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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 delic

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): https://corplinguistics.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/the-weirdest-languages/ https://corplinguistics.wordpress.com/2013/06/21/the-weirdes...

hprotagonist 5y ago
> Grammatical gender, as in a whole lot of European languages “In german, a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has.” Imagine if Twain knew about some of the several-hundred-gender languages…
- MauranKilom 5y ago
  young lady = (das) Mädchen turnip = (die) Rübe (for those wondering)
  - ben_w 5y ago
    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”.
  - liversage 5y ago
    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.
  - q-big 5y ago
    Native German speaker: 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).
    - hprotagonist 5y ago
      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.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > 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.
      - CRConrad 5y ago
        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.
        pseudalopex 5y ago
        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.
  - StavrosK 5y ago
    But it does have a gender, the neuter gender.
- 1cvmask 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Awful_German_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Awful_German_Language 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.
- bradrn 5y ago
  > several-hundred-gender languages 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!
  - hprotagonist 5y ago
    “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. https://medium.economist.com/we-went-in-search-of-the-worlds-hardest-language-95a27c2cff3 https://medium.economist.com/we-went-in-search-of-the-worlds...
    - tom_mellior 5y ago
      > 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_classifiers_versus_noun_classes 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_grammatical_genders 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.)
      - bradrn 5y ago
        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.)
tjpnz 5y ago
>* 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".
- lhorie 5y ago
  "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")
  - schoen 5y ago
    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).
  - glandium 5y ago
    Same in French and Spanish. It's probably similar in all Romance languages.
    - mattkrause 5y ago
      Wait really? 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.
      - glandium 5y ago
        Translating the GP example literally in French: Je suis en bonne santé vs. J'ai une bonne santé. Funnily enough, Google Translate gives the former for both portuguese versions. I guess it is still translating through English.
lhorie 5y ago
> 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.
- greggman3 5y ago
  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.
  - lhorie 5y ago
    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.
corey_moncure 5y ago
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.
- laurieg 5y ago
  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.
usrusr 5y ago
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.
yosito 5y ago
> 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!"
- Wowfunhappy 5y ago
  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!
  - tom_mellior 5y ago
kiscica 5y ago
>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.
- bradrn 5y ago
  > 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.
  - Tainnor 5y ago
    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.
dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago
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.
- Clewza313 5y ago
  "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.
hassancf 5y ago
“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. Reference: theme and rheme in Japanese.
- Tainnor 5y ago
  > the “wa” particule (actually “ha”) phonetically, it's "wa". The fact that it's written with the kana for "ha" is just a weird quirk of the writing system.
dheera 5y ago
The reverse is true as well, i.e. English has plenty of things that are alien to other languages. Conjugating verbs, inflection, capitalization, and plural forms of nouns are alien to at least Chinese and probably many other Sino-Tibetan languages. The lack of phoenetic/spelling consistency is alien to many European languages, especially Spanish, which is remarkably consistent.
- jwhitlark 5y ago
  IIRC English was phonetic/spelled consistently before the great vowel shift. The spelling solidified but pronunciation continued to change.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    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.
    - dodobirdlord 5y ago
      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.
      - rsj_hn 5y ago
        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.
SavantIdiot 5y ago
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).
- Cerium 5y ago
  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.
- thealig 5y ago
  Hindi has got the "pipe" to end a sentence, and spaces between words. eg. मैं पहले उससे नहीं मिला था | (I have not met him before).

hprotagonist 5y ago

> Grammatical gender, as in a whole lot of European languages “In german, a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has.” Imagine if Twain knew about some of the several-hundred-gender languages…

MauranKilom 5y ago
young lady = (das) Mädchen turnip = (die) Rübe (for those wondering)
- ben_w 5y ago
  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”.
- liversage 5y ago
  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.
- q-big 5y ago
  Native German speaker: 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).
  - hprotagonist 5y ago
    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.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > 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.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      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.
      - pseudalopex 5y ago
        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.
- StavrosK 5y ago
  But it does have a gender, the neuter gender.
1cvmask 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Awful_German_Language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Awful_German_Language 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.
bradrn 5y ago
> several-hundred-gender languages 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!
- hprotagonist 5y ago
  “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. https://medium.economist.com/we-went-in-search-of-the-worlds-hardest-language-95a27c2cff3 https://medium.economist.com/we-went-in-search-of-the-worlds...
  - tom_mellior 5y ago
    > 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_classifiers_versus_noun_classes 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_grammatical_genders 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.)
    - bradrn 5y ago
      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.)

tjpnz 5y ago

>* 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".

lhorie 5y ago
"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")
- schoen 5y ago
  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).
- glandium 5y ago
  Same in French and Spanish. It's probably similar in all Romance languages.
  - mattkrause 5y ago
    Wait really? 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.
    - glandium 5y ago
      Translating the GP example literally in French: Je suis en bonne santé vs. J'ai une bonne santé. Funnily enough, Google Translate gives the former for both portuguese versions. I guess it is still translating through English.

lhorie 5y ago

> 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.

greggman3 5y ago
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.
- lhorie 5y ago
  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.

corey_moncure 5y ago

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.

laurieg 5y ago
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.

usrusr 5y ago

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.

yosito 5y ago

> 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!"

Wowfunhappy 5y ago
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!
- tom_mellior 5y ago

kiscica 5y ago

>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.

bradrn 5y ago
> 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.
- Tainnor 5y ago
  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.

dvfjsdhgfv 5y ago

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.

Clewza313 5y ago
"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.

hassancf 5y ago

“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. Reference: theme and rheme in Japanese.

Tainnor 5y ago
> the “wa” particule (actually “ha”) phonetically, it's "wa". The fact that it's written with the kana for "ha" is just a weird quirk of the writing system.

dheera 5y ago

The reverse is true as well, i.e. English has plenty of things that are alien to other languages. Conjugating verbs, inflection, capitalization, and plural forms of nouns are alien to at least Chinese and probably many other Sino-Tibetan languages. The lack of phoenetic/spelling consistency is alien to many European languages, especially Spanish, which is remarkably consistent.

jwhitlark 5y ago
IIRC English was phonetic/spelled consistently before the great vowel shift. The spelling solidified but pronunciation continued to change.
- rsj_hn 5y ago
  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.
  - dodobirdlord 5y ago
    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.
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      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.

SavantIdiot 5y ago

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).

Cerium 5y ago
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.
thealig 5y ago
Hindi has got the "pipe" to end a sentence, and spaces between words. eg. मैं पहले उससे नहीं मिला था | (I have not met him before).