Finnish as a world language?
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Most cases are simply used where English would use prepositions. In Finnish those are postfixes instead, a bunch of letters tacked onto the end of a word. It’s a case and not a word because there’s no space between the two, that’s it.
Eg “talo” means house. Talossa means “in the house”. Talon means “of the house” (actually, “the house’s” - omg English has cases too, super difficult). Talolla means “on (top of) the house”. That’s not harder than prepositions is it?
I did cheat a bit, because with some words you first got to find the root before you can tack on “-ssa”. The root of talo is also talo, but for some words you got to apply a (simple, purely letter-based) rule. Eg the root of “ankka” (duck) is “anka” so “the duck’s house” becomes “ankan talo”. There’s a bunch of rules to find the root of a noun and you can learn them in half an hour or so.
There’s plenty stuff that’s harder about Finnish (notably the vocabulary), but the cases are peanuts.
It's still incredibly easy compared to the fusional case systems in languages like Latin or Russian.
>Another illustration of fusionality is the Latin word bonus ("good"). The ending -us denotes masculine gender, nominative case, and singular number. Changing any one of these features requires replacing the suffix -us with a different one. In the form bonum, the ending -um denotes masculine accusative singular, neuter accusative singular, or neuter nominative singular.
That's very abstract but an example makes it clear. Consider some Latin words with their English translations:
mensa -- table (singular, nominative)
mensae -- tables (plural, nominative)
mensae -- to the table (singular, dative)
mensis -- to the tables (plural, dative)
There are two parts of meaning (whether it's singular vs. plural, and whether it's nominative vs. dative) which are expressed in these forms, but the way this is done is opaque. You can't look at "mensis" and break it into a part that corresponds to plurality, and a part that corresponds to dative: the suffix -is conveys both of those features simultaneously. That's a fusional language.
Compare with the Hungarian equivalents: (Finnish is similar, but I know Hungarian and not Finnish)
asztal -- table (singular, nominative)
asztalok -- tables (plural, nominative)
asztalnak -- to the table (singular, dative)
asztaloknak -- to the tables (plural, dative)
Here you can identify that the suffux -ok corresponds to plural and the suffix -nak corresponds to dative. So the Hungarian paradigm here is agglutinative, not fusional. The upshot is that the Hungarian paradigm will be easier to learn and to extend to a very large number of cases compared to the Latin paradigm.
Just to continue the explainer, vowel harmony means that “in the house” is “talossa” but “in the forest” is “metsässä”. Notice that it’s “-ssä” and not “-ssa”. This depends on which vowels are in the root. There’s two groups of vowels and Finnish words helpfully never mix the two in a single (non compound) word.
In other words, “vowel harmony” sounds fancy, but it’s a single
if root.match(/a|u|o/) then “ssa” else “ssä”Quite the opposite; /u/ is a high vowel, /o/ is mid-high, and /a/ is low. AOU vowels, assuming the Finnish orthography is anything like the rest of Europe, are made with your tongue pulled back, while ÄÖY are made with your tongue thrust forward.
It's not only not a 1:1 mapping, and not only can wildly different spellings sound the same, but wildly different pronunciations can be written the same. It's crazy.
That is not evidence that they are case affixes rather than separate words. The English articles adjust their pronunciation based on the word that follows them, but they are considered separate words rather than inflectional definiteness markers.
There is a special term for lexical items which are independent words in a syntactic sense without simultaneously being independent words in a phonological sense; they are called clitics, not affixes.
Except that this is a claim you just made up, which is not reflected in any usage of the term.
SIL ( https://glossary.sil.org/term/clitic-grammar ):
> A clitic is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but shows evidence of being phonologically bound to another word.
Wikipedia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clitic ):
> a clitic [] is a morpheme that has syntactic characteristics of a word, but depends phonologically on another word or phrase.
The English 'genitive' particle 's is a clitic[1] because it takes its pronunciation from the syllable it follows. Not because it has grammatical functions at a phrase level. Clitic 'm can only ever follow the pronoun I, but that does nothing to stop it from being clitic.
[1] Actually, CGEL prefers to call 's a "phrasal case marker", but I find that absurd.
https://depressingfinland.tumblr.com/post/65222506844/what-d...
That said, but this sort of contextual stuff happens with languages with prepositions too (eg “on the table” vs “on the job”). It’s not special about Finnish.
(We have the same between English and German. Most of the time, you can translate the prepositions with a simple lookup table, but they aren't completely 1-for-1.)
Finnish is pretty weird and unique (at least among the languages I know) in that it doesn't have a separate word for "to have". I suppose the closest it gets is "omistaa", for "to own".
That's not how the terminology works. Nobody is out there claiming that Latin should be considered to have conjunctive and disjunctive cases (-que, -ve) in addition to its actual cases. They're especially not claiming that we should recognize an "interrogative case" (-ne) that isn't even restricted to nouns.
