority of English in terms of how it interacts with each individual's minds that other languages cannot potentially achieve.
- mikorym 7y ago
  > [English is] not this way because of some essential superiority of the language This is an important point to me and something often misunderstood, even (and especially) by mother tongue Northern Sotho speakers. Perceived superiority is sometimes mere utility. As far as I know, the spelling of Northern Sotho is derived from German missionaries (though perhaps also influenced by Dutch). This has caused Northern Sotho to be incompatible with English spelling. A prudent 7-year-old Mosotho would use this as an argument to rather learn English spelling, but also to make the mistake of discounting their language based on what is essentially just an unfortunate historical choice of orthography. Contrast this with Shona, which uses English-derived spelling. The Shona people generally have impressive skills in English spelling and eloquence in the use of English. (Though this is also due to Zimbabwe being influenced more by the British than anyone else.) I think we need to admit that language itself is something that a young learner sees through the lens of utility and that superiority as a social concept would always be grossly subjective. It is funny how "supremacists" often prosecute the most competent people in their own culture (due to their competent brethren being mostly nosy and challenging towards the supremacists).

ak39 7y ago

Thank you, this was a lovely explanation.

rvense 7y ago

> It is also one of the reasons why English is taking over (and in less serious cases, borrowed from). English is fully developed for social, scientific, technical, complex, specialised and precise communication to an extent rivaled maybe by only a dozen other languages. I don't think this would be accepted by very many linguists. Complexity and precision is a function of vocabulary, and vocabularies are easily transferred, as your own example shows. English often proves itself deficient when it is taken over by new peoples. Especially for describing the social realities of the non-English speaking world - but of course, non-native speakers will patch up these deficiencies. Finally, I am very sure that no linguist would agree that English is taking over the world because of this or that aspect of its vocabulary or the (supposed) simplicity its grammar. It is doing so because it is useful and has a high status due to social and political factors.

mikorym 7y ago
English is deficient in context, absolutely. But the advantages of English is in a "modern" society, whatever that may be. There are deficiencies in these languages even that are not just about vocabulary. Things like "I have never" or "I would never" are a strange example. In the dialect where I come from, you say in Sotho: "Ga ke tsebe ka ya kua." This means: "I don't know about going there." But contextually it means that you have never been there. I am not saying you can't write a scientific paper in these languages at all, but I am saying that you need to standardise the languages better before you can do that. At the present state of things, esssentially, you can't write scientific papers. By the way, Afrikaans was wittingly and deliberately developed into a scientific language. It did have a significant head start though, having been mostly derived from Dutch. An example of superiority of Sotho is in idiomatic language. There are running metaphors that don't even come close in English. It kind of makes sense, because if you think about it, precision of meaning trades off idiomatic richness. There was a funny meme that essentially illustrated how different Sotho grammar can be, and how your figurative use of language can essentially hide meaning through ambiguity. [1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCU2Uh42qS4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCU2Uh42qS4. Explanation: She is actually just saying that she stole her mom's money that should have been used to make pots with for people that had paid. Literally: "I did the thing that made that the pots couldn't be made."
- yorwba 7y ago
  > I am not saying you can't write a scientific paper in these languages at all, but I am saying that you need to standardise the languages better before you can do that. The way to make a language fit for writing a scientific paper in it is to write a scientific paper in it, and whenever you're at a loss for words, either make them up as you go along or take them from another language. The latter option is usually chosen by people already fluent in that language, which is how English scientific vocabulary got its multiple layers of Arabic, Greek and Latin loan words. However, loanwords can render the underlying logic incomprehensible. For example, I recently watched the Japanese series アンナチュラル annachuraru (Unnatural [Death]) on a Chinese streaming platform (because that one didn't have region locking blocking European IP addresses). When the word エチレングリコール echirengurikōru (ethylene glycol/ethane diol) came up, obviously someone had to ask to repeat it, because it's such a long and complicated foreign word. The Chinese commenters reading the subtitles were very amused by that, because the Chinese translation is 乙二醇 yĭ èr chún and has a systematic composition: 乙 yĭ is used like the Roman numeral Ⅱ or the Latin letter B in enumerations and indicates here an organic molecule with two carbon atoms. 二 èr is the number two. 醇 chún indicates alcohol. Essentially a mirror image of "ethane diol" that even someone without much knowledge about chemistry can understand.

