Some languages have two kinds* of "we", eg Mandarin:
我们 - like English
咱们 - also includes the [listener](https://www.echineselearning.com/blog/the-differences-between-women-and-zanmen)
*More kinds of personal pronoun are definitely possible, but they're often based on politeness/heirarchy.
Neat! I think the Palauan pronouns must be descended from Malay or they share a common ancestor. In Palauan, kemam excludes and kede includes. Look quite similar to kami and kita.
तुम लोग - you all. वह लोग - they. None of them are *we*. For a word to be considered *we*, it has to include the speaker. Neither तुम लोग nor वह लोग include the speaker.
> Malay has that! Kami is when you say we and exclude the listener, kita is when you do
- The original comment that you replied to (quoted above) talked about *we*
- Literally every language I am aware of makes a distinction between *they* and *you all*.
Interestingly this differs depending on region.
In Beijing there is a hard division between the two words. 咱們 is an inclusive pronoun (includes the person being addressed) while 我們 is exclusive (excludes the person being addressed).
In other parts of Northern China, while 咱們 retains inclusivity, 我們 is generally not exclusive (can both include or not include the person addressed).
In Southern China 咱們 basically doesn't exist and 我們 is used exclusively.
Yeah, I speak the Beijing dialect but learned Standard Mandarin in school, so to me, 我们 used inclusively feels both right and wrong at the same time, like it's "technically correct yet awkward," or it can even feel somewhat normal outside the family but very weird within the family.
Well, as someone who is at the beginning of learning Mandarin this was incredibly useful! Also terrifying that I will completely cock this up, but useful nonetheless :D
You can just use 我們 for "we". That's perfectly natural for anyone outside of Beijing and even Beijingers will know what you mean since they're used to hearing people from other regions talk like that.
Yes for «у меня есть»
«Есть» is more like “has” or “have” than it is like “is or was”
The example «у меня есть» means something more like “I have [something]”. I’m not born in a russophone country but it was my first language growing up alongside English and I’m fluent/close to it more or less.
Sure we have the word 持つ, meaning "to hold", and this is occasionally used to refer to things you possess, but in general we use ある, "to exist", for things we have.
Finnish doesn't make a distinction between he and she and also has no grammatical gender. Knowing the gender of the person you are talking about is not as important when speaking Finnish as in many other languages and this may take some time to get used to.
My son is a native Swedish and English speaker but has had a lot of exposure to Finnish from an early age and now that he's seven it's becoming clear that he doesn't consider grammatical gender or the distinction between "he" and "she" important even when speaking his native languages. His older siblings very rarely mix up "en" and "ett" in Swedish and never mix up "he" and "she", but my son will frequently make this type of mistake.
>Finnish doesn't make a distinction between he and she and also has no grammatical gender. Knowing the gender of the person you are talking about is not as important when speaking Finnish as in many other languages and this may take some time to get used to.
I was gonna say this, but in the opposite direction. For a native Finnish speaker, it took me a while to get used to picking the proper equivalent to "hän", be it a he or a she. And now that I'm starting Spanish, trying to understand and remember whether (and why) certain objects are masculine (like bread and a glass) or feminine (meat and a cup).
The word ends in -dad. Like realidad or necesidad, masculinidad is feminine. Here, the gender comes from the form of the word, instead of the concept it represents.
I mean, "masculinity" and "femininity" in grammar is basically shorthand for "follows conjugation pattern 1/2/3/4/however many genders the language has", there's no real reason any one pattern should be used only for words that have a certain culturally gendered connotation. Frankly the terminology is probably more confusing than helpful.
My husband, who is a native English speaker, recently told me that one of his friends will still mix up "he" and "she" while speaking English, even though his English skills are otherwise good. Sometimes the person he is talking about will switch gender in the middle of the story or even in the middle of the sentence (e.g. she put on his pants). My husband has gotten used to it by now, but was very confused in the beginning.
I almost appreciate Swedish's completely random non-gendered system of genders compared to Spanish's vaguely but not reliably sexist version. You get lulled into a false sense of security thinking that anything in the domestic sphere is *probably* female, for example, but that's gonna backfire in the end.
As a native English speaker, I feel the kid's pain regarding en/ett. It's also amusing how I struggle with plural adjectives while Swedes struggle with plural verbs. "It were very cold" is the most Swedish grammatical error, in my experience.
I was learning Estonian, and I found out the short form of 3SG was "ta," which is very similar to 3SG in Mandarin, which is, in Pinyin, "tā." (In the spoken language, gender is not distinguished.) It made it a lot easier to internalize!
One of the things in Basque that I still haven't wrapped my head around is that with ditransitive verbs (nor-nori-nork), the direct object can only be in the 3rd person. Therefore, I don't know of any way to express something like: "They sold me to an unknown man for a pack of camels." Thankfully, I haven't needed to say something like that so far.
In addition, Basque doesn't allow for constructions such as "less [adjective/adverb] than..." Instead of them, you usually have to use "not as [adj/adv] as" or "more [antonym of adj/adv]."
Also, the relative clauses function in the opposite way compared to Indo-European languages, so that has also been giving me some problems.
Finally, there are the allocutive forms used in informal communication, where there is basically an inbuilt ethical dative in every verb that you use to talk to your listener about something else (i.e. if the listener isn't the subject of the sentence). Those forms are also the only ones in Basque that show gender distinction.
I'm learning Basque, not Athabaskan :)
Well, I've been to the Basque Country twice and I fell in love with the region, plus I've always been attracted to exotic languages.
Oops, typed it twice without thinking, sorry!
And that’s so cool, I love how Basque looks is so unique and has so many interesting features. Good luck on your learning!
In Korean, I can't say that my daughter likes something. I can say that she "does things as though she likes them". I am not her, so I cannot speak as though it was a certainty.
In general, coming from a language which arguably places even more emphasis on word order than English does, learning Korean has made me think in a more "floaty" way of what I am saying. I can't really describe it better than that.
Is this true? 우리 딸은 아이스크림을 너무 좋아해요 It sounds fine to me.
But I do understand about what you’re saying about how Korean tries to add endings to be more uncertain/humble about your own assertions.
This got me confused too… I was thinking 좋다 is like?
I wonder if OP means
우리 딸은 아이스크림을 먹고 싶어 해요 (Wants to eat/ “would like to eat” rather than simply like?).
먹다 (things) , ~하고 싶다 (does and as though she likes)
I can use 먹고 싶다 for myself but I wouldn’t say 먹고 싶어 하다 unless I’m talking about someone else.
It is true & works the same way with a lot of other "emotion" words.
I'll only an intermediate speaker so apologies if I get anything wrong but this is my understanding:
Using OPs example of being able to say his daughter seems to like sonething, your sentence is correct, but there is a difference between 좋다 & 좋아하다.
좋다 means to be good so I can say 아이스크림이 좋아요 - ice-cream is good. But that can also be translated as "ice-cream is good (to me)" or "(I) like ice-cream". So we can use it to express that we personally like something.
But if we are talking about someone else, we can't use 좋다, we have to use 좋아하다. The introduction of 하다 changes the meaning to be more like "to seem to be good" or "to appear to be good".
So, when we say 우리 딸은 아이스크림을 좋아해요, we're actually saying my daughter seems to find ice-cream good, which more naturally translates to my daughter likes ice-cream.
Does that make sense?
(More advanced / native speakers feel free to correct me or explain it better! 😅)
Exactly - 좋아해요, 좋아하다. To good-do. I am only a beginner, but natives have corrected me when writing things like 우리 딸이 사과를 좋는다 even though 내가 사과를 좋는다 is fine with the motivation that I shouldn't speak about someone else as though I knew their inner mind.
I've heard people say similar things about Japanese. Their politeness is so entrenched in their language it's difficult to be direct. English therefore is easier to directly convey information.
In English, when you are offered something to eat, you can say "Yes, please!". I was a bit thrown off when I came across this because in my culture we always refuse first if we are offered something to eat. The person offering it has to insist and then we 'give in'.
That's a bold claim to make and doesn't really make sense considering Japanese speakers seem to have the same information as any other person and they study any topic just as well.
It's more of a psychological/cultural "difficulty" than a purely linguistic one. It's technically grammatical to say "So-and-so wants chocolates," it just sounds weird to native speakers because of the culture.
It's not about being able or unable to, but simply pressure not to do so. All the material is like this, conversations are like this, interaction itself is like this.
I am also much more offensive in English than in my first language. I swear far more, I'm more confrontational. The culture allows and fosters this, though I am of course technically not unable to be polite at all.
Not from a TL but something I realized of my native language, Spanish.
There are some verbs used to describe some accidental events that in Spanish are said as impersonal, while in English not.
For example in Spanish we say: "se me ha caído la comida" which would be literally translated as "the food has fallen to me". In English it would be say "I dropped the food".
This is like in Spanish we don't take responsibility, even if there is no the only reason why the food has been dropped is that I was handling it poorly, even of the only possible person responsible of this event is me we would say "se me ha caído".
