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All these can be said as succinctly in English though. "one beer please" is enough to place an order, and the rest is just decorative. Does Korean not have mor

All these can be said as succinctly in English though. "one beer please" is enough to place an order, and the rest is just decorative. Does Korean not have more complex / ceremonial speech patterns?

aeternum 4y ago
It does, many words have different age-based / status-based suffixes which adds a lot of unnecessary complexity. Numbers are also annoying as the counting numbers vs. quantity. From an information theory POV, we should really look at not just the complexity but the information density of a language. English has a lot of foolish rules, but the large vocabulary provides a much higher bandwidth than other languages. https://medium.com/oscar-tech/information-density-of-different-languages-ad4fce32a828 https://medium.com/oscar-tech/information-density-of-differe...
- gibolt 4y ago
  Compared to many European languages, sure, but English still has plenty of filler. Chinese, for example, can be extremely information dense.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > English has a lot of foolish rules, but the large vocabulary provides a much higher bandwidth than other languages. I think that it's the grammar rules that make English fairly efficient, and also effectively add to its vocabulary, because word order in English is so strong that it twists whatever word you put in a particular position into whatever part of speech it needs to be. In less order-based languages you have to learn a bunch of elaborate formulas to change the word; in English, it's basically just Subject, Verb, Object and a few mathematical rules about commas, prepositions and conjunctions to make that basic structure recursive or flowery. All of English's core vocabulary is horrifyingly irregular, and you can ignore almost all of that irregularity, prefixes and suffixes, and still make yourself pretty easily understood. I think the massive vocabulary of English makes it less dense. We have a lot of words that mean exactly the same thing, but that we pretend mean different things. We find ourselves arguing about the innuendo around words or the "actual definitions" of words almost more than material issues, constantly invoking contradictory authorities. We're also constantly repeating ourselves and pretending like we've understood because using obscure words is a sign of intelligence, and not understanding them a sign of stupidity. Romance languages seem to have a lot fewer words with specific meanings, and do most of their playing with grammar (making a lot of sentences into horrifying mazes.) And irt the center and north in Germanic Europe, the most interesting thing about "Uncleftish Beholding" is that to English speakers it reads like stupid cavemen talking about magic, but it's basically a unit-by-unit direct translation of how Danes, Norwegians and Swedes really talk. English speakers never use the common word for anything if they want to sound like they know what they're talking about. an aside: I've always heard that Vietnamese is the most efficient by syllable. IIRC some paper came up with a metric where it was about 1.4x more efficient than English. There was also someone who figured out that universally, human languages expressed ideas at the same rate, but the people who spoke less efficient languages just talked faster.
  - ablob 4y ago
    > We have a lot of words that mean exactly the same thing, but that we pretend mean different things. They could have meant different things at some point in time. A Language can change drastically with time and if the people using the words stop differentiating between them it may appear as if it was only a game of pretend. This only becomes a problem when someone that doesn't see a difference in meaning communicates with someone that does.
neom 4y ago
How would would you say "where is the toilet?" more succinctly with the context up front in English? If someone came up to me in English and said "toilet where?" I'd presume they're either rude or English isn't their first language. There are formal and informal ways to say thing in Korean, for every day stuff it's often just a matter of changing the suffix, for some stuff it's a different word, for example 감사합니다 Kamsahamnida is thank you to anyone, but 고마워 gomawo (thanks) only to a friend.
- lalopalota 4y ago
  > How would would you say "where is the toilet?" more succinctly with the context up front in English? "Restroom?"
  - neom 4y ago
    We're talking(the article) about forming sentences, not just saying words at people.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      "Restroom?" is a valid english sentence.
    - Google234 4y ago
      https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal you can raise the pitch to indicate that you are asking a question
    - vineyardmike 4y ago
      While I agree “restroom?” Is perfectly valid, you could also say “the restroom is where?” Which puts the important noun first and makes it a question later. It’s not particularly formal, which in America at least is completely unnecessary for day to day life.
- wizofaus 4y ago
  "The toilet - where would I find it?" But arguably putting the key information at the start of a sentence is not ideal as it gives the listener no time to context switch. If I ask a busy waiter in a restaurant "where would I find the toilet", they may well not fully hear the "where would... " but they'll know for sure what I've asked by the end of the request. Which is presumably why we often prefix statements with "excuse me, but..." and the like...I assume that must happen in Korean too.
yongjik 4y ago
Korean has a crapload of complex speech patterns (degree of politeness - that's sheer madness) but the nice(?) thing about it is that it all comes at the end. So you can start your sentence without even deciding if it's a statement or a question. E.g., 오늘 그 식당 열어요 Today that restaurant is open. 오늘 그 식당 열어요? Is that restaurant open today? 오늘 그 식당 열 것 같아요. I guess that restaurant is open today. 오늘 그 식당 열 것 같다고 들었어요. I heard [someone] saying that restaurant is probably open today. 오늘 그 식당 열 것 같다고 들으셨다면서요? I heard that you heard that the restaurant is probably open today, is that true? 오늘 그 식당 열 것 같다고 말한 분이 누군지 찾아서 좀 따져야겠어! I'm going to find whoever told me that the restaurant would open today, and set the record straight! 오늘 그 식당 열 것 같을 리가 없잖아요! There's no way the restaurant is even open today! In fact, learning English as a native Korean speaker, one of the greatest difficulty was asking questions - you can't just start your sentence and make it a question later, you have to mentally pause, construct your question in your head, and then invert the first word! It took me years.
