4 ms·
A few interesting language-related points: Sanskrit and Hindi have no equivalent of the English word "the" (and, I think, of "a" either). Sanskrit and Hindi
by vram22 6y ago
A few interesting language-related points:
Sanskrit and Hindi have no equivalent of the English word "the" (and, I think, of "a" either).
Sanskrit and Hindi have no concept of upper case vs. lower case letters, just a concept of letters.
Also, a vertical bar is the equivalent of the period or full stop of English.
Just realized (IIRC) that neither language has the concept of single or double quotation marks either :)
- oytis 6y agoLatin also has no articles, neither definite or indefinite, they were later derived from personal pronouns in Romance languages. Same for lower/upper case and punctuation marks, it's all (relatively) late invention - after the Classical period at least.
- dodobirdlord 6y agoIn the Classical period Latin was so punctuation-free that words weren't even separated by spaces.
- tom_mellior 6y agoWeren't center dots common as word separators instead of spaces? For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome#/media/File:20190406-DSC5193_Panteon.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome#/media/File:201...
- dodobirdlord 6y agoRomans initially used center dots in early Roman history, but transitioned to continuous script for several centuries following exposure to Greek writing that used continuous script, before eventually transitioning to separating words with empty space. Use of the center dot seems to have persisted on monuments after it ceased to be used in ordinary writing. The lack of spacing also led to an interesting phenomenon where most (perhaps nearly all) Romans could not read silently, and had to process written text by reading it aloud to themselves. There are some recorded instances of figures from Greek and Roman antiquity reading silently, but it’s generally remarked on as being surprising to those around them, and attributed to individuals that are otherwise attested to have been exceptionally intelligent (Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Saint Ambrose).
- tom_mellior 6y agoFascinating, thanks!
- vram22 6y agoWow, I had no idea of this. Interesting. My guess is that these points in common between Sanskrit, Hindi and Latin may be because of the PIE (Proto-Indo-European) ancestry of all three of them (and other European and Indian languages too). There are many other points in common, such as similar-sounding everyday words like mother/ mata/mater, father/pitr/pita/pater, deci/dasha, brother/bhrata, deva/deus, and many more, although all may not have been derived through the common ancestry route; some can be loanwords or other,e.g. via Hindi -> Arabic -> European.
- euroderf 6y agoFinnish and Estonian also lack definite and indefinite articles (i.e. "the", "a"). Some of the work of articles is done by the use of the partitive. But in general, it's gonna take a new learner a while to get the hang of it.