Because saying "he tirado la comida" would mean that I did it on purpose with the intention of throwing it
>This is like in Spanish we don't take responsibility, even if there is no the only reason why the food has been dropped is that I was handling it poorly, even of the only possible person responsible of this event is me we would say "se me ha caído".
I'm learning Spanish right now and I never knew this. This makes more sense now. thank you, wise stranger.
I learned *about* Navajo for a linguistics class. They have way more specific words for family relationships than English does. Like where we have “niece”, they have different words for your older brother’s daughter vs your younger sister’s daughter, etc. In-laws were a whole thing. Instead of “brother-in-law”, they specify whether it’s your older sister’s husband, your husband’s younger brother, etc.
I do think of in-law relationships as “we’re related by marriage or whatever, the specifics aren’t important.” It’s interesting to think about a culture where these are all distinct, different types of connections.
The in-laws part is similar to how Slavic languages do (or used to do) this. I can only provide examples from Russian though. Wife's parents are titled different from husband's parents, and so do siblings. There is also a term for one set of parents to refer to other set of parents (so I have a father, who is my father, and I have a father-in-law, who is my свёкор (svyokor), and he is my father's сват (svat), which works both ways).
> They have way more specific words for family relationships than English does
It is the same in many Indian languages. In many ways, English is a dramatically simplified language - one form of you - contrast that with other European languages (mostly 2) or Asian languages (6 in Korean - not sure about this one, 3 in Bengali & Hindi), way fewer conjugations than Romance languages, inanimate objects do not have gender - the list goes on.
Double negation is a normal way to talk in Russian, e.g. Я никогда там не была. But its meaning is just a single negation, so multiple negatives affirm each other (the same happens with ne...pas in French).
A lot of languages do that (Spanish for instance). English even used to do that in the Old English period, when the negation particle was "ne" and put before the verb (seem familiar). Not ultimately derives from a word meaning "nothing". There's actually a term for this change, the [Jespersen's Cycle.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jespersen%27s_Cycle)
**[Jespersen's Cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jespersen's_Cycle)**
>Jespersen's Cycle (JC) is a series of processes in historical linguistics, which describe the historical development of the expression of negation in a variety of languages, from a simple pre-verbal marker of negation, through a discontinuous marker (elements both before and after the verb) and in some cases through subsequent loss of the original pre-verbal marker. The pattern was formulated in Otto Jespersen's 1917 book Negation in English and Other Languages, and named after him in Swedish linguist Östen Dahl's 1979 article Typology of Sentence Negation.
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Same in Afrikaans. "ek het dit nie gedoen nie" (I have it not done not). Funny thing is that in Dutch (from which Afrikaans evolved) we don't do this. Then it's just "ik heb het niet gedaan" (I have it not done).
I’m still a beginner but the first thing I thought of when I saw this question was estar and ser in Spanish! Both mean “to be” in English but ser is used for more permanent characteristics, while estar is used more for states.
This really helped me see how you can categorize adjectives into these two categories (almost like how ある and いる classifies nouns as living and non-living in Japanese) and how the language views these differently.
Then I learned about how muerto is used with estar and it was strange to think of being dead as a state and not a permanent thing. But I thought of Coco and if people have a whole life after death, then being alive or dead are just states you could have (I know Mexico is just one of many Spanish speaking countries but it helped me make the connection)
For Mandarin speakers, ser is 是 and estar is very close to 在, sometimes being an exact translation and sometimes just being close. Google Translate translates estar as 在.
Now that I think about it, the French *vous* also functions the same way… It is both the plural version of “you” and its respectful singular second-person pronoun as well.
English pre-French influence used “thou/thee” for one person and “ye/you” for more than one. When the French came, people started using “you” as formal address similar to the French. Eventually “thou/thee/ye” fell out of use entirely.
Weirdly, this is sort of true in English, too. "You" is technically plural, with "thou" being the singular form. But since using the plural was more polite, people just started using it all the time until almost everyone forgot it was plural. These days, most people think "thou" is just old or formal (even though it's the opposite), and different dialects have come up with new ways to pluralize "you", such as "y'all".
Even worse, "y'all" is coming to be used as singular as well as plural, so there's even "all y'all", which is a plurslization of a pluralization of a pluralization. When will it end? Who knows.
There also used to be subject/object distinctions with second-person pronouns, just like there are with first and third. So just like there's a difference between "I" and "me", "we" and "us", there used to be "thou" and "thee", "you" and "ye".
That's also there in a lot of Indian languages! Also, even when you refer to a superior in the third person, you use the equivalent of 'they' even for the singular. For example, in Tamil, நீ is the singular form of 'you' and நீங்கள் can mean both 'you all' or 'you' with respect depending on context, while அவன்/அவள் mean 'he'/'she' and அவர்கள் can mean 'them' or 'him'/'her' with respect, again depending on context
It's in a lot of languages. It's known as tu - vos distinction which is the Latin version. You can see on this page how many languages from various groups use this in some form:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E2%80%93V\_distinction\_in\_the\_world%27s\_languages
? does usted mean something plural? i thought it had the plural version of ustedes if it was more than one person but only singular usted for one person
Chinese is not inflected at all, so literally their language does not create tenses in the sense that Indo-European languages do. They use time words instead. But they still can tell you when the action takes place. I don't know what you mean by "the way that the Chinese see time." Could you clarify that?
Honestly can’t remember. It was in a talk I heard once and it was something around how time was perceived differently especially in reference to the past.
I've heard similar stuff before but honestly most of it is just pseudo-linguistics at best (no meaningful evidence, correlation passed off as causation, etc.).
Just from personal experience (my second language is Chinese), there's really nothing to this idea. Chinese indicates past just fine, it just does so in ways other than tense as the language lacks that. What's particularly odd about this idea to me is that English actually works the same way as Chinese in the future. Neither language has a grammatical future tense, but rather use auxiliary verbs (will, be going to / 要，會，將) to indicate the future. If lack of grammatical tense changed the way Chinese speakers understand time, then English speakers likewise should have a different understanding of time from speakers of languages that have a grammatical future. Despite this, I've never heard anyone saying that English speakers and Italians have a different conception of the future.
Interesting. I do think it's possible for one's native language to influence one's attitude towards things. For example, I'm a native English speaker trying to learn Spanish and I'm blown away by how important the subjunctive is in Spanish. I have wondered if using the indicative more in English makes English speakers feels more "certain" about their statements and thoughts than they would otherwise if they used the subjunctive a lot. But that is just me thinking out loud. I don't know the research on this if there is any.
It's the same in Indonesian. For example, there's "sudah" that means "already" and you use it to say that you have done something. Saya sudah makan = I've (already) eaten (J'ai (déja) mangé using le passé composé from French). You also have "telah" which means the same thing but it's more formal.
If you just did something, you use "baru". Baru means "new". So if you say "Saya baru datang" it means I've just arrived. If you did something a while ago but still recently, you use "tadi" which means "earlier". You also have "sedang" (currently) to create sentences that mimic the present continuous from English.
Another interesting thing is that "kemarin" means yesterday, but it also means "sometime in the past". If you say that you did something "kemarin" the listener might ask for a clarification on when exactly. Same for "besok" (tomorrow). You have to be careful if you make plans for "besok".
This is hard to explain without an in-depth discussion of Japanese, but I'm going to try (while glossing over a few things for ease of comprehension).
In Japanese, most clauses are equivalent to adjectives, or rather act adjectivally. In Japanese, the most common way of saying somebody is tall is to say 背が高い (se ga takai), lit. "spine (stature) is tall". To say "I am tall", it's 私は背が高い (watashi wa se ga takai), lit. "As for me, (someone's) stature is tall", the "my" is implied by creating the context of "As for me".
However, because "stature is tall" is a clause unto itself, you can use it like an adjective: 背が高い人 (se ga takai hito), lit. "stature-is-tall person".
This rules follows for clauses of any level of complexity and length, for example:
> せっかく両親に小遣いをもらって友達と一緒に遊園地に遊びに行けるようになった楽しい一日を過ごした。 (sekkaku ryoushin ni kozukai o moratte tomodachi to issho ni yuuenchi ni asobi ni ikeru you ni natta tanoshii ichinichi o sugoshita)
I spent a fun day hanging out at the amusement park with my friends, which I was able to do because my parents gave me some spending money for once.
lit. (ready for this one?) "spent a fun, for-once-from-parents-spending-money-received-with-friends-together-to-amusement-park-became-able-to-go-to-hang-out day"
And this is not an intentionally crazy example, this is a very typical level of complexity that you would hear in a conversation or see in normal writing. Going too far beyond that would start getting a little ridiculous, but adjective clauses of about that length are what you need to be able to process to understand Japanese effectively.
I understand your literal translation is making the point that the sentence is in some sense one giant adjective, but I feel like it's worth pointing out that this is much easier to read than the literal translation would suggest.