- MichaelZuo 4y ago
  Is there the Korean equivalent of very formal language, such as: "Dear honoured sir, may I humbly beg for your indulgence in a meagre glass of beer?"
  - famouswaffles 4y ago
    Formality and politeness is baked into Korean and you are basically always speaking at the right formality unless you ignore the rules. Your relationship to who you're speaking to (and who you are referring to if you speak about anyone else) changes the grammar of the sentence. The grammar changes mostly manifest in different suffix endings.
    - MichaelZuo 4y ago
      How do noble or formal titles work then? It seems very unlikely to just be a suffix ending.
      - famouswaffles 4y ago
famouswaffles 4y ago
Yeah....It gets a lot more sparse Strictly speaking 친구 있어요 ? means Friend Have ? And you would say exactly that for any of these English equivalents "Do they have friends ?" "Do you have a friend ?" "Do you have friends ?" "Does he have a friend ?" And so on. Plurality as a special marker doesn't really exist. Possessive and Article Determiners don't really exist either. Articles don't exist at all. Possessive markers are few and only used when surrounding context might not be enough to convey the needed information. You might ask, well how would you know which of those equivalents 친구 있어요 means ? It's context. Korean is highly context dependent. There is no way to tell before reading or hearing the surrounding context. >Does Korean not have more complex / ceremonial speech patterns? Oh boy. Let's just say formality and politeness is baked into the language. Words and sentence/phrase suffixes change depending on your age and relationship with who you're taking to. 친구 있어요 (meaning I have a friend/They have friends etc without the question mark) becomes 친구 있어 speaking to a close friend and 친구 입니다 speaking to someone much older than you (or in a formal setting with say your boss) There are also on how to address people you refer to in a sentence separate from rules on how you address people you speaking to.
- airstrike 4y ago
  > And you would say exactly that for any of these English equivalents > "Do they have friends ?" > "Do you have a friend ?" > "Do you have friends ?" > "Does he have a friend ?" Seems like there's a lot of room for ambiguity, then
  - famouswaffles 4y ago
    Yes there is a lot of ambiguity that is only resolved by surrounding context.
- squirtlebonflow 4y ago
  Sure but counting words is not a measure of brevity. The actual temporal length of the utterance is what matters. When I speak English it sounds more like "d'yv'n'e friends"? 5 syllables, most very short
yongjik 4y ago
Oh, and there's one really succinct way of expression that's not found in English: One can say something like 난 라면 - literally "I am ramen" (or something like that - it's a bit fuzzy because the "be" verb is omitted). It would be a ridiculous sentence by itself, but if your friend just asked "I'll have noodles, how about you?" then it's a perfectly fine response. Similarly you could even say 난 프랑스 ("I am France") if the question was "I visited New York this summer, it was really nice, did you go somewhere?"
- hydrok9 4y ago
  In English you could say I am FOR salmon though!
- LudwigNagasena 4y ago
  Isn't 난 just 나 (I) +‎ ㄴ (topic marker)? So it seems like 난 라면 should be translated more or less as "As for me, ramen" and 난 프랑스 as "As for me, France".
  - yongjik 4y ago
    You are absolutely correct - I oversimplified. On the other hand, nobody says "As for me, ramen" in English (it's not even shorter than "I'll have ramen"), so there's that.
- creamyhorror 4y ago
  You could just say "Ramen", "Ramen for me", "I want ramen", or maybe even "Me, ramen". But I get your point - it's more common in English to use a longer sentence. The same thing is pointed out about Japanese too - "watashi wa ramen" for "As for me, ramen" - it has the same topic-comment structure as Korean.
- l3000 4y ago
  I may want to add that as a person who had a lot of exposure to Korean (but is not native). Directly translating for instance “나는 라면” with the example context you mentioned, feels like „in my case, Ramen“. The 는/은 is describing the 나 in a way that is contrasting whatever was said in the current context. It is certainly used for saying something that is different from the other. „Well in MY case, it is …“, but it may work for other cases too, I am not totally sure.
KMnO4 4y ago
주세요 doesn’t actually mean “please”. It’s just the conjugated version of “to give”. So it’s more like saying “beer, one, give me” in a polite way. And it’s cool, not because of the English translation (which yes, is just as simple), but as a showcasing of the composability of Korean. Replace 주세요 (joo-se-yo) with any other verb and the sentence works. For example, 마시다 (ma-si-da) is the verb[0] for “to drink”, so when you drop the “da” and conjugate it with the polite present tense “yo”, the sentence now becomes 맥주 한잔 마시요, or “I’m drinking a beer”. And then as another show of Korean’s flexibility, don’t change anything about that sentence, but add a question mark and “맥주 한잔 마시?” For it to mean “would you like a beer?”. Very cool and succinct. [0]- you can identify Korean verbs because they all end in 다 (da). You can easily conjugate them to present tense by dropping the “da” and replacing it with “yo”. You’ll also notice that each block of characters in Korean maps to exactly one syllable, with no exceptions — pretty cool!
wrp 4y ago
A large part of this is cultural, not linguistic. Japanese syntax has just as much structure to it as English syntax. The difference is that ellipsis is socially accepted in Japan to a much greater extent than in Anglophone societies. You could generate abbreviated sentences in English, which listeners could understand just as well, but people would think you were being rude.

