161–170 of 215 posts
Most languages also have examples of single words that convey concepts requiring many words to express in English. Always fun to discover these gems. Here's one that I learned yesterday in Visayan: "Manginhas ta". This means "Let's go the beach at low tide and turn over stones and collect small shrimp and other edibles."
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> It does beg the question however what are we missing Ability to say that certain objects is far from both speaker and listener for example. Or ability to mention a French coworker in your speech without explicitly mentioning their gender and the whole singular the all together
In parts of the USA you can say "yonder object" and be understood that it is far away from both of us. It is archaic to most native speakers now.
There's a really nice essay by David Moser about why Chinese is so hard to learn for English speakers. It comes down to the hot mess of a writing system: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html My Russian professor had an interesting insight about why that language had such a high attrition rate among college learners. It's not possible to say even simple things in a Slavic language without learning much of the…
Proficient French after one year is miraculous (German would be realistic for limited domains), it’s an unforgiving language in a lot of unfathomable ways, just matching gender and number in a phrase can be a nightmare
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IIRC English was phonetic/spelled consistently before the great vowel shift. The spelling solidified but pronunciation continued to change.
The great vowel shift happened after the Norman conquest, and there is no way that an infusion of French would create a language in which there is phonetic spelling.
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ippon, nihon, and ippiki, nihiki are numbers with counter units added (different from hitori, futari). Counter units exist in English. It's common to say "I have 600 head of cattle" vs "I have 600 cattle". "600 head of cattle" is exactly the same in Japanese, "牛６００頭". The counters in Japanese are also often similar to the way we use the words in English. You don't say "I have 12 wines". You say "I have 12 bottles of…
I think the difference (and what makes Japanese harder in this case) is that you can't stumble into the correct number suffix for a large number of mundane nouns. For example, "12 bottles of wine" uses words that are used in other contexts ("bottles", "wine"), so if you mash these English words together, you get a proper sentence that doesn't sound weird. This is because you have to use "bottles" to provide context.…
IIRC 冊 ＝ bindings (very similar to the concept of pairs of socks, we have bindings of paper). So you count "sheets of paper" (枚）and "bindings of books" (冊）.
All I'm saying is there are lots of place in English were without a counting unit it's often awkward or ungrammatical. I agree it takes take some getting used to all the counters though and even Japanese have trouble with it as there's a game you play where you call out a thing and the next per says that thing +1 +the counter.
Example player 1: "Apple", Player 2 "apple ik-ko. banana", Player 3 "banana nip-pon. car", Player 4 "car yon dai. house", Player 5: "House go-ken" Player 5 might have just gotten that wrong and then everyone would laugh.
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> To say "it was delicious", you need to say "it is delicious-ed" The "desu" isn't strictly necessary. You can just say "oishikatta". With that said, Japanese does have a bunch of curious features, like different words for ordinal numbers depending on what you're counting (e.g. "one, two" can be translated to "hitori, futari" for people, or "ippon, nihon" for long objects, or "ippiki, nihiki" for small animals, etc),…
Counters are often depicted as a unique feature in Japanese but I think it originated in Chinese, as their use of counters are more systematic (e.g. instead of saying "this book", you can say "this [book-counter]" in Chinese, which is not allowed in Japanese "*この冊"). Also many onomatopoeic words exist in English, but they just exhibit in a different way (e.g. "glitter" or "slippery" sounds very onomatopoeic to me). P…
I'm trying to learn the language, but man it's difficult.
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> Sentences like "I took something there with me", for example, are almost comically difficult. Did you go on foot, by vehicle, run, crawl, fly? Was it a habitual action or a one-time thing? Are you stressing the trip or its completion? Did you enter there, climb inside, descend down? Did the trip require overcoming an obstacle? Is the object known to the speaker and listener, known only to the speaker, or unknown? I…
Slavic languages (not just Russian) distinguish the mode of transportation for verbs of motion. So, there is no single "go", there is either "go by foot" or "go by vehicle" and choosing the wrong one makes you sound like a silly foreigner. Similarly ,there is no single "bring", there is "bring on foot" or "bring in a vehicle".
Most languages also have examples of single words that convey concepts requiring many words to express in English. Always fun to discover these gems. Here's one that I learned yesterday in Visayan: "Manginhas ta". This means "Let's go the beach at low tide and turn over stones and collect small shrimp and other edibles."
What are examples of the opposite? English words that convey concepts that require lots of words in other languages?
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>Agglutinative languages, like Finnish or Hungarian, where word order is largely irrelevant and conjugations, not word order, determine meaning. I'd argue that word order is just as relevant (and indeed constrained by meaning) in Hungarian or Finnish as it is in, say, English, though the details of how each language's syntax works are very different. Also, there are plenty of languages not usually characterized as "a…
> I'd argue that word order is just as relevant (and indeed constrained by meaning) in Hungarian or Finnish as it is in, say, English, though the details of how each language's syntax works are very different. I agree; GP didn’t choose the best examples for this. But there are languages like Yimas, Tiwi and Dyirbal for which word order truly is insignificant, so the point still stands.
There's a difference between "free ordering of constituent phrases", where you may rearrange subject noun phrases, object noun phrases, adverbial phrases and the verb into any order depending on emphasis etc., and completely free word order - like in the languages you mentioned - where "the little man walked through the big door" could end up as "man door through walked big little the the" or something like that, completely breaking apart what we'd consider "constituent phrases" in a language like English, where "the little man" etc. always move together in a sentence.
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> Hungarian, where word order is largely irrelevant Not exactly irrelevant, but very flexible. There are some rules to word order in Hungarian, but you typically rearrange the sentence to emphasize the important part by putting whatever is important in front. For example, if you ask a question, the question word that you expect an answer to always goes in front, "What should I wear?" and the answer should start with…
> you can think of word order in Hungarian like the word order that Yoda uses Absolutely. So much so that in the Hungarian dub of Star Wars Yoda speaks normaly, like any other character. His vocal weirdness thing completely gets lost in the translation.