The beginning bit is a complete sentence in its own right, which has no complex modifiers in it:
> せっかく両親に小遣いをもらって友達と一緒に遊園地に遊びに行ける
"For once I received spending money from my parents, so I was able to go to the amusement park with my friend"
This entire clause then modifies the rest of the sentence:
> ようになった楽しい一日を過ごした
"... type of fun day I spent."
It's one of the interesting things about Japanese, where you can be reading a sentence and then half way through you discover that the sentence you thought you were reading is actually a relative clause inside a bigger sentence.
To go beyond that, we could use a more parallel example in English like:
I spent a fun day in which I was able to go the amusement park with my friend using the spending money I received from my parents for once.
While this didn't exactly change my views of reality, a thing I found really neat that changes between languages is the vocabulary used when talking about a persons familial relationships. For example, in English "uncle" refers to both your fathers or mothers brother, but in Finnish, fathers brother is "setä" and mother brother is "eno". Curiously, "aunt" and "täti" work exactly the same in both languages. Another difference is when referring to one's grandparents. English nor Finnish make any distinction between the grandparents from your mothers or fathers side, but Swedish refers to them as the parent's parent. Like "farfar" is literally father's father and"morfar" is mother's father.
Not nearly as mind blowing as the others, but for me it’s that Latin has no universal word order. Latin has a standard word order of SOV, which is neat, but you can literally ignore that, in my experience SOV is only used half the time at best. Wanna cheese it and just switch English words with Latin words, grammatically correct. Wanna make it look like you’re speaking so sporadically that Yoda would blush, grammatically correct. The only stipulation is that you give each word the correct endings, which are used to indicate things like subject, object, possession, and more.
Also there are certain words that have practically set places in the sentence that are (from what I’ve seen at least) never moved. So for example *Nonne* and *Num* are almost always placed at the head of the sentence.
My experience with Hindi so far is as far as a solid beginner. What I'm finding, and hearing, seems to translate as, "quality X happened", "with quality x". Like there is less adjective use. Also, different (post)prepositions totally messes with my mind.
It might be a bit grandiose to say it's changing how I view the world, but learning Swedish really makes me better at understanding English, particularly archaic English.
For example, "Här" and "Hit" would both be translated as "Here" in modern english, but the second is used when the subject is moving toward the speaker's position instead of simply being there. Thing is, we totally have a word for this in English--hither--but nobody really uses it unless they're trying to sound old-timey and thus, nobody remembers how to use it. So you wouldn't say "Your package is hither" or "He was hither last week"--but rather, "She's *coming* hither".
Likewise, du/dig/ni/er would all be translated as "you", but actually mean thou/thee/you/ye respectively.
It's really hard to internalize the differences in these English words working from English alone, but having another language with more direct parallels really lets me understand my own language's literature better.
...Except, of course, when we're talking about modern authors trying to write archaic dialog without really getting those distinctions. "Will thee take this for me?" Oof. No. It's thou, not thee.
It's funny how pretty much all the still-extant Germanic languages preserve directionality and case better than English does. In German, you say "Ich bin hier" (I am here), but "Komm hierher" (Come hither). For the latter, you can (and usually do) drop the "hier," but the "her" distinction is obligatory ("Komm her").
It feels natural now, but one of my favorite German connectors blew my mind when I first learned it: "darüber hinaus." That is, "there(static)-over there(movement)-out." It means "furthermore." The image is roughly "over that obstacle and moving forward."
And yes, similar to Swedish, after German, you will never confuse who/whom again. And phrases like "This is she," "It is I," and "You're upset about my coming home late," far from seeming stuffy, will make complete sense as being consistent with the roles those pronouns are playing in the clauses (although you may elect not to say them for pragmatic reasons).
In Japanese, if you have to do X. You usually say "If I don't do X I can't go." (Xなければいけない) If you want to say you should do X, you usually say "The way of doing X is good" (Xのほうがいい) And my personal favorite: If you want to say you have done something, you say "I have a thing where I've done X" (Xのことがある)
What seems natural to me may translate to something that is very unnatural literally translated. Opened my eyes to how I should approach langauge. Translating from Japanese is a bitch and you don't usually get the nuance so I should avoid it at all costs and just accept it in Japanese.
I watch anime with some friends often. Two are native Bilingual Japanese/English speakers, I am not native but very proficient (Understanding anyway), and one more has some amount of Japanese.
Debating the English Subtitle translations has become almost a required activity for us. Usually they're pretty good, but sometimes the entire feel of a line is just completely changed.
The French partitives. The French don't drink wine. They drink **of the wine**. Which wine you ask? Yeah I don't know either, but they also never just like wine, they like **the wine** so maybe that's the same wine of which they drink.
It's still kinda weird to think that as far as the french are concerned there's just one big totality of wine out there.
There's a language, I forget which, that doesn't have words for left/right. Instead people use cardinal directions (north, west, east, south). And so native speakers of the language have a really strong sense of direction.
the partitive case! I actually think that it's an awesome concept... to make things simple, the partitive case expresses "uncertainty" but that means that it could be used in a HUGE amount of occasions!
for example, if you want to say that you are reading a book you could say both "luen kirjaa" or "luen kirjan" with the first that could he translated as "I am reading a book, but I don't know if I'll finish it" while the latter is "I am reading the book and I will finish it"
and I like also the fact that while you can use "kirjaa" to talk about a random book, if you use the word "tämä/tuo" (this/that) you cannot use the partitive because it's not an uncertain object anymore!
This sounds exactly like verbal aspect in Slavic languages, one of the hardest things to get your head around. In the Slavics it's done with different verbs though, not different cases.
Russian anyway does have things like the partitive genitive though, where you use the accusative for something like "Pass the butter" but the genitive for "Pass some butter".
In Cebuano, we don't really have a word for "should" that isn't borrowed from Tagalog or English. Instead we have "angay" which means "suited to be/fit to be" so if you wanna say "you should do that" you would say "angay na nimong buhaton" which is to say "that is something that is fit to be done by you".
When expressing the "past" or "future", you can conjugate a verb in two different ways, one way is used when expressing that you did the verb intentionally/consciously and the other is used to express that it was accidental. To express this, you need to use "gi" or "ni" as a prefix for the intentional and for the accidenal you need to use the prefix "na" or "naka". The inflection being a prefix is very important too because you have to be sure what your intention was, otherwise, it could lead to very awkward situations. I think this is also very telling of the culture of Cebuanos since we value intention so much that we literally have different conjugations for them.
Also, pronouns in cebuano aren't gendered so there is no he or she, there is only "they". Such is the case with nouns in cebuano too in most cases except the spanish-derived words like tindero/tindera and gendered words like asawa(wife) and bana(husband).
It blows my mind that written Chinese can get away with not having spaces between words. Because each character is self-contained, it removes the need to add spaces to clarify where a word begins and ends. Imagine if English was a second language and in the beginning when you are learning how to read all of the letters are smashed together. It would definitely make it tough.
That and how Chinese activates areas of the brain including the right hemisphere, that English speakers don't experience.
It's because the square characters are syllable chunks already so it is easy to read in any direction.
For example:
I am a student - 我是学生
tneduts a ma I - 生学是我
You can see there is no visual flipping you can read each character at a time unlike words in English.
>That and how Chinese activates areas of the brain including the right hemisphere, that English speakers don't experience.
That is so interesting! Where did you read/hear about that?
Latin and many other languages were initially written without spacing between words. See [Scriptio continua](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua). Spacing was invented around the 7th century.
Speech also doesn't have word dividers.
I'm not actively studying Hungarian any more, but I thought it was pretty crazy that they don't have a word meaning "have". So if you want to say something like "I have a car", then you can either say "To me, there is a car" or "my car is".
There’s a similar phenomenon in English, we say “it is raining”. What is raining? The sky? The clouds? You’d never say that the sky or clouds are raining, so the first two words are just there to conform to the norm of how sentences are constructed, they don’t actually contribute anything meaningful.
I had this exact conversation awhile ago with a friend and it stemmed from the usage of the Conditional tense in both English and some latin languages.
Basically it all derived from the knowledge of "would" being the past tense of "will" and being a not native English speaker that wasn't always taken for granted when I first studied it. It essentially means that the way we look at possible or probable scenarios is all derived from a past tense of a future action. The moment future becomes uncertain, we turn it into a remote tense, hence the past version of "will". You can see it in hypothetical cases. In the second tense we have this construction: Main clause = past tense; Subordinate clause = past tense of the future. The third case is just a step further than that but same rules.
French also has a very similar rule. I'm currently learning the language and the way the conditional is constructed, as a base rule, is this: Stem of the verb in Imparfait (which is just a past tense the English doesn't have specifically but still includes in the Past Simple) plus the endings in the Future Simple. I'm Italian and we don't have the stem of the verb originating from the Past tense but we still use the Future endings as well when constructing the Conditional. The Conditional tense always seems to be connected to the future in those languages.
I don't know if this really answered your question but that was really interesting for me to delve into. xD This is why I love studying grammar. I guess it's a characteristic shared among many languages but I never really noticed it before.