I had the same experience with Turkish, which also has the same "issue" with cases. As long as you try to learn them cases, you'll give up. If you learn them as "this ending means at, this ending means in", you'll learn them in half a day.
It’s just the equivalent of cases which takes the shape of suffixes.
Note that our personal pronouns also take the shape of suffixes in Finnish:
taloni (my house) talossani (in my house)
They’re really not cases.
Suffixes are not inflections.
-ssa is the suffix that marks the case
-ni is the first person possessive suffix (not a case)
The first person singular pronoun would be "minä" and its genitive case "minun" - not a suffix but including the suffix -n that marks the genitive case.
My house => Minun taloni (the possessive is visible in both words in formal Finnish: the genitive case in the pronoun, the possessive suffix in the noun)
My house => Mun talo (less formal Finnish shortens the pronoun and does not use the possessive suffix)
The fact that the possessive suffix is not a case does in no way indicate that there wouldn't be actual cases in Finnish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_noun_cases
Verb conjugations are where things get super interesting.
https://effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/languag...
I enjoy studying languages and have learned enough Finnish to get midway through the Harry Potter series, and even just getting to the point where I could smoothly look up words, let alone remember them, took a fair amount of practice. (The form you see on the page often needs to be un-consonant-gradated before you can find it in the dictionary, and the rules are somewhat complicated, though very regular.)
One funny aspect of Finnish pronunciation is that the ubiquitous long sounds give it a bit of a herky-jerky rhythm. It's always sounded to me as if the speaker is trying to figure out the grammar too :)
Pekka's house => Pekan talo (in Finnish)
Unless linguistics has advanced since I learnt this (which is quite possible), the theory is that case (and conjugation? I can't remember) came from disambiguating particles that later fused into the base noun (/verb). And of course languages can subsequently go the other way (like English or French which have been shedding conjugation for a few hundred years and case for even longer, and gender too (French still has two but abandoned neuter a while ago).
That phrase is “Hakkaa Päälle!” It’s best when shouted, immediate prior to an act of sudden violence.
Japanese can be written using either the Latin alphabet, or Chinese characters. The two most common writing systems in the world. It can also be written with its own elegant and purely phonetic writing system. There's even Braille, Morse code, and sign language encodings. It is truly media agnostic.
Japanese has a regular grammar. From a linguist's perspective, aside from the politeness system, it's really quite normal for a language. Very little in it to surprise a Finnish, Turkish or Korean speaker. (Unlike English, which if first discovered today spoken by a people in the interior of New Guinea, would lead to accusations of a linguistic hoax.)
Finally, some 40% of Japanese vocabulary is based on Chinese, and Chinese and Japanese technical terms flow freely between the languages to this day. Another ~20% of Japanese vocabulary is borrowed from European languages like English or Portuguese. The majority of the world already speaks a significant amount of Japanese and they don't even know it! For this reason, Chinese, European, and American, alike, usually find it quite easy to learn.
There are only two real problems:
1. The writing system is ridiculously complex, and even if you just vow to only write in romaji you also have to deal with the problem that kanji acts as a huge source of both puns and compound words. You can invent new compound words just by jamming together the on readings of a couple of kanji and most Japanese people will understand you. It's also not unheard of in, for example, songs, to pronounce a word one way when singing but write it in the official lyrics sheet using kanji that's normally associated with a completely different word. The closest I can compare to this in other languages would be like if you were talking and using sign language at the same time and you were deliberately signing different words than what you were speaking in order to add subtext.
2. Because a) so many features aren't grammatically tracked and b) Japanese is aggressively pro-drop, a lot of sentences are extremely ambiguous without context. For example, you often can't tell just from hearing the words if someone is saying "I go", "you go", "they go", "he goes", or "she goes" (in Japanese these are all just iku/ikimasu... unless you're going out of your way to put a pronoun in there, but most people don't); you have to parse the sentence in the context of what else is being said in the conversation or by what's going on around you.
There are additional levels of honorifics which can be far more complicated but (outside of workplace honorifics -- which you will need to practice if you will work at a Japanese company) native speakers usually get some kind of training in how to speak in that exceptionally formal way (the kind of keigo used in restaurants is sometimes criticised for being "incorrect" Japanese and is called バイト敬語 -- usually service workers literally get handed a manual which explains how to interact with customers using this form of 敬語). If you or I had an audience with the queen we would probably also get some kind of training in how to politely speak to her.
Finally, if it's obvious you're studying Japanese and you drop a です or ます the person is quite unlikely to be insulted. Especially if it's not someone who is your superior at work.