All these can be said as succinctly in English though. "one beer please" is enough to place an order, and the rest is just decorative. Does Korean not have more complex / ceremonial speech patterns?

aeternum 4y ago

It does, many words have different age-based / status-based suffixes which adds a lot of unnecessary complexity. Numbers are also annoying as the counting numbers vs. quantity. From an information theory POV, we should really look at not just the complexity but the information density of a language. English has a lot of foolish rules, but the large vocabulary provides a much higher bandwidth than other languages. https://medium.com/oscar-tech/information-density-of-different-languages-ad4fce32a828 https://medium.com/oscar-tech/information-density-of-differe...

gibolt 4y ago
Compared to many European languages, sure, but English still has plenty of filler. Chinese, for example, can be extremely information dense.
pessimizer 4y ago
> English has a lot of foolish rules, but the large vocabulary provides a much higher bandwidth than other languages. I think that it's the grammar rules that make English fairly efficient, and also effectively add to its vocabulary, because word order in English is so strong that it twists whatever word you put in a particular position into whatever part of speech it needs to be. In less order-based languages you have to learn a bunch of elaborate formulas to change the word; in English, it's basically just Subject, Verb, Object and a few mathematical rules about commas, prepositions and conjunctions to make that basic structure recursive or flowery. All of English's core vocabulary is horrifyingly irregular, and you can ignore almost all of that irregularity, prefixes and suffixes, and still make yourself pretty easily understood. I think the massive vocabulary of English makes it less dense. We have a lot of words that mean exactly the same thing, but that we pretend mean different things. We find ourselves arguing about the innuendo around words or the "actual definitions" of words almost more than material issues, constantly invoking contradictory authorities. We're also constantly repeating ourselves and pretending like we've understood because using obscure words is a sign of intelligence, and not understanding them a sign of stupidity. Romance languages seem to have a lot fewer words with specific meanings, and do most of their playing with grammar (making a lot of sentences into horrifying mazes.) And irt the center and north in Germanic Europe, the most interesting thing about "Uncleftish Beholding" is that to English speakers it reads like stupid cavemen talking about magic, but it's basically a unit-by-unit direct translation of how Danes, Norwegians and Swedes really talk. English speakers never use the common word for anything if they want to sound like they know what they're talking about. an aside: I've always heard that Vietnamese is the most efficient by syllable. IIRC some paper came up with a metric where it was about 1.4x more efficient than English. There was also someone who figured out that universally, human languages expressed ideas at the same rate, but the people who spoke less efficient languages just talked faster.
- ablob 4y ago
  > We have a lot of words that mean exactly the same thing, but that we pretend mean different things. They could have meant different things at some point in time. A Language can change drastically with time and if the people using the words stop differentiating between them it may appear as if it was only a game of pretend. This only becomes a problem when someone that doesn't see a difference in meaning communicates with someone that does.