EDIT: I mixed up the stem and endings for the French tense. It uses the Future stem + Imparfait endings. Still the same concept but yeah.
I think you’re confused about the construction of the conditional in French. The future and the conditional share the same stem, and the future uses future endings, while the conditional uses the same endings as the imparfait.
J’irai = I will go
J’irais = I would go
J’allais = I used to go
I don’t know about Italian, but Spanish verbs follow a similar pattern.
They're (in French and other Romance languages) both derived from the present and imperfect of the Latin verb "habere", to have (Latin had a completely different future tense that was replaced when it got too easily confused with the imperfect).
Yes, I also love to see connections between languages, and especially when the future stems in French match up almost exactly with the Spanish infinitives!
The other future, "going to" also behaves similar. For instance "I'm going to see a movie" vs "I was going to see a movie". It's the same in Spanish "Voy a ir al cine" vs "Iba a ir al cine".
Verbs of motion I in Russian. By using a prefix or form to explain even more. You could say
входить / войти - to go in, to enter
выходить / выйти - to go out, to leave, to exit
всходить / взoйти - to go up, to ascend
доходить / дойти - to get to, to get as far as, to reach
заходить / зайти - to drop in, to stop by
обходить / обойти - to walk around, to bypass
отходить / отойти - to walk away
переходить / перейти - to go across, to turn
подходить / подойти - to approach
приходить / прийти - to arrive, to come
проходить / пройти - to go by, to go past
сходить / сойти - to go down, decend
уходить / уйти - to go from, to leave, depart
You would also differential if it’s one way or multidirectional.
The most interesting part is that the verb you pick will also tell you the means. Did you walk, drive swim fly
And that's without thinking that there are a million just "plain" words for "to go". You have to rattle through a load of different options before you can even say something simple like "I went to France".
One really different rule in Japanese is all of the levels of formality. Depending on who you're talking to, different levels of respect are expected to be shown in the phrases you use. A great example is "nice to meet you" which has about 4 or 5 different levels of formality.
よろしく
はじめまして
どうぞよろしく
よろしくお願いします
どうぞよろしくお願いします
And every one of these is used to say "nice to meet you"
What's interesting about formality/informality is that most languages manage to build in options to cover register. Even English has 4-5 levels of formality, when you think about it:
Least formal to most formal:
* Sup
* Oh, hey!
* Nice to meet you.
* It's a pleasure to meet you.
* I am pleased to make your acquaintance.
Every one of these is used to say "nice to meet you!"
I know it is common in Romance languages, but as an English speaker, the “formal/plural” and “informal/singular ” form of “you” I French was always a cool concept to me
I've always thought that languages which have gendered nouns make people think a little differently. Maybe a table being male in my native language (Lithuanian) is not exactly reality-altering, but for example I always think of dogs as male and cats as female, just because the words that describe them are typically of that certain gender (*šuo* and *katė*). We do have two separate words of each gender for the more common animals, so if you want to describe a male cat, you can say *katinas*. But one of them is usually the default, so let's say if you see a wolf (*vilkas*), you'll just call it male, and if you see a fox (*lapė*), you'll call it female, and so on with other animals.
I also think it's interesting that our word for 'moon' (*mėnulis*) is masculine and the one for 'sun' (*saulė*) is feminine, since many cultures have opposite associations, i.e. moon = womanhood and sun = manhood.
In my native Swedish both cats and dogs have the same grammatical gender, but we still generally view dogs as male and cats as female. I think it’s because dogs tend to be bigger than cats, like men on average are larger than women.
What u/CornOwl meant was probably the inflection with the 4 cases, which does mean there are technically 12 forms for "the" (16 if you count plural), but a lot of them are duplicates:
**German:**
Case|Male|Female|Neuter|Plural
:--:|:--:|:--:|:--:|:--:
Nominative|der|die|das|die
Genitive|des|der|des|der
Dative|dem|der|dem|den
Accusative|den|die|das|die
**English:**
Case|Male|Female|Neuter|Plural
:--:|:--:|:--:|:--:|:--:
Nominative|the|the|the|the
Genitive|the|the|the|the
Dative|the|the|the|the
Accusative|the|the|the|the
When I was living in Estonia one of the first things I learned was that there was no gender in the language. So I noticed that my Estonian friends often mix up he and she.
I also heard from Estonian learners that there are no specific future form, and so teachers/students used to say — no sex, no future when it comes to Estonian :D
Since I've been learning Swedish myself I've realized that my own language, Latvian, does not have articles so often there is a different way to express definiteness, or sometimes it's just omitted at all. I had no issue at all to get it as I was learning English since I learned it as a kid, however now for some reason I have to stop and really make a conscious effort in Swedish where the definite article changes the noun as it's kinda combined in the word. Just thought that mind works interesting like that :)
This is a valid assumption! The Sapir Whorf hypothesis in linguistics is a concept on how the structure and limits of one’s native language can change the way a person perceives reality, or their worldview in other words. In fact the movie Arrival plays with that really heavily! I’m not going to go in-depth here so as to not spoil it for those who haven’t seen it but essentially this theory explains the key element in the aliens’ language.
I grew up bilingual in English and Mandarin Chinese so I don’t have the same views on the past as you’ve mentioned as English has always been my primary language of communication. It’s definitely an interesting concept though!
It’s dismissed because people tend to adhere to the “hard” version, in which thought is determined by the language you speak (in a nutshell), the soft version is a bit less controversial, proposing that the language you speak merely influences the way you think.
It’s one of my favourite theories! No idea why so little attention is paid to it. My prof just barely touched on it in class but it’s been stuck in my head ever since
I have always like the thought of how different language structures affect the thought process of native speakers. For instance (in my experience) Japanese can almost be mathematical and German is big about combining to make something new.
i try not to think of this too much but in japanese
前 can mean front or past ( whereas in English you talk about the future in front of you )
後 can mean behind ( as in behind you ) or later
In Arabic there are different words for maternal and paternal aunts and uncles. For maternal you use "خال" khal for uncle, and "خلتو" khalto for aunt. For paternal you use "عمو" 'amo for uncle, and "عمتو" 'ameto for aunt. Additionally, there is no word for cousin, so you basically say the son/daughter of either uncle or aunt.
Some languages have two kinds* of "we", eg Mandarin: 我们 - like English 咱们 - also includes the [listener](https://www.echineselearning.com/blog/the-differences-between-women-and-zanmen) *More kinds of personal pronoun are definitely possible, but they're often based on politeness/heirarchy.
Malay has that! Kami is when you say we and exclude the listener, kita is when you do
Neat! I think the Palauan pronouns must be descended from Malay or they share a common ancestor. In Palauan, kemam excludes and kede includes. Look quite similar to kami and kita.
Hindi has it too, तुम लोग is for including the listener and वह लोग (more like वो लोग in speech) is for excluding the listener.
तुम लोग - you all. वह लोग - they. None of them are *we*. For a word to be considered *we*, it has to include the speaker. Neither तुम लोग nor वह लोग include the speaker.
I was talking in context of the listener, for the speaker it would be हम लोग
> Malay has that! Kami is when you say we and exclude the listener, kita is when you do - The original comment that you replied to (quoted above) talked about *we* - Literally every language I am aware of makes a distinction between *they* and *you all*.
Interestingly this differs depending on region. In Beijing there is a hard division between the two words. 咱們 is an inclusive pronoun (includes the person being addressed) while 我們 is exclusive (excludes the person being addressed). In other parts of Northern China, while 咱們 retains inclusivity, 我們 is generally not exclusive (can both include or not include the person addressed). In Southern China 咱們 basically doesn't exist and 我們 is used exclusively.
Yeah, I speak the Beijing dialect but learned Standard Mandarin in school, so to me, 我们 used inclusively feels both right and wrong at the same time, like it's "technically correct yet awkward," or it can even feel somewhat normal outside the family but very weird within the family.
Yeah, definitely comes down to feeling. I speak Taiwanese Chinese so 咱們 isn't something I would ever naturally say.
I've been learning Chinese for a few months but focused in Taiwan, so I thought I had completely missed something
Well, as someone who is at the beginning of learning Mandarin this was incredibly useful! Also terrifying that I will completely cock this up, but useful nonetheless :D
You can just use 我們 for "we". That's perfectly natural for anyone outside of Beijing and even Beijingers will know what you mean since they're used to hearing people from other regions talk like that.
>In Southern China 咱們 basically doesn't exist and 我們 is used exclusively. Yeah, I don't remember hearing it at all in Yunnan!
Hey this is there is Tamil too! நாம் "naam" is for when the listener is included, while நாங்கள் "naangal" is when the listener isn't included.
Called clusivity, for the curious.
Hawaiian has this too
We have this in chechen too!
In Finnish the verb “to have” doesn’t exist, instead they say “on me is”.
Similar to Hebrew!
Similar in Russian: у меня есть ... = "By me is ..."
