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I hadn't heard these before and I find that even less exotic languages change they way you think about things. I didn't understand grammar like indirect objects
by frakt0x90 6y ago
I hadn't heard these before and I find that even less exotic languages change they way you think about things. I didn't understand grammar like indirect objects until I studied Spanish. In Vietnamese, every word is a single syllable and you chain them together to make more complex descriptors. They also have no tense. So to say "I went to the store yesterday", you say "I go store yesterday" The form of go does not change depending on the time period. Languages are so cool and if I could make as good a living just studying them I would.
- blacksmith_tb 6y agoI remember (vaguely) my year of Mandarin as an undergrad was similar - though to be fair English is also capable of a lot of word-order tricks for a Subject-Verb-Object language, we don't have any trouble with "I went to the store yesterday" vs. "Yesterday I went to the store" or even "I went, yesterday, to the store".
- chris_st 6y agoQuite agree -- I really enjoyed my linguistics classes in college, and if I hadn't discovered programming, might have become a linguist.
- yorwba 6y ago> In Vietnamese, every word is a single syllable Would you consider "sân bay" to be two words but "airport" to be one? If so, then that's just an artifact of the writing system. After all, it could just be "sânbay" and "air port". There are no spaces in speech.
- knolax 6y agoYes but what he's really talking about are morphemes. English has many multisyllabic morphemes where as Vietnamese has few.