If a grammar is too limited that it leaves things unsaid and thus ambiguous (well, I can't say that's not a thing in Japanese - it is, sometimes) then yes, it can make things harder because one gotta very carefully watch out for the context to be able to comprehend what's going on.
But if grammar is just simple - e.g. if there are no or almost no irregular verbs (Japanese has only two), or no concept of grammatical gender (so you simply don't have to care about anything related to your nouns and can indicate gender using an extra word if that starts to matter), it's probably just fine. I mean you're not losing anything in that case.
Considering your example (even though I don't think it's a good idea to compare machine and human languages in general) - many assembly languages do NOT exactly map to the actual machine code. Say, many assembly languages remove the concept of argument size which can be compared to a grammatical gender (your operands are your nouns and instruction is a verb). Let's say we're talking classic x86. In Intel syntax you can write "MOV AX, 0" and "MOV EAX, 0" but bytecode would be different - 66B80000 vs B800000000, the assembly had lost the 0x66 operand-size override prefix. There is AT&T syntax that has distinct "MOVW" and "MOVL", but the point is that it's a potentially unnecessary complication that proves to be not needed as everything is pretty much obvious without it.
Most of the complexity is merely that it requires a lot of memorization, though. One has to literally remember a couple thousand of characters, memorizing their meanings and a few possible readings. Obviously one remember them not as a random opaque pictogram but by mentally splitting it in smaller graphemes. And there are, IIRC, like, about 30 or so most common ones that are enough for most characters one would normally encounter.
Either way, it's surely much more complex than systems that only have alphabets or syllabaries, but in a personal (and biased, because I know one and failed to grok the other) opinion some segmental scripts like Arabic are much harder to process.
Tackle Kanji after mastering Katakana and Hiragana.
It took me a few weeks to be able to read a hiragana sentence, just read not necessarily understand, without needing to look anything up.
For example, we abbreviate "personal computer" as PC. In Japanese, it's パーソナルコンピューター (pāsonaru konpyūtā), abbreviated as パソコン (pasokon; roughly "persocom"). Similarly, "remote control" is R/C. In Japanese, it's リモートコントロール (rimōto kontorōru), abbreviated as リモコン (rimokon; roughly "remocon"). You can even see this with proprietary trademarks, such as the Nintendo Family Computer ファミリーコンピュータ (Famirī Konpyūta) abbreviated as ファミコン (Famikon; roughly "Famicom")... which I guess is four and a half katakana, but it's still four morae. And in English-speaking markets, it was sold as the Nintendo Entertainment System, which we've abbreviated as NES.
Made me really lean towards never abbreviating in variable names unless it was extremely necessary for brevity, and also provide good comments.
If that doesn't scare you, go ahead.
Although some sequences are completely new, so you need to figure out which word ends where.
And the most commonly used kanji also have the highest number of different pronunciations, sometimes in several ways that are impossible to tell apart grammatically (or even semantically, obviously this is almost never annotated, because adding the pronunciation is for words the author thinks you don't know, even when the pronunciation is entirely unambiguous*)
*: No I'm not bitter I had way too much trouble figuring out how to annotate Japanese text with the pronunciation to make it vaguely readable, why do you ask?
Some have a lot more. 下 has two On readings (Ka and Ge) and several Kun readings (Shita, Shimo, Moto, Sa, Kuda, and O).
While combinations typically do have one reading, some can have multiple readings, especially people’s names. Still, it is hard for learners to know which reading for individual Kanji’s are the right ones a lot of times.
EDIT: Fixed a couple of typos and a premature submit.
> "While those readings might be technically possible, usually only a few of them form a known word."
Are you suggesting that these various readings are academic and not commonly used? If so, that is incorrect. All the readings are used in common words.
Here are examples of both the On and Kun readings for the kanji 水 being used:
水道: Pronounced "suido" and means "water supply" or "water service."
水着: Pronounced "mizugi" and means "swimsuit."
Here are examples of both the On readings for the kanji 下 being used:
下降: Pronounced "kakou" and means "descent."
下水: Pronounced "gesui" and means "sewer."
Here are examples of all the Kun readings for the kanji 下 being used:
下着: Pronounced "shitagi" and means "underwear."
下々: Pronounced "shimojimo" and means "commoners" or "common people".
法の下 (can also be written as 法の元): Pronounced "hounomoto" and means "under the law."
下さい: Pronounced "kudasai" and means "please."
下りる: Pronounced "oriru" and means "to get off."
Your comparison to the various pronunciations of "ou" in English seems off as well. For example, if you mispronounce "cough" using the "ou" pronunciation of "rough," you'll sound weird but will most likely be understood. However, if you misread "oriru" (下りる) as "kariru," using the On reading "KA" instead of the correct Kun reading, you'd be verbalizing a completely different word. Instead of telling others you're getting off of something, you'd be saying you're borrowing something.