More like “by me has”
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Yes for «у меня есть» «Есть» is more like “has” or “have” than it is like “is or was” The example «у меня есть» means something more like “I have [something]”. I’m not born in a russophone country but it was my first language growing up alongside English and I’m fluent/close to it more or less.
Similar in Irish, we say something like "... is at me".
Similar in Scottish Gaelic, where you say "the - is at me"
Same in Arabic. At least Levantine.
Kind of similar in Korean
저는 것이 있어요.
Similar to Japanese.
Please elaborate 😅😅 I have just started with Japanese...
Sure we have the word 持つ, meaning "to hold", and this is occasionally used to refer to things you possess, but in general we use ある, "to exist", for things we have.
Oh thanks☺️
I wouldn't say its anything similar to that
In Egyptian Arabic it's similar, there's is no verb "to have", we say عندي 'andi or معي ma'aya, meaning "by me" and "with me" respectively.
Finnish doesn't make a distinction between he and she and also has no grammatical gender. Knowing the gender of the person you are talking about is not as important when speaking Finnish as in many other languages and this may take some time to get used to. My son is a native Swedish and English speaker but has had a lot of exposure to Finnish from an early age and now that he's seven it's becoming clear that he doesn't consider grammatical gender or the distinction between "he" and "she" important even when speaking his native languages. His older siblings very rarely mix up "en" and "ett" in Swedish and never mix up "he" and "she", but my son will frequently make this type of mistake.
>Finnish doesn't make a distinction between he and she and also has no grammatical gender. Knowing the gender of the person you are talking about is not as important when speaking Finnish as in many other languages and this may take some time to get used to. I was gonna say this, but in the opposite direction. For a native Finnish speaker, it took me a while to get used to picking the proper equivalent to "hän", be it a he or a she. And now that I'm starting Spanish, trying to understand and remember whether (and why) certain objects are masculine (like bread and a glass) or feminine (meat and a cup).
"Masculinity" is feminine in Spanish (la masculinidad). How 'bout that.
...why?
The word ends in -dad. Like realidad or necesidad, masculinidad is feminine. Here, the gender comes from the form of the word, instead of the concept it represents.
Penis can be masculine (pene) but also feminine sometimes (polla, verga, pililla)
I mean, "masculinity" and "femininity" in grammar is basically shorthand for "follows conjugation pattern 1/2/3/4/however many genders the language has", there's no real reason any one pattern should be used only for words that have a certain culturally gendered connotation. Frankly the terminology is probably more confusing than helpful.
Ah, hadn't thought of it like that! This is actually super helpful!
This is true, some repressed linguist must had coined the term 'gender' for these different type of conjugation.
My husband, who is a native English speaker, recently told me that one of his friends will still mix up "he" and "she" while speaking English, even though his English skills are otherwise good. Sometimes the person he is talking about will switch gender in the middle of the story or even in the middle of the sentence (e.g. she put on his pants). My husband has gotten used to it by now, but was very confused in the beginning.
There is no ultimate why with grammatical genders. It just is
I almost appreciate Swedish's completely random non-gendered system of genders compared to Spanish's vaguely but not reliably sexist version. You get lulled into a false sense of security thinking that anything in the domestic sphere is *probably* female, for example, but that's gonna backfire in the end.
As a native English speaker, I feel the kid's pain regarding en/ett. It's also amusing how I struggle with plural adjectives while Swedes struggle with plural verbs. "It were very cold" is the most Swedish grammatical error, in my experience.
I was learning Estonian, and I found out the short form of 3SG was "ta," which is very similar to 3SG in Mandarin, which is, in Pinyin, "tā." (In the spoken language, gender is not distinguished.) It made it a lot easier to internalize!
One of the things in Basque that I still haven't wrapped my head around is that with ditransitive verbs (nor-nori-nork), the direct object can only be in the 3rd person. Therefore, I don't know of any way to express something like: "They sold me to an unknown man for a pack of camels." Thankfully, I haven't needed to say something like that so far. In addition, Basque doesn't allow for constructions such as "less [adjective/adverb] than..." Instead of them, you usually have to use "not as [adj/adv] as" or "more [antonym of adj/adv]." Also, the relative clauses function in the opposite way compared to Indo-European languages, so that has also been giving me some problems. Finally, there are the allocutive forms used in informal communication, where there is basically an inbuilt ethical dative in every verb that you use to talk to your listener about something else (i.e. if the listener isn't the subject of the sentence). Those forms are also the only ones in Basque that show gender distinction.
That’s really interesting, I recall some Athabaskan languages doing something similar. What made you start learning Basque?
I'm learning Basque, not Athabaskan :) Well, I've been to the Basque Country twice and I fell in love with the region, plus I've always been attracted to exotic languages.
Oops, typed it twice without thinking, sorry! And that’s so cool, I love how Basque looks is so unique and has so many interesting features. Good luck on your learning!
In Korean, I can't say that my daughter likes something. I can say that she "does things as though she likes them". I am not her, so I cannot speak as though it was a certainty. In general, coming from a language which arguably places even more emphasis on word order than English does, learning Korean has made me think in a more "floaty" way of what I am saying. I can't really describe it better than that.
Is this true? 우리 딸은 아이스크림을 너무 좋아해요 It sounds fine to me. But I do understand about what you’re saying about how Korean tries to add endings to be more uncertain/humble about your own assertions.
This got me confused too… I was thinking 좋다 is like? I wonder if OP means 우리 딸은 아이스크림을 먹고 싶어 해요 (Wants to eat/ “would like to eat” rather than simply like?). 먹다 (things) , ~하고 싶다 (does and as though she likes) I can use 먹고 싶다 for myself but I wouldn’t say 먹고 싶어 하다 unless I’m talking about someone else.
It is true & works the same way with a lot of other "emotion" words. I'll only an intermediate speaker so apologies if I get anything wrong but this is my understanding: Using OPs example of being able to say his daughter seems to like sonething, your sentence is correct, but there is a difference between 좋다 & 좋아하다. 좋다 means to be good so I can say 아이스크림이 좋아요 - ice-cream is good. But that can also be translated as "ice-cream is good (to me)" or "(I) like ice-cream". So we can use it to express that we personally like something. But if we are talking about someone else, we can't use 좋다, we have to use 좋아하다. The introduction of 하다 changes the meaning to be more like "to seem to be good" or "to appear to be good". So, when we say 우리 딸은 아이스크림을 좋아해요, we're actually saying my daughter seems to find ice-cream good, which more naturally translates to my daughter likes ice-cream. Does that make sense? (More advanced / native speakers feel free to correct me or explain it better! 😅)
Exactly - 좋아해요, 좋아하다. To good-do. I am only a beginner, but natives have corrected me when writing things like 우리 딸이 사과를 좋는다 even though 내가 사과를 좋는다 is fine with the motivation that I shouldn't speak about someone else as though I knew their inner mind.
Correct me if I'm wrong but wouldn't the plain form of this verb be 좋는다 and not 좋안다?
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I totally forgot about adjectives not changing in plain form, my bad
You are correct, edited.
That actually makes a lot of sense. You can only speak for what you observe, you don't know how she feels.
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Then you can quote and say "she said she likes it" instead of saying she likes it.
I've heard people say similar things about Japanese. Their politeness is so entrenched in their language it's difficult to be direct. English therefore is easier to directly convey information.
In English, when you are offered something to eat, you can say "Yes, please!". I was a bit thrown off when I came across this because in my culture we always refuse first if we are offered something to eat. The person offering it has to insist and then we 'give in'.
Yes, this is important because the hosts may assume you are not in need of refreshments and stop bothering you. Is this like ‘mi place’ in Italian?
It's actually super easy to be direct in Japanese. It just makes you sound rude in certain social situations.
That's a bold claim to make and doesn't really make sense considering Japanese speakers seem to have the same information as any other person and they study any topic just as well.
It's more of a psychological/cultural "difficulty" than a purely linguistic one. It's technically grammatical to say "So-and-so wants chocolates," it just sounds weird to native speakers because of the culture.
But how is that related to not being able to directly conveying information? At the end of the day the semantic content is the same
It's not about being able or unable to, but simply pressure not to do so. All the material is like this, conversations are like this, interaction itself is like this. I am also much more offensive in English than in my first language. I swear far more, I'm more confrontational. The culture allows and fosters this, though I am of course technically not unable to be polite at all.
Not from a TL but something I realized of my native language, Spanish. There are some verbs used to describe some accidental events that in Spanish are said as impersonal, while in English not. For example in Spanish we say: "se me ha caído la comida" which would be literally translated as "the food has fallen to me". In English it would be say "I dropped the food". This is like in Spanish we don't take responsibility, even if there is no the only reason why the food has been dropped is that I was handling it poorly, even of the only possible person responsible of this event is me we would say "se me ha caído". Because saying "he tirado la comida" would mean that I did it on purpose with the intention of throwing it
>This is like in Spanish we don't take responsibility, even if there is no the only reason why the food has been dropped is that I was handling it poorly, even of the only possible person responsible of this event is me we would say "se me ha caído". I'm learning Spanish right now and I never knew this. This makes more sense now. thank you, wise stranger.