neom 4y ago

How would would you say "where is the toilet?" more succinctly with the context up front in English? If someone came up to me in English and said "toilet where?" I'd presume they're either rude or English isn't their first language. There are formal and informal ways to say thing in Korean, for every day stuff it's often just a matter of changing the suffix, for some stuff it's a different word, for example 감사합니다 Kamsahamnida is thank you to anyone, but 고마워 gomawo (thanks) only to a friend.

lalopalota 4y ago
> How would would you say "where is the toilet?" more succinctly with the context up front in English? "Restroom?"
- neom 4y ago
  We're talking(the article) about forming sentences, not just saying words at people.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    "Restroom?" is a valid english sentence.
  - Google234 4y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_rising_terminal you can raise the pitch to indicate that you are asking a question
  - vineyardmike 4y ago
    While I agree “restroom?” Is perfectly valid, you could also say “the restroom is where?” Which puts the important noun first and makes it a question later. It’s not particularly formal, which in America at least is completely unnecessary for day to day life.
wizofaus 4y ago
"The toilet - where would I find it?" But arguably putting the key information at the start of a sentence is not ideal as it gives the listener no time to context switch. If I ask a busy waiter in a restaurant "where would I find the toilet", they may well not fully hear the "where would... " but they'll know for sure what I've asked by the end of the request. Which is presumably why we often prefix statements with "excuse me, but..." and the like...I assume that must happen in Korean too.

yongjik 4y ago

Korean has a crapload of complex speech patterns (degree of politeness - that's sheer madness) but the nice(?) thing about it is that it all comes at the end. So you can start your sentence without even deciding if it's a statement or a question. E.g., 오늘 그 식당 열어요 Today that restaurant is open. 오늘 그 식당 열어요? Is that restaurant open today? 오늘 그 식당 열 것 같아요. I guess that restaurant is open today. 오늘 그 식당 열 것 같다고 들었어요. I heard [someone] saying that restaurant is probably open today. 오늘 그 식당 열 것 같다고 들으셨다면서요? I heard that you heard that the restaurant is probably open today, is that true? 오늘 그 식당 열 것 같다고 말한 분이 누군지 찾아서 좀 따져야겠어! I'm going to find whoever told me that the restaurant would open today, and set the record straight! 오늘 그 식당 열 것 같을 리가 없잖아요! There's no way the restaurant is even open today! In fact, learning English as a native Korean speaker, one of the greatest difficulty was asking questions - you can't just start your sentence and make it a question later, you have to mentally pause, construct your question in your head, and then invert the first word! It took me years.

MichaelZuo 4y ago
Is there the Korean equivalent of very formal language, such as: "Dear honoured sir, may I humbly beg for your indulgence in a meagre glass of beer?"
- famouswaffles 4y ago
  Formality and politeness is baked into Korean and you are basically always speaking at the right formality unless you ignore the rules. Your relationship to who you're speaking to (and who you are referring to if you speak about anyone else) changes the grammar of the sentence. The grammar changes mostly manifest in different suffix endings.
  - MichaelZuo 4y ago
    How do noble or formal titles work then? It seems very unlikely to just be a suffix ending.
    - famouswaffles 4y ago