I'd characterize your example of "ou" as a mispronunciation in English, whereas your example in Japanese would be a misreading.
I hope this helps.
EDIT: Fixed a typo.
In my (limited) experience so far however I find myself remembering the words themselves, rather than work out their pronunciation from their constituent kanji. To me working from the pronunciations of the kanji themselves is like trying to pronounce 'cough' by fitting together pronunciations for 'c', 'ou', and 'gh' (all of which have several options interestingly enough).
If you can imagine a language where 2k+ emoji are used as parts of words, with all the combination rules which emoji have, that would give you some idea.
But it does tax your memory (nothing compared to Chinese, though!), and takes time when writing by hand. Typing is significantly easier because a reasonable IME gives you variants to choose from when you type the pronunciation.
> actually pictorial to some degree
Only in the same sense that star constellations are pictorial.
I really feel like this is appropriate.
I thought you were going to link this guy but both work :)
Tree: 木
Forest: 森
Rest: 休 (person leaning against a tree)
Someone with a quirky personality might say that :)
Nah, OK, so it seems I've misunderstood that then.
Hei, vasta 27 v tässä pakkosuomen maassa...
For example, the character for people (民) comes from the image of a person being pierced through the eye, which was done to mark slaves in ancient China. Eventually the character and meaning evolved to the way it's used now.
huge nuance here. it is not fun memorizing hyroglyphics
(1) It isn't fun. Not everyone of us knows the whole set and have to keep a digital dictionary in smartphone
(2) We don't assume the names of people based on their Kanji, because (surpise!) people do get offended by minor changes in pronunciation e.g Yamasaki vs. Yamazaki, with similar Kanjis.
That's why I always prefer to inscribe my Japanese notes with Kana in a superscript wherever needed. It is very tight in grammar but the language is not easy by any means. In fact, same goes for Chinese & Koreans.
Note that even (or maybe especially) Japanese people don’t do this either.
The first thing anyone introducing themselves does is say how to write/say their name.
It’s certainly not easy for everyone.
Also I don’t know how much actual conversational practice you get from day to day life - but at least for me, I talk with my wife and my (mostly Japanese) friends in Japanese for hours every day, and that makes a huge difference. Once a week would simply not be enough.
Hangul is far less capricious, though, a marvel of careful design.
Do you have a source on that? As a Bulgarian (where Cyrillic comes from) i had never heard anything of the like, and a short Google, in Bulgarian or Russian, found nothing.
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2_(%D0%BA%D0%B8%D1%80%D0%...
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%AE%D1%81_%D0%BC%D0%B0%D0%B...
From there the transformation into "Я" is obvious. And it happened gradually over time long before Peter; he just happened to look at various different shapes already in use during his time, picked the one that looked the simplest and the most appealing to him, and (sometimes) did further minor tweaks to simplify.
It has absolutely nothing to do with the shape of the letter "R".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul
"However the character 古 gǔ also functions as a phonetic component of 蒙古 Měnggǔ "Mongol". Indeed, records from Sejong's day played with this ambiguity, joking that "no one is older (more 古 gǔ) than the 蒙古 Měng-gǔ". From palace records that 古篆字 gǔ zhuānzì was a veiled reference to the 蒙古篆字 měnggǔ zhuānzì "Mongol Seal Script", that is, a formal variant of the Mongol ʼPhags-pa alphabet of the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) that had been modified to look like the Chinese seal script, and which had been an official script of the empire."
Might be true, might be not. Still interesting to see. And the Mongols themselves mostly stopped using their script to write in Cyrillic and Hanzi (?) now so.
We have another example of such great men creating a new script by himself after exposure to another script. Cherokee by Sequayah.
First is, of course, tengwar, but no real spoken language uses it.
Second if hangul, which is great overall and has an easy structure [2], with just a few historic warts.
Third, there's Cree syllabary. Just look at the logic: [3].
[1]: https://lotr.fandom.com/wiki/Tengwar#Spelling_and_pronunciat... [2]: https://sites.google.com/site/hangulanationallanguage/photo-... [3]: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/plains-cree-syllabics-tr...
I will go
I will be going
I will have gone
I will have been going
Both languages, of course, still have other mechanisms for doing this, either via specifying the point in time "She's buying that tomorrow", or via auxillary words (is going to buy, kaeru tsumori desu).
Here's what I mean:
1. Go to this link: http://erg.delph-in.net/logon .
2. Type in "I will go to the store" and check "mrs" in the output list.
3. Click "Analyze"
4. In the MRS (right pane), under "go_v_1", hover over the "e3" of the "ARG0 e3" line.
5. You'll see "TENSE fut" in the feature box.
That's the result of a symbolic, machine grammar, not a machine-learning system. A rules-based system was able to determine that the verb is future tense (based on a syntactic rule that unifies in the future tense based on the presence of the auxiliary).