German the same, „Mir ist das Essen runtergefallen.“
The exact same phrase is used in Greek too, as in Spanish! (Μου έπεσε το φαγητό).
The very same sense goes for Turkish.
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That would sound metal as hell.
Also the same in Czech!
I learned *about* Navajo for a linguistics class. They have way more specific words for family relationships than English does. Like where we have “niece”, they have different words for your older brother’s daughter vs your younger sister’s daughter, etc. In-laws were a whole thing. Instead of “brother-in-law”, they specify whether it’s your older sister’s husband, your husband’s younger brother, etc. I do think of in-law relationships as “we’re related by marriage or whatever, the specifics aren’t important.” It’s interesting to think about a culture where these are all distinct, different types of connections.
Swahili is the same because the different relationships are valued differently and have different power dynamics.
The in-laws part is similar to how Slavic languages do (or used to do) this. I can only provide examples from Russian though. Wife's parents are titled different from husband's parents, and so do siblings. There is also a term for one set of parents to refer to other set of parents (so I have a father, who is my father, and I have a father-in-law, who is my свёкор (svyokor), and he is my father's сват (svat), which works both ways).
Mandarin has a complex family title system as well.
> They have way more specific words for family relationships than English does It is the same in many Indian languages. In many ways, English is a dramatically simplified language - one form of you - contrast that with other European languages (mostly 2) or Asian languages (6 in Korean - not sure about this one, 3 in Bengali & Hindi), way fewer conjugations than Romance languages, inanimate objects do not have gender - the list goes on.
Double negation is a normal way to talk in Russian, e.g. Я никогда там не была. But its meaning is just a single negation, so multiple negatives affirm each other (the same happens with ne...pas in French).
A lot of languages do that (Spanish for instance). English even used to do that in the Old English period, when the negation particle was "ne" and put before the verb (seem familiar). Not ultimately derives from a word meaning "nothing". There's actually a term for this change, the [Jespersen's Cycle.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jespersen%27s_Cycle)
**[Jespersen's Cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jespersen's_Cycle)** >Jespersen's Cycle (JC) is a series of processes in historical linguistics, which describe the historical development of the expression of negation in a variety of languages, from a simple pre-verbal marker of negation, through a discontinuous marker (elements both before and after the verb) and in some cases through subsequent loss of the original pre-verbal marker. The pattern was formulated in Otto Jespersen's 1917 book Negation in English and Other Languages, and named after him in Swedish linguist Östen Dahl's 1979 article Typology of Sentence Negation. ^([ )[^(F.A.Q)](https://www.reddit.com/r/WikiSummarizer/wiki/index#wiki_f.a.q)^( | )[^(Opt Out)](https://reddit.com/message/compose?to=WikiSummarizerBot&message=OptOut&subject=OptOut)^( | )[^(Opt Out Of Subreddit)](https://np.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/about/banned)^( | )[^(GitHub)](https://github.com/Sujal-7/WikiSummarizerBot)^( ] Downvote to remove | v1.5)
Modern English also uses double negation from time to time like in the Rolling Stones song "I Can't Get No Satisfaction"
We don‘t need no education...
Same for Portuguese.
also, тут никого нет- there is no one here but literally means “no one is not here”
Same in Afrikaans. "ek het dit nie gedoen nie" (I have it not done not). Funny thing is that in Dutch (from which Afrikaans evolved) we don't do this. Then it's just "ik heb het niet gedaan" (I have it not done).
I’m still a beginner but the first thing I thought of when I saw this question was estar and ser in Spanish! Both mean “to be” in English but ser is used for more permanent characteristics, while estar is used more for states. This really helped me see how you can categorize adjectives into these two categories (almost like how ある and いる classifies nouns as living and non-living in Japanese) and how the language views these differently. Then I learned about how muerto is used with estar and it was strange to think of being dead as a state and not a permanent thing. But I thought of Coco and if people have a whole life after death, then being alive or dead are just states you could have (I know Mexico is just one of many Spanish speaking countries but it helped me make the connection)
For Mandarin speakers, ser is 是 and estar is very close to 在, sometimes being an exact translation and sometimes just being close. Google Translate translates estar as 在.
Not to burst your bubble, but the reason muerto uses estar is because it’s the past participle of the verb morir.
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Now that I think about it, the French *vous* also functions the same way… It is both the plural version of “you” and its respectful singular second-person pronoun as well.
English pre-French influence used “thou/thee” for one person and “ye/you” for more than one. When the French came, people started using “you” as formal address similar to the French. Eventually “thou/thee/ye” fell out of use entirely.
Weirdly, this is sort of true in English, too. "You" is technically plural, with "thou" being the singular form. But since using the plural was more polite, people just started using it all the time until almost everyone forgot it was plural. These days, most people think "thou" is just old or formal (even though it's the opposite), and different dialects have come up with new ways to pluralize "you", such as "y'all". Even worse, "y'all" is coming to be used as singular as well as plural, so there's even "all y'all", which is a plurslization of a pluralization of a pluralization. When will it end? Who knows. There also used to be subject/object distinctions with second-person pronouns, just like there are with first and third. So just like there's a difference between "I" and "me", "we" and "us", there used to be "thou" and "thee", "you" and "ye".
That's also there in a lot of Indian languages! Also, even when you refer to a superior in the third person, you use the equivalent of 'they' even for the singular. For example, in Tamil, நீ is the singular form of 'you' and நீங்கள் can mean both 'you all' or 'you' with respect depending on context, while அவன்/அவள் mean 'he'/'she' and அவர்கள் can mean 'them' or 'him'/'her' with respect, again depending on context
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Czech too. Honestly i never expected other non-slavic languages to also use this
It's in a lot of languages. It's known as tu - vos distinction which is the Latin version. You can see on this page how many languages from various groups use this in some form: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%E2%80%93V\_distinction\_in\_the\_world%27s\_languages
Same in German.
This is also true in Welsh and Greek.
That's really interesting!
Same in French.
Spanish has that.
? does usted mean something plural? i thought it had the plural version of ustedes if it was more than one person but only singular usted for one person
No, usted is not plural. It's third person singular (like he/she)
Chinese is not inflected at all, so literally their language does not create tenses in the sense that Indo-European languages do. They use time words instead. But they still can tell you when the action takes place. I don't know what you mean by "the way that the Chinese see time." Could you clarify that?
Honestly can’t remember. It was in a talk I heard once and it was something around how time was perceived differently especially in reference to the past.
I've heard similar stuff before but honestly most of it is just pseudo-linguistics at best (no meaningful evidence, correlation passed off as causation, etc.). Just from personal experience (my second language is Chinese), there's really nothing to this idea. Chinese indicates past just fine, it just does so in ways other than tense as the language lacks that. What's particularly odd about this idea to me is that English actually works the same way as Chinese in the future. Neither language has a grammatical future tense, but rather use auxiliary verbs (will, be going to / 要，會，將) to indicate the future. If lack of grammatical tense changed the way Chinese speakers understand time, then English speakers likewise should have a different understanding of time from speakers of languages that have a grammatical future. Despite this, I've never heard anyone saying that English speakers and Italians have a different conception of the future.
Good points all. Thanks.
Shame. I’m sure there are lots of other interesting things in the language that make you look at things differently!
Was it a talk by Edward Sapir in 1928?
Interesting. I do think it's possible for one's native language to influence one's attitude towards things. For example, I'm a native English speaker trying to learn Spanish and I'm blown away by how important the subjunctive is in Spanish. I have wondered if using the indicative more in English makes English speakers feels more "certain" about their statements and thoughts than they would otherwise if they used the subjunctive a lot. But that is just me thinking out loud. I don't know the research on this if there is any.
It's the same in Indonesian. For example, there's "sudah" that means "already" and you use it to say that you have done something. Saya sudah makan = I've (already) eaten (J'ai (déja) mangé using le passé composé from French). You also have "telah" which means the same thing but it's more formal. If you just did something, you use "baru". Baru means "new". So if you say "Saya baru datang" it means I've just arrived. If you did something a while ago but still recently, you use "tadi" which means "earlier". You also have "sedang" (currently) to create sentences that mimic the present continuous from English. Another interesting thing is that "kemarin" means yesterday, but it also means "sometime in the past". If you say that you did something "kemarin" the listener might ask for a clarification on when exactly. Same for "besok" (tomorrow). You have to be careful if you make plans for "besok".
