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Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

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Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#71

Post by retinaros »

neom wrote: post #4

Having spent the last 5 years learning Korean, I've grown to find it an incredibly efficient language. 맥주 한 잔 주세요 Beer one please 화장실은 어디에요? Toilet where? 와이파이 있어요? wifi is here? You can process and even start answering someone before they've finished their sentence. By contrast in English, I'd say "Could I have another beer please?" - tell me what you need up front!

hum… there is a saying in korean 한국말은 끝까지 들어봐야 한다 that literally translate to the opposite you are saying « You should listen to Korean until the end«

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#72

Post by malodyets »

retinaros wrote: post #71
neom wrote: post #4

Having spent the last 5 years learning Korean, I've grown to find it an incredibly efficient language. 맥주 한 잔 주세요 Beer one please 화장실은 어디에요? Toilet where? 와이파이 있어요? wifi is here? You can process and even start answering someone before they've finished their sentence. By contrast in English, I'd say "Could I have another beer please?" - tell me what you need up front!

hum… there is a saying in korean 한국말은 끝까지 들어봐야 한다 that literally translate to the opposite you are saying « You should listen to Korean until the end«

Maybe such a saying is needed in Korean more than in other languages?

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#73

Post by retinaros »

malodyets wrote: post #72
retinaros wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hum… there is a saying in korean 한국말은 끝까지 들어봐야 한다 that literally translate to the opposite you are saying « You should listen to Korean until the end«

Maybe such a saying is needed in Korean more than in other languages?

well its also true for turkish as well or any sov language

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#74

Post by famouswaffles »

airstrike wrote: post #53
famouswaffles wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah....It gets a lot more sparse Strictly speaking 친구 있어요 ? means Friend Have ? And you would say exactly that for any of these English equivalents "Do they have friends ?" "Do you have a friend ?" "Do you have friends ?" "Does he have a friend ?" And so on. Plurality as a special marker doesn't really exist. Possessive and Article Determiners don't really exist either. Articles don't exist at all. Possessive marker…

> And you would say exactly that for any of these English equivalents > "Do they have friends ?" > "Do you have a friend ?" > "Do you have friends ?" > "Does he have a friend ?" Seems like there's a lot of room for ambiguity, then

Yes there is a lot of ambiguity that is only resolved by surrounding context.

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#75

Post by ryukafalz »

yongjik wrote: post #24
schwartzworld wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Korean has a crapload of complex speech patterns (degree of politeness - that's sheer madness) but the nice(?) thing about it is that it all comes at the end. So you can start your sentence without even deciding if it's a statement or a question. E.g., 오늘 그 식당 열어요 Today that restaurant is open. 오늘 그 식당 열어요? Is that restaurant open today? 오늘 그 식당 열 것 같아요. I guess that restaurant is open today. 오늘 그 식당 열 것 같다고 들었어요. I…

> In fact, learning English as a native Korean speaker, one of the greatest difficulty was asking questions - you can't just start your sentence and make it a question later, you have to mentally pause, construct your question in your head, and then invert the first word! It took me years.

Thank you, you've answered a question I've had about different languages for years as a monolingual English speaker! I've always suspected that it might feel significantly different to construct sentences in languages with different word ordering, and I think that confirms that.

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#76

Post by DiscourseFan »

posterboy wrote: post #68
wobby_sobby wrote: post #13

This is going to make a great r/badlinguistics post

Perhaps that's because it is not inherently Linguistics?

>Perhaps that's because it is not inherently Linguistics?

I can admit that linguistics is a specific field of knowledge and has certain methodologies associated with it that are not always fitting or practical for all forms of analysis, but I think it's still inappropriate to say that any investigation into the operation of (spoken) language is not in some way a form of "linguistics."

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#77

Post by DiscourseFan »

neom wrote: post #4

Having spent the last 5 years learning Korean, I've grown to find it an incredibly efficient language. 맥주 한 잔 주세요 Beer one please 화장실은 어디에요? Toilet where? 와이파이 있어요? wifi is here? You can process and even start answering someone before they've finished their sentence. By contrast in English, I'd say "Could I have another beer please?" - tell me what you need up front!

Anyone can argue that any language is efficient based on some ability to express a (relatively) complex idea in (relatively) few words.

In Sanskrit, for instance, one can express entire metaphyiscal/philosophical systems in a single word, using compounds, and in philosophical commentaries this is actually quite frequent (which is what makes reading philosophy in Sanskrit so difficult, because everything is so condensed). The compounds can be of an arbitrary length, and feature extraordinarily complex syntactic system that allows for such complexity of expression. See the Wikipedia article below, for more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit_compound

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#78

Post by famouswaffles »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #37
famouswaffles wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Formality and politeness is baked into Korean and you are basically always speaking at the right formality unless you ignore the rules. Your relationship to who you're speaking to (and who you are referring to if you speak about anyone else) changes the grammar of the sentence. The grammar changes mostly manifest in different suffix endings.

How do noble or formal titles work then? It seems very unlikely to just be a suffix ending.

Forgot to mention. The brother/sister words don't necessarily need to be referring to an actual brother or sister.

They can be used endearingly to refer to older males/females you are close to.

오빠 can be used somewhat flirtingly/romantically as well

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#79

Post by [deleted] »

neom wrote: post #20
schwartzworld wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

[deleted]

Re: Korean as a Concatenative, Stack-Oriented Language (2017)

#80

Post by ARandomerDude »

ryukafalz wrote: post #75
yongjik wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Korean has a crapload of complex speech patterns (degree of politeness - that's sheer madness) but the nice(?) thing about it is that it all comes at the end. So you can start your sentence without even deciding if it's a statement or a question. E.g., 오늘 그 식당 열어요 Today that restaurant is open. 오늘 그 식당 열어요? Is that restaurant open today? 오늘 그 식당 열 것 같아요. I guess that restaurant is open today. 오늘 그 식당 열 것 같다고 들었어요. I…

> In fact, learning English as a native Korean speaker, one of the greatest difficulty was asking questions - you can't just start your sentence and make it a question later, you have to mentally pause, construct your question in your head, and then invert the first word! It took me years. Thank you, you've answered a question I've had about different languages for years as a monolingual English speaker! I've always…

Some languages don’t even use word order as the primary mechanism for forming sentences. Latin and Ancient Greek are two examples. They are “inflected” meaning you change the word to show how it functions in a sentence.

Pronouns in English still function this way a little (for example he = subject, him = object).

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