If aliens came by and zapped every English speaker's brain so that we all started using "I gowill to the store and buywill some fruits" instead of an auxiliary, that would be a simple adjustment to that grammar (delete the old syntax rule, add a will-lex rule to strip the suffix and apply the same feature to the verb).
If, then, another set of aliens came and zapped our brains again, deleting all memory of the concept of "will X" from our heads, that would be different. In the presence of the sentence "I go to the store tomorrow" or "I write code next year", there's no way for any symbolic grammar to handle all the possible ways you can contextually refer to the future. That's solely the domain of ML systems (and all their faults), at least as far as I know.
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By analogy, the way people talk about English future tense is like if people said "Python doesn't have closures with more than one statement", and when questioned "Well inline function definitions in Python have closure", they responded "Well of course I meant 'Python doesn't have expression closures with more than one statement'". Like sure, it's true and even a valid clipping to make in a certain context, but as it spreads as a meme people who don't know the context get the wrong idea.
I really don’t agree, as a speaker of both languages.
There’s a lot of western-exceptionalism invested in the notion that Japanese somehow has an exceptional paucity of ability to express future events that’s categorically different than English, when in reality the situations are quite quite close to one another.
It’s not that English doesn’t have a future tense in a casual/non-strictly-morphological sense of “tense” — it’s that by that casual definition really Japanese is in almost the same boat, and we should stop playing this “invent arbitrary ways to claim the inscrutable Japanese mind speaks without the ability to use a future tense but English is different because I Say So” game.
To be clear, I completely disagree with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis & don't think there's anything "weird" about Japanese, the past / nonpast split as opposed to past / present / future is quite common cross-linguistically[1]. The idea of whether something is grammaticalized is separate than whether a language can express it -- AFAIK the current theory is that all languages express just about the same set of concepts, just certain languages evolve grammaticalizations of tenses, aspects, topic, politeness, etc. and others represent them "ad hoc" via constructs like "do tomorrow" etc. Hopefully that makes sense. I find the "Mysterious Japanese mind" trope orientalist and stupid.
[1]: And there are lots of systems, like multiple levels of past remoteness, too: https://wals.info/feature/66A#2/26.7/149.2
These humongous walls of text sound rather like "and therefore I choose to define what English does as 'grammaticalize' and what Japanese does as 'not grammaticalize'".
> I find the "Mysterious Japanese mind" trope orientalist and stupid.
Then maybe have another think about why you're coming off as if that's exactly what you're doing.
Obviously, nobody is claiming that Japanese has no way of talking about the future, that's the kind of nonsense non-linguists like to read into purely grammatical differences. It's still a fact that English has a grammatical future (actually more than one), even if it's not inflectional and not strictly required in all situations, and Japanese does not.
For example, "tomorrow, it's cold" would generally sound weird in English, the most common way to express this would be "tomorrow, it's gonna be cold". There's nothing weird about 明日は寒い, by contrast.
going = present
gone = preterite
No future tense there.
You're using "will" as an auxiliary verb to talk about the future. It accomplishes the same thing as a present tense, but it is not the same thing.
«going» is not «present», and «gone» is not «preterite».
They are present and past participles, respectively, that can be used to form present and past tenses in English, and they can be both used as adjectives which signifies the fact that they are the true participles.
Present and past participles are a common distinctive feature of Indo-European languages, and their use to form specific aspects of the present and past tenses in English is a common feature across Germanic languages.
The fact remains there's no future participles in English.
None of the Indo-European languages (to the best of my knowledge) have future participles due to none of them having a true morphological future tense. Therefore, there future participles are not possible.
Future tense, depending on the exact language, is expressed in Indo-European languages either with the use of an auxiliary or a modal verb or with the use of a perfective aspect of the present tense.
Esperanto is the only language that does have the future participles, but that is another bedtime story.
They are used in Romance languages as well. Half the tenses in French are auxiliary+participle combinations (Latin even has future participles).
Muahahahaa, good one!
For example, in French j’irai (I will go) and je serai allé (I will have gone) are two different tenses. Sure, you can express both meanings in English, but French has a specific tense for “things that will have happened at some point in the future” (and many other besides). On the other hand, English has continuous tenses, which cannot be expressed with just a tense in French: /I am going/ (je suis en train de partir) vs /I go/ (je vais).
Both languages can express both concepts, but they have different shortcuts.
Compare "I walked" (inflection) with the simple future "I will walk" ("will" as a modal auxiliary).
I'm going to go
I'm going to be going (?)
I'm going to have gone (??)
I'm going to have been going (??)