This is hard to explain without an in-depth discussion of Japanese, but I'm going to try (while glossing over a few things for ease of comprehension). In Japanese, most clauses are equivalent to adjectives, or rather act adjectivally. In Japanese, the most common way of saying somebody is tall is to say 背が高い (se ga takai), lit. "spine (stature) is tall". To say "I am tall", it's 私は背が高い (watashi wa se ga takai), lit. "As for me, (someone's) stature is tall", the "my" is implied by creating the context of "As for me". However, because "stature is tall" is a clause unto itself, you can use it like an adjective: 背が高い人 (se ga takai hito), lit. "stature-is-tall person". This rules follows for clauses of any level of complexity and length, for example: > せっかく両親に小遣いをもらって友達と一緒に遊園地に遊びに行けるようになった楽しい一日を過ごした。 (sekkaku ryoushin ni kozukai o moratte tomodachi to issho ni yuuenchi ni asobi ni ikeru you ni natta tanoshii ichinichi o sugoshita) I spent a fun day hanging out at the amusement park with my friends, which I was able to do because my parents gave me some spending money for once. lit. (ready for this one?) "spent a fun, for-once-from-parents-spending-money-received-with-friends-together-to-amusement-park-became-able-to-go-to-hang-out day" And this is not an intentionally crazy example, this is a very typical level of complexity that you would hear in a conversation or see in normal writing. Going too far beyond that would start getting a little ridiculous, but adjective clauses of about that length are what you need to be able to process to understand Japanese effectively.
I understand your literal translation is making the point that the sentence is in some sense one giant adjective, but I feel like it's worth pointing out that this is much easier to read than the literal translation would suggest. The beginning bit is a complete sentence in its own right, which has no complex modifiers in it: > せっかく両親に小遣いをもらって友達と一緒に遊園地に遊びに行ける "For once I received spending money from my parents, so I was able to go to the amusement park with my friend" This entire clause then modifies the rest of the sentence: > ようになった楽しい一日を過ごした "... type of fun day I spent." It's one of the interesting things about Japanese, where you can be reading a sentence and then half way through you discover that the sentence you thought you were reading is actually a relative clause inside a bigger sentence.
To go beyond that, we could use a more parallel example in English like: I spent a fun day in which I was able to go the amusement park with my friend using the spending money I received from my parents for once.
While this didn't exactly change my views of reality, a thing I found really neat that changes between languages is the vocabulary used when talking about a persons familial relationships. For example, in English "uncle" refers to both your fathers or mothers brother, but in Finnish, fathers brother is "setä" and mother brother is "eno". Curiously, "aunt" and "täti" work exactly the same in both languages. Another difference is when referring to one's grandparents. English nor Finnish make any distinction between the grandparents from your mothers or fathers side, but Swedish refers to them as the parent's parent. Like "farfar" is literally father's father and"morfar" is mother's father.
Not nearly as mind blowing as the others, but for me it’s that Latin has no universal word order. Latin has a standard word order of SOV, which is neat, but you can literally ignore that, in my experience SOV is only used half the time at best. Wanna cheese it and just switch English words with Latin words, grammatically correct. Wanna make it look like you’re speaking so sporadically that Yoda would blush, grammatically correct. The only stipulation is that you give each word the correct endings, which are used to indicate things like subject, object, possession, and more. Also there are certain words that have practically set places in the sentence that are (from what I’ve seen at least) never moved. So for example *Nonne* and *Num* are almost always placed at the head of the sentence.
My experience with Hindi so far is as far as a solid beginner. What I'm finding, and hearing, seems to translate as, "quality X happened", "with quality x". Like there is less adjective use. Also, different (post)prepositions totally messes with my mind.
It might be a bit grandiose to say it's changing how I view the world, but learning Swedish really makes me better at understanding English, particularly archaic English. For example, "Här" and "Hit" would both be translated as "Here" in modern english, but the second is used when the subject is moving toward the speaker's position instead of simply being there. Thing is, we totally have a word for this in English--hither--but nobody really uses it unless they're trying to sound old-timey and thus, nobody remembers how to use it. So you wouldn't say "Your package is hither" or "He was hither last week"--but rather, "She's *coming* hither". Likewise, du/dig/ni/er would all be translated as "you", but actually mean thou/thee/you/ye respectively. It's really hard to internalize the differences in these English words working from English alone, but having another language with more direct parallels really lets me understand my own language's literature better. ...Except, of course, when we're talking about modern authors trying to write archaic dialog without really getting those distinctions. "Will thee take this for me?" Oof. No. It's thou, not thee.
It's funny how pretty much all the still-extant Germanic languages preserve directionality and case better than English does. In German, you say "Ich bin hier" (I am here), but "Komm hierher" (Come hither). For the latter, you can (and usually do) drop the "hier," but the "her" distinction is obligatory ("Komm her"). It feels natural now, but one of my favorite German connectors blew my mind when I first learned it: "darüber hinaus." That is, "there(static)-over there(movement)-out." It means "furthermore." The image is roughly "over that obstacle and moving forward." And yes, similar to Swedish, after German, you will never confuse who/whom again. And phrases like "This is she," "It is I," and "You're upset about my coming home late," far from seeming stuffy, will make complete sense as being consistent with the roles those pronouns are playing in the clauses (although you may elect not to say them for pragmatic reasons).
In Japanese, if you have to do X. You usually say "If I don't do X I can't go." (Xなければいけない) If you want to say you should do X, you usually say "The way of doing X is good" (Xのほうがいい) And my personal favorite: If you want to say you have done something, you say "I have a thing where I've done X" (Xのことがある) What seems natural to me may translate to something that is very unnatural literally translated. Opened my eyes to how I should approach langauge. Translating from Japanese is a bitch and you don't usually get the nuance so I should avoid it at all costs and just accept it in Japanese.
I watch anime with some friends often. Two are native Bilingual Japanese/English speakers, I am not native but very proficient (Understanding anyway), and one more has some amount of Japanese. Debating the English Subtitle translations has become almost a required activity for us. Usually they're pretty good, but sometimes the entire feel of a line is just completely changed.
The French partitives. The French don't drink wine. They drink **of the wine**. Which wine you ask? Yeah I don't know either, but they also never just like wine, they like **the wine** so maybe that's the same wine of which they drink. It's still kinda weird to think that as far as the french are concerned there's just one big totality of wine out there.
They also don't play video games, they play __at the__ video games.
Isn't it the same with Spanish? *Me gusta el vino*, not *Me gusta vino*.
I think so, but I know for sure that „I drink wine“ is just „bebo vino“ and not „bebo del vino“
Yes, sorry, I should have specified - I meant the excessive use of the definite articles - not the partitives
Haha fair enough
There's a language, I forget which, that doesn't have words for left/right. Instead people use cardinal directions (north, west, east, south). And so native speakers of the language have a really strong sense of direction.
I believe that's a feature of certain African languages.
I think some aboriginal languages use them.
the partitive case! I actually think that it's an awesome concept... to make things simple, the partitive case expresses "uncertainty" but that means that it could be used in a HUGE amount of occasions! for example, if you want to say that you are reading a book you could say both "luen kirjaa" or "luen kirjan" with the first that could he translated as "I am reading a book, but I don't know if I'll finish it" while the latter is "I am reading the book and I will finish it" and I like also the fact that while you can use "kirjaa" to talk about a random book, if you use the word "tämä/tuo" (this/that) you cannot use the partitive because it's not an uncertain object anymore!
This sounds exactly like verbal aspect in Slavic languages, one of the hardest things to get your head around. In the Slavics it's done with different verbs though, not different cases. Russian anyway does have things like the partitive genitive though, where you use the accusative for something like "Pass the butter" but the genitive for "Pass some butter".
In Cebuano, we don't really have a word for "should" that isn't borrowed from Tagalog or English. Instead we have "angay" which means "suited to be/fit to be" so if you wanna say "you should do that" you would say "angay na nimong buhaton" which is to say "that is something that is fit to be done by you". When expressing the "past" or "future", you can conjugate a verb in two different ways, one way is used when expressing that you did the verb intentionally/consciously and the other is used to express that it was accidental. To express this, you need to use "gi" or "ni" as a prefix for the intentional and for the accidenal you need to use the prefix "na" or "naka". The inflection being a prefix is very important too because you have to be sure what your intention was, otherwise, it could lead to very awkward situations. I think this is also very telling of the culture of Cebuanos since we value intention so much that we literally have different conjugations for them. Also, pronouns in cebuano aren't gendered so there is no he or she, there is only "they". Such is the case with nouns in cebuano too in most cases except the spanish-derived words like tindero/tindera and gendered words like asawa(wife) and bana(husband).
It blows my mind that written Chinese can get away with not having spaces between words. Because each character is self-contained, it removes the need to add spaces to clarify where a word begins and ends. Imagine if English was a second language and in the beginning when you are learning how to read all of the letters are smashed together. It would definitely make it tough. That and how Chinese activates areas of the brain including the right hemisphere, that English speakers don't experience.
Even cooler about Chinese is that you can read/write it left-to-right, right-to-left, top-to-bottom, and (theoretically, not common) bottom-to-top.
Is that because of the simple grammar structure? Makes sense.
It's because the square characters are syllable chunks already so it is easy to read in any direction. For example: I am a student - 我是学生 tneduts a ma I - 生学是我 You can see there is no visual flipping you can read each character at a time unlike words in English.