famouswaffles 4y ago

Yeah....It gets a lot more sparse Strictly speaking 친구 있어요 ? means Friend Have ? And you would say exactly that for any of these English equivalents "Do they have friends ?" "Do you have a friend ?" "Do you have friends ?" "Does he have a friend ?" And so on. Plurality as a special marker doesn't really exist. Possessive and Article Determiners don't really exist either. Articles don't exist at all. Possessive markers are few and only used when surrounding context might not be enough to convey the needed information. You might ask, well how would you know which of those equivalents 친구 있어요 means ? It's context. Korean is highly context dependent. There is no way to tell before reading or hearing the surrounding context. >Does Korean not have more complex / ceremonial speech patterns? Oh boy. Let's just say formality and politeness is baked into the language. Words and sentence/phrase suffixes change depending on your age and relationship with who you're taking to. 친구 있어요 (meaning I have a friend/They have friends etc without the question mark) becomes 친구 있어 speaking to a close friend and 친구 입니다 speaking to someone much older than you (or in a formal setting with say your boss) There are also on how to address people you refer to in a sentence separate from rules on how you address people you speaking to.

airstrike 4y ago
> And you would say exactly that for any of these English equivalents > "Do they have friends ?" > "Do you have a friend ?" > "Do you have friends ?" > "Does he have a friend ?" Seems like there's a lot of room for ambiguity, then
- famouswaffles 4y ago
  Yes there is a lot of ambiguity that is only resolved by surrounding context.
squirtlebonflow 4y ago
Sure but counting words is not a measure of brevity. The actual temporal length of the utterance is what matters. When I speak English it sounds more like "d'yv'n'e friends"? 5 syllables, most very short

yongjik 4y ago

Oh, and there's one really succinct way of expression that's not found in English: One can say something like 난 라면 - literally "I am ramen" (or something like that - it's a bit fuzzy because the "be" verb is omitted). It would be a ridiculous sentence by itself, but if your friend just asked "I'll have noodles, how about you?" then it's a perfectly fine response. Similarly you could even say 난 프랑스 ("I am France") if the question was "I visited New York this summer, it was really nice, did you go somewhere?"

hydrok9 4y ago
In English you could say I am FOR salmon though!
LudwigNagasena 4y ago
Isn't 난 just 나 (I) +‎ ㄴ (topic marker)? So it seems like 난 라면 should be translated more or less as "As for me, ramen" and 난 프랑스 as "As for me, France".
- yongjik 4y ago
  You are absolutely correct - I oversimplified. On the other hand, nobody says "As for me, ramen" in English (it's not even shorter than "I'll have ramen"), so there's that.
creamyhorror 4y ago
You could just say "Ramen", "Ramen for me", "I want ramen", or maybe even "Me, ramen". But I get your point - it's more common in English to use a longer sentence. The same thing is pointed out about Japanese too - "watashi wa ramen" for "As for me, ramen" - it has the same topic-comment structure as Korean.
l3000 4y ago
I may want to add that as a person who had a lot of exposure to Korean (but is not native). Directly translating for instance “나는 라면” with the example context you mentioned, feels like „in my case, Ramen“. The 는/은 is describing the 나 in a way that is contrasting whatever was said in the current context. It is certainly used for saying something that is different from the other. „Well in MY case, it is …“, but it may work for other cases too, I am not totally sure.

KMnO4 4y ago

주세요 doesn’t actually mean “please”. It’s just the conjugated version of “to give”. So it’s more like saying “beer, one, give me” in a polite way. And it’s cool, not because of the English translation (which yes, is just as simple), but as a showcasing of the composability of Korean. Replace 주세요 (joo-se-yo) with any other verb and the sentence works. For example, 마시다 (ma-si-da) is the verb[0] for “to drink”, so when you drop the “da” and conjugate it with the polite present tense “yo”, the sentence now becomes 맥주 한잔 마시요, or “I’m drinking a beer”. And then as another show of Korean’s flexibility, don’t change anything about that sentence, but add a question mark and “맥주 한잔 마시?” For it to mean “would you like a beer?”. Very cool and succinct. [0]- you can identify Korean verbs because they all end in 다 (da). You can easily conjugate them to present tense by dropping the “da” and replacing it with “yo”. You’ll also notice that each block of characters in Korean maps to exactly one syllable, with no exceptions — pretty cool!

wrp 4y ago

A large part of this is cultural, not linguistic. Japanese syntax has just as much structure to it as English syntax. The difference is that ellipsis is socially accepted in Japan to a much greater extent than in Anglophone societies. You could generate abbreviated sentences in English, which listeners could understand just as well, but people would think you were being rude.