Unlike school grammar, most linguists consider English tense as just present and past, or "non-past" and "past", to be precise. There are several arguments for that:
* The auxiliary verbs "will" and "shall" don't behave like present/past tense markers ("-ed"), but behave more like "can", "may", "must", etc., which are grouped as verbs affecting modality. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_verb
* More importantly, you can actually take the past tense of "will"!
> He would frequently go out for dinner.
Hard to tell what's its tense, if "will" marked the future tense. It's much cleaner to consider it as a past tense of the modal verb "will".
* English does use present tense in many cases to denote an event in the future, e.g., "We depart at five a.m. tomorrow," or "When does it start today?" Contrast this with the past tense, where nobody says "We depart at five a.m. yesterday," or "When does it start last evening?"
The fact that future tense is not obligatory is also not an indication that it doesn't exist (again, it's the same situation as in German).
Compare the sentence pair:
"Every day at 6, I eat dinner"
"Every day at 6, I will eat dinner"
They have clearly different meanings, the second referring to something that will only start to happen in the future (which is why it's a bit hard to imagine a context in which the utterance makes sense). The first one refers to a habitual action that extends at least to the present moment.
FWIW, when I learned English (as a foreign language) in school, this use of "would" would be referred to as future-in-the-past, and considered a distinct tense, along with present, past, and future.
In practice, you can lump tense, aspect, and mood together and call them all "tenses." Especially because many languages can end up partially conflating them, insisting on a formal dichotomy based on the specific information being conveyed in verb forms or based on how it is grammatically represented (inflection versus modal verbs versus what have you).
There's no reason that something happening in the future needs to be encoded with weird grammar/verb conjugation. It's simpler to denote something happening in the future with a phrase describing when it happens, which often needs to be included anyway. Fewer tenses means less to learn.
'I go tomorrow' vs. 'I will go tomorrow'
'I go later' vs. 'I will go later'
Note that I don't speak Japanese. I'm basing this off of my very limited understanding of how Mandarin denotes the future. It's very possible I misunderstood what you mean by "no future tense".
Only for a very loose definition of "speaking"
A Chinese without knowledge of Japanese reading it or vice versa would be like a English speaker reading French or vice versa. You'd recognize some vocabulary, but the grammar and pronounciation is significantly different and most of the overall sentence is still foreign.
Even English loanwords are significantly altered by shortening and mapping to Japanese tones. Most English speakers wouldn't recognize "terebi" (television) or "konbini" (convenience store) for example.
An elegant language that is easy to learn should be based off of consistent primitives. Similar to math where an entire mathematical language can be derived from a few axioms. For a language you should have a single alphabet and consistent grammar rules.
Such a language is not only more elegant, but much more practical to learn as well. And Practicality is by far more important then elegance.
The reason borrowed words are written in katakana is too provide a clue that the word may have a non-standard pronunciation.
It functions similarly to how italicization does in English
This is largely similar.
Among many other stylistic uses, katakana are often used for native onomatopoeia and are used to write native words all the time (usually in cases where the kanji is either not well-known or to give a different feeling to the sentence -- ズルい is a good example of this).
English grammar is actually very regular. It has lost most of the complexity of its Germanic substrate due to the repeated historic pidginization. For a learner, the lack of grammatical gender is godsent and a turbo hack to producing grammatically correct sentences.
Where I think English would be surprising, if discovered as a new language, is the phonology: we have lots of extremely unusual and hard-to-pronounce consonant and vowel sounds. You can take whole classes just to learn how to pronounce the English /r/ in a way that sounds right. Which makes it especially unfortunate as a world language.
While true that is "solved" by having very distinct accents. Somebody from Oxford, Melbourne, Delhi and Houston ( all pronounce the /r/ and other sounds quite different, but will still understand each other (given a little will on both sides)
And the closer you get to London the more the English have a French culture. By that I mean an inferiority/superiority complex. They’re always better than everyone else.
E.g. “I wondered what did he do” will be understood perfectly by virtually 100% of English speakers, but will immediately mark you as a non-native speaker (the correct form is “I wondered what he did”).
The real problem is understanding English spoken by those native speakers in all their accents...
Plurals and articles seem to trip up many non-native English speakers. The rules for these things are quite intricate and riddled with exceptions, and if you write a page of prose and make a single mistake with a plural or an article, a native English reader will instantly know you are not a native speaker, even if your meaning is understood.
Example: "if you write page of prose and make single mistake with plural or article, native English reader will instantly know you are not native speaker."
"Ships are 'she', except in the American navy, where littoral surface combatants are 'he'", or "...except in the British navy, where submarines are 'he'", something like that, isn't it? Guess I'll only talk about "the vessel", which should pretty reliably be "it".
> Plurals and articles seem to trip up many non-native English speakers. The rules for these things are quite intricate and riddled with exceptions, and if you write a page of prose and make a single mistake with a plural or an article, a native English reader will instantly know you are not a native speaker, even if your meaning is understood.