Juliate 7y ago

It's not due to English own linguistic merits in itself - and it borrowed/borrows from other languages as well. English has taken over because, in our local history so far, because it's been the official language of the last two main world military (hence cultural & business) powers: UK for 19th century, US for 20th century - boosted by WW I & II & furthering globalization. It's been also shaped by this globalization worldwide. In 1, or 2 centuries, it very well may be that another language will have taken over. https://blog.esl-languages.com/blog/learn-languages/english-language-global-number-one/ https://blog.esl-languages.com/blog/learn-languages/english-...

henrikschroder 7y ago
> It's not due to English own linguistic merits in itself Well, English is a pretty simple language, grammatically. Compared to its Germanic neighbours, it doesn't have gendered nouns, it doesn't have the funky word order of German, nor the funky word order of the V2 Scandinavian languages. It has fewer letters in its alphabet, and it has fewer phonemes. It does have a very large vocabulary, mostly due to the French influence, and it's in dire need of a spelling reform to fix all the accumulated crap, but those are hurdles for writing English or mastering English. When it comes to speaking simple English, the bar is lower than what is required for speaking simple German, or simple Norwegian, for example. It's also pretty forgiving when it comes to word order, which means understanding bad English is also easier. So I think there's some sort of lowest common denominator merit to it that made it easier for it to take over.
- Juliate 7y ago
  That's seen through your own lens. Just compare the delicacies of the differences between British English & American English, if not only for the different understated meanings. The "funky word order" of German makes sense from a German perspective (and back to ancient Latin & Greek). Mandarin is not simple, comparatively to English. Yet, you can be quite assured that, would China, for instance, get the military & cultural influence UK/US had for 2 centuries, by 2200 they wouldn't have spread something else than a globalized Mandarin worldwide (as it happened for English; and French and Spanish before them).

thaumasiotes 7y ago

> it has... verb modifiers! > For example: use = to cause to work. Repair = to cause to be good. Understand = to cause to hear. > Wow, am I telling you that verbs convey and encode causality in these languages? Yup, that's right. This isn't really a feature of modern English, but it certainly isn't something exotic. It was a feature of earlier English, and the effects of that are still obvious today. For example: raise = cause to rise. Fell = cause to fall. Lay = cause to lie. Drench = cause to drink. (Causative verbs are alive and well in modern English, but they are more likely to be zero-derived than to use a separate overt grammatical form.)

yorwba 7y ago
That earlier form of English was Proto-Germanic, where the grammatical regularity of causative verbs in Proto-Indo-European was still recognizable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causative#Proto-Germanic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causative#Proto-Germanic
mikorym 7y ago
What is the furthest that the modified verb can be from the original verb? In Northern Sotho it gets pretty far: nyaka = want nyakišiša = investigate

throw0101a 7y ago

> It is also one of the reasons why English is taking over ... There are various reasons why a language may become a lingua franca (LF). If anyone wants to more about the history and process of this, I recommend The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel by Nicholas Ostle: * https://www.amazon.com/Last-Lingua-Franca-English-Return/dp/0802717713 https://www.amazon.com/Last-Lingua-Franca-English-Return/dp/... * https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8366156-the-last-lingua-franca https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8366156-the-last-lingua-... * https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/dec/04/last-lingua-franca-ostler-review https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/dec/04/last-lingua-fr... He goes over past LFs like Persian, Aramaic, Ancient/Koine Greek, and how they waxed and waned over the centuries, and what may happen to English in the future.

jhanschoo 7y ago

Ah, and before English today, the educated said that French was the most precise language, and before that, Latin. I agree that English vocabulary is very well-developed for concepts in the modern world, but I hope that readers will recognize that it is not this way because of some essential superiority of the language, but because many people are using it for precise communication. Imagine for example that the entire population speaking English were to die off but for a few rednecks who don't understand much of the world, and you will find that English as is spoken by them is too imprecise to apprehend most things. Or when a casual conversation steered into specialist territory, and those of a different profession felt like the conversation was Greek to their ears. English speakers would need to be trained in your profession's jargon and idioms to be able to understand what is being discussed. Here the value of English is that there is already a community of people who understand this idiom, whereas to discuss the same matter in another language would require fixing jargon and idioms that nobody is already conversant in. That is, it is the existing communities of speakers that understand specialized English that makes it developed for precise communication in a variety of advanced topics, and not some essential superiority of English in terms of how it interacts with each individual's minds that other languages cannot potentially achieve.

mikorym 7y ago
> [English is] not this way because of some essential superiority of the language This is an important point to me and something often misunderstood, even (and especially) by mother tongue Northern Sotho speakers. Perceived superiority is sometimes mere utility. As far as I know, the spelling of Northern Sotho is derived from German missionaries (though perhaps also influenced by Dutch). This has caused Northern Sotho to be incompatible with English spelling. A prudent 7-year-old Mosotho would use this as an argument to rather learn English spelling, but also to make the mistake of discounting their language based on what is essentially just an unfortunate historical choice of orthography. Contrast this with Shona, which uses English-derived spelling. The Shona people generally have impressive skills in English spelling and eloquence in the use of English. (Though this is also due to Zimbabwe being influenced more by the British than anyone else.) I think we need to admit that language itself is something that a young learner sees through the lens of utility and that superiority as a social concept would always be grossly subjective. It is funny how "supremacists" often prosecute the most competent people in their own culture (due to their competent brethren being mostly nosy and challenging towards the supremacists).