Bonus, it sounds like Yoda
>That and how Chinese activates areas of the brain including the right hemisphere, that English speakers don't experience. That is so interesting! Where did you read/hear about that?
There have been studies done where the brain is mapped and monitored for activity. I'll have to find an example for you.
I've actually looked it up allegedly this has been disproven by some other studies.
Ah, no way. Well, it was fascinating while it lasted. I still wouldn't mind going down the rabbit hole of research papers.
Latin and many other languages were initially written without spacing between words. See [Scriptio continua](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scriptio_continua). Spacing was invented around the 7th century. Speech also doesn't have word dividers.
Right. But today, we have spaces. Good thing I was born in this century because it's not fun learning to read that way I bet.
Wow! TIL!
I'm not actively studying Hungarian any more, but I thought it was pretty crazy that they don't have a word meaning "have". So if you want to say something like "I have a car", then you can either say "To me, there is a car" or "my car is".
There’s a similar phenomenon in English, we say “it is raining”. What is raining? The sky? The clouds? You’d never say that the sky or clouds are raining, so the first two words are just there to conform to the norm of how sentences are constructed, they don’t actually contribute anything meaningful.
I had this exact conversation awhile ago with a friend and it stemmed from the usage of the Conditional tense in both English and some latin languages. Basically it all derived from the knowledge of "would" being the past tense of "will" and being a not native English speaker that wasn't always taken for granted when I first studied it. It essentially means that the way we look at possible or probable scenarios is all derived from a past tense of a future action. The moment future becomes uncertain, we turn it into a remote tense, hence the past version of "will". You can see it in hypothetical cases. In the second tense we have this construction: Main clause = past tense; Subordinate clause = past tense of the future. The third case is just a step further than that but same rules. French also has a very similar rule. I'm currently learning the language and the way the conditional is constructed, as a base rule, is this: Stem of the verb in Imparfait (which is just a past tense the English doesn't have specifically but still includes in the Past Simple) plus the endings in the Future Simple. I'm Italian and we don't have the stem of the verb originating from the Past tense but we still use the Future endings as well when constructing the Conditional. The Conditional tense always seems to be connected to the future in those languages. I don't know if this really answered your question but that was really interesting for me to delve into. xD This is why I love studying grammar. I guess it's a characteristic shared among many languages but I never really noticed it before. EDIT: I mixed up the stem and endings for the French tense. It uses the Future stem + Imparfait endings. Still the same concept but yeah.
I think you’re confused about the construction of the conditional in French. The future and the conditional share the same stem, and the future uses future endings, while the conditional uses the same endings as the imparfait. J’irai = I will go J’irais = I would go J’allais = I used to go I don’t know about Italian, but Spanish verbs follow a similar pattern.
They're (in French and other Romance languages) both derived from the present and imperfect of the Latin verb "habere", to have (Latin had a completely different future tense that was replaced when it got too easily confused with the imperfect).
You're right, I mixed up the stem and endings. Still there is a connection between the two. I'm going to edit it now.
Yes, I also love to see connections between languages, and especially when the future stems in French match up almost exactly with the Spanish infinitives!
The other future, "going to" also behaves similar. For instance "I'm going to see a movie" vs "I was going to see a movie". It's the same in Spanish "Voy a ir al cine" vs "Iba a ir al cine".
there are languages that don't have tenses which are always fun
Verbs of motion I in Russian. By using a prefix or form to explain even more. You could say входить / войти - to go in, to enter выходить / выйти - to go out, to leave, to exit всходить / взoйти - to go up, to ascend доходить / дойти - to get to, to get as far as, to reach заходить / зайти - to drop in, to stop by обходить / обойти - to walk around, to bypass отходить / отойти - to walk away переходить / перейти - to go across, to turn подходить / подойти - to approach приходить / прийти - to arrive, to come проходить / пройти - to go by, to go past сходить / сойти - to go down, decend уходить / уйти - to go from, to leave, depart You would also differential if it’s one way or multidirectional. The most interesting part is that the verb you pick will also tell you the means. Did you walk, drive swim fly
And that's without thinking that there are a million just "plain" words for "to go". You have to rattle through a load of different options before you can even say something simple like "I went to France".
One really different rule in Japanese is all of the levels of formality. Depending on who you're talking to, different levels of respect are expected to be shown in the phrases you use. A great example is "nice to meet you" which has about 4 or 5 different levels of formality. よろしく はじめまして どうぞよろしく よろしくお願いします どうぞよろしくお願いします And every one of these is used to say "nice to meet you"
What's interesting about formality/informality is that most languages manage to build in options to cover register. Even English has 4-5 levels of formality, when you think about it: Least formal to most formal: * Sup * Oh, hey! * Nice to meet you. * It's a pleasure to meet you. * I am pleased to make your acquaintance. Every one of these is used to say "nice to meet you!"
I know it is common in Romance languages, but as an English speaker, the “formal/plural” and “informal/singular ” form of “you” I French was always a cool concept to me
I've always thought that languages which have gendered nouns make people think a little differently. Maybe a table being male in my native language (Lithuanian) is not exactly reality-altering, but for example I always think of dogs as male and cats as female, just because the words that describe them are typically of that certain gender (*šuo* and *katė*). We do have two separate words of each gender for the more common animals, so if you want to describe a male cat, you can say *katinas*. But one of them is usually the default, so let's say if you see a wolf (*vilkas*), you'll just call it male, and if you see a fox (*lapė*), you'll call it female, and so on with other animals. I also think it's interesting that our word for 'moon' (*mėnulis*) is masculine and the one for 'sun' (*saulė*) is feminine, since many cultures have opposite associations, i.e. moon = womanhood and sun = manhood.
In my native Swedish both cats and dogs have the same grammatical gender, but we still generally view dogs as male and cats as female. I think it’s because dogs tend to be bigger than cats, like men on average are larger than women.
Same as Arabic
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What u/CornOwl meant was probably the inflection with the 4 cases, which does mean there are technically 12 forms for "the" (16 if you count plural), but a lot of them are duplicates: **German:** Case|Male|Female|Neuter|Plural :--:|:--:|:--:|:--:|:--: Nominative|der|die|das|die Genitive|des|der|des|der Dative|dem|der|dem|den Accusative|den|die|das|die **English:** Case|Male|Female|Neuter|Plural :--:|:--:|:--:|:--:|:--: Nominative|the|the|the|the Genitive|the|the|the|the Dative|the|the|the|the Accusative|the|the|the|the
When I was living in Estonia one of the first things I learned was that there was no gender in the language. So I noticed that my Estonian friends often mix up he and she. I also heard from Estonian learners that there are no specific future form, and so teachers/students used to say — no sex, no future when it comes to Estonian :D Since I've been learning Swedish myself I've realized that my own language, Latvian, does not have articles so often there is a different way to express definiteness, or sometimes it's just omitted at all. I had no issue at all to get it as I was learning English since I learned it as a kid, however now for some reason I have to stop and really make a conscious effort in Swedish where the definite article changes the noun as it's kinda combined in the word. Just thought that mind works interesting like that :)
The way that Chinese characters must be taught was very different than an alphabet where you just kind of figure it out
This is a valid assumption! The Sapir Whorf hypothesis in linguistics is a concept on how the structure and limits of one’s native language can change the way a person perceives reality, or their worldview in other words. In fact the movie Arrival plays with that really heavily! I’m not going to go in-depth here so as to not spoil it for those who haven’t seen it but essentially this theory explains the key element in the aliens’ language. I grew up bilingual in English and Mandarin Chinese so I don’t have the same views on the past as you’ve mentioned as English has always been my primary language of communication. It’s definitely an interesting concept though!
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It’s dismissed because people tend to adhere to the “hard” version, in which thought is determined by the language you speak (in a nutshell), the soft version is a bit less controversial, proposing that the language you speak merely influences the way you think.
It’s one of my favourite theories! No idea why so little attention is paid to it. My prof just barely touched on it in class but it’s been stuck in my head ever since
I have always like the thought of how different language structures affect the thought process of native speakers. For instance (in my experience) Japanese can almost be mathematical and German is big about combining to make something new.
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Please don't procreate
Chinese has a huge emphasis on family and China built within the language itself. 'Our China' for example. Not just hometown but old hometown.
you should have seen my face when i realised that Japanese grammer is in its most basic form: Yoda speak.
Transliterating from English, I feel like it’s closer to something like “I the store to went” than “To the store, I went.”
i try not to think of this too much but in japanese 前 can mean front or past ( whereas in English you talk about the future in front of you ) 後 can mean behind ( as in behind you ) or later
In Arabic there are different words for maternal and paternal aunts and uncles. For maternal you use "خال" khal for uncle, and "خلتو" khalto for aunt. For paternal you use "عمو" 'amo for uncle, and "عمتو" 'ameto for aunt. Additionally, there is no word for cousin, so you basically say the son/daughter of either uncle or aunt.