Fortunately not so bad for speakers of German and the Nordic languages, which work rather similarly. (Germans usually give themselves away by using the compound in stead of simple past tense.)
> Example: "if you write page of prose and make single mistake with plural or article, native English reader will instantly know you are not native speaker."
The canonical example seems to be the Slavic languages, above all Russian.
Yeah, that's me.
> almost totally dying out
That too.
> among the younger generations.
That's not me.
It's really annoying that we're modifier-modified when it comes to adjectives but modified-modifier when it comes to relative clauses. We say "the red car", but "the car, which is red,".
Also we sometimes use modified-modifier for adjectives for poetic effect, in constructs such as "painter extraordinaire", "minister plenipotentiary", or "court martial".
And then we have questions, where English goes from normally being SVO to being OSV. We say "That is John." but ask "Who is that?", and if we say "That is who?", it's usually an expression of abject shock. Or sometimes we dip into our Germanic heritage and bring out V2 word order (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V2_word_order#Vestiges_in_Mode...).
You can read more about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_language
I've been tempted to learn Korean since I discovered this factoid, but haven't found a program or the time that I can stick to.
Anecdotally, I'm learning Dutch right now to prepare to move overseas next month, and the basics haven't been that difficult. I feel pretty confident that I can order food and exchange daily phrases after only a few dozen hours of practice. Lucky for me, the Dutch also speak excellent English, but I'm trying to learn anyway!
Still, if you can speak Dutch it’s appreciated, especially in less international areas.
Featural scripts are pretty rare - it seems that they never evolve naturally, so it's something that has to be constructed, and then also to become popular for long enough to stick around. The only example I know of other than Hangeul is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Aboriginal_syllabics, and they are noticeably less featural.
(Featural scripts for conlangs are more common - e.g. for Lojban, there's Zbalermorna: https://jackhumbert.github.io/zbalermorna/write-up/)
One thing to keep in mind though is that Hangeul was very systematic and consistent back when it was designed. But languages evolve, and they evolve much faster in the absence of widespread literacy and mass media. And Hangeul is almost 600 years old now. So e.g. ㅐ was originally the diphthong "ai", consisting of ㅏ for "a" and ㅣ for "i", but it's now pronounced "e" - not dissimilar to English, actually, but with much more rapid and drastic changes. At this point, it's actually less phonemic than Serbo-Croatian.
I would say hebrew is also another interesting alphabet system
Up until 90s, early 2000s it was common to read Hanja in newspapers. Starting around 10 years ago they all disappeared. English words have largely replaced complicated Chinese characters and young Koreans no longer learn it.
Instead English loan words are now used so much that most Koreans can't go a few paragraph without using it. Downside it leads to confusion as to what the original Korean words meant. But for sure it is not comparable to Japanese which absolutely requires you to memorize a few thousand Chinese characters, their strokes, pronounciation and meaning.
English is a mess because it is a mixture of languages from different ethnic groups: Anglo-Saxon, Norse, Celtic, and Norman. It's been used for cross-cultural communication ever since it was identifiable as English.
Hackernews armchair linguists seem to think an ideal language for world communication can somehow be engineered from some small set of primitives, like Scheme -- resulting in suggestions like that we all start speaking Toki Pona -- but the reality is that human communication is messy and the most practical languages tend to be messy ones. Some linguists have observed that trade pidgins develop English-like morphologies, even when English is not one of the contributing languages.
(And even Scheme got messy; see R6RS and R7RS...)
As for Japanese, I love it, it's beautiful, but as even any weeaboo knows, Japanese language is very bound up with Japanese culture. You can't simply ignore or elide the politeness bits; where you stand in society very strongly influences what you say. The fact that English is largely free of this baggage helps make it an effective language that people around the world pick up and use for trade, especially when different ethnic groups are involved.
It would be interesting to see a Scheme-like underpinning to the semantics of any language -- maybe not to be used for communication in its own right, but to achieve things like more intelligent translation, or NLP machine-learning applications that extract meaning from a text. I don't see much interest in something like this emerging, however, with the current trend in AI being "throw more statistics at the problem".
English language is like Chinese: while simple structurally (no cases, constructive verb forms, etc) has a terribly complicated writing and pronunciation system, where there sort of are rules, but you never know when you hit an exception. Despite that, people take it up, because the important communication happens in English. (People who study areas like ML, or who work a lot with industrial production, likely pick up some Chinese, out of the same necessity.)
https://www.vulture.com/2020/01/stand-up-comedy-english-lang...
For instance, Gad mentions in the article the expression "Got it" that doesn't have great equivalents in French. But French also has sentences that don't have great equivalents in English, or if they do have one it's not nearly as playful.
The one thing English has that most languages don't is a massive body of work and a dominant grip on international culture, and I think that's what the comics in the article are interpreting as higher overall playfulness.
I see we have met. My ideal computer language would be Scheme in Ido. :) I guess to do real work one needs a ~980 page spec like Common Lisp which consumes half of their available neurons--in English, which consumes the other half. The R7RS spec is ~98 pages, for reference. A few extensions do not remove that much cognitive availablity (see Jaffer's Slib and the SRFI suite). As a matter of fact, speaking of minimalism, I was using MIT Scheme Version 7.4 Edwin today, an Emacs compatible editor written at R4RS (with a few extensions).
Seriously though, I really wish like the universal translator in Star Trek that I could understand all human language with deep context--but my puny U.S.-public-school-trained brain limits me to a few.
"So stop ragging on C++, you meanies!"?
Korean has a much simpler writing system, but similarly suffers from a lot of homophones, and in addition with no characters/kanji to differentiate them. Neither of these are magically simpler languages: like any language, there's a lot of legwork that goes into learning them, particularly if you come from a language with little in common
(Edit: I'm not a linguist, I just happen to like both of these languages as a hobbyist; feel free to point out any inaccuracies)
Right, because what's a West Germanic language very similar to Frisian doing all the way over in New Guinea?
Except for all the exceptions. Also, the millions of different ways you need to manipulate your verbs based on what comes after/what you are talking about.
Oh, and that you cannot read/write contemporary Japanese without knowing at least 3 writing systems (with a minimum of 54 characters each).
Though you could more than double it again by including all the variations I suppose.
The hardest part of learning Japanese for me was Kanji (which I still forget all the time if I’m not using an IME or a dictionary).
+1 Funny because it's true.
"It is an essentially logical language. The rules are absolute and reliable in all situations, except exceptions."
"except exceptions?!" whoa..! the brought back memories from learning German.
perkele!
Pronunciation is extremely systematic too. You could record the sound of each character as an audio file and put each file in order of a word/sentence and it’ll sound like (bad, robotic) Finnish.
This also means that you can hear a spoken word (or a name!) and just know how it’s spelled, even if you have no idea what it means. Compare that to English!
This article is clearly satire, but it’s a delightful language, especially for nerds who think learning consistent grammar rules is easier than endless lists of exceptions (Hi there, French!)
The only practical downside is that just about every word is unique to the Finnish language group, except recent imports (eg bussi, teatteri). Eg “mom” is a word with an “m” in every other language I’m familiar with, but it’s “äiti” in Finnish.
Now, Finnish? It's way, way more regular. Each letter is pronounced always the same, no matter the context or the letters surrounding it (there aren't even consonant groups like ch). The grammar might be more complex, and the vocabulary might be difficult because it lacks the indo-european roots from all the other languages I know. But phonetics? Yeah, it's one of the simplest languages out there, in this sense. I love Finnish because of that, and I actually listen to a lot of Finnish music (despite not understanding almost anything), just because I love the way it sounds.
Still, I with I had fewer issues with a and ä... I can pronounce both separately, but when I hear someone speaking, I still have trouble when I need to differentiate between these two.
And then there is the double l, «ll», which is pronounced as «y» in nearly all varieties of Spanish. But, yes, the Spanish spelling is far more regular and straightforward compared to many other languages.
> Now, Finnish? It's way, way more regular.
… at this given point in time and history. The relationship between the spelling and the pronunciation is a notoriously complicated affair due languages being living things that keep on evolving with the spelling and pronunciation inevitably diverging over extended periods of time. There is not guarantee that, for example, either Spannish or Finnish will be pronounced the same way in, say, 200-300 years time as they are spelled today.
Different languages with their respective writing systems have resorted to different ways of dealing with the problem. English and Icelandic, for instance, have retained most of the historical spelling representing the no longer accurate historical pronunciation (with some complications), whilst, for example, Tibetan (being one of the more extreme examples) and Burmese languages have retained the archaic spelling in its entirety – both are spelled today using the pronunciation that existed hundreds of years ago. Other languages have resorted to regular historical revisions of spelling rule to purge obsolete spellings or even purge the disappeared sounds, e.g. Russian.
On the opposite side of the spectrum we have Chinese characters that have remained [mostly] unchanged over a very extended period of time, however, the pronunciation has changed several times, i.e. 越 as /*ɢʷaːd/ in Old Chinese -> as /ɦuɑt̚/ in Middle Chinese -> as /yuè/, /yuht/, /yad6/, /oat/, /uêg8/, /hhyq/ in modern Chinese languages (Mandarin, Cantonese, Hakka, Hokkien, Teochew and Wu, respectively).
I'm not saying that it doesn't happen, of course. But a phonemic spelling created today is still likely to have a much longer useful lifetime than one created 300 years ago, say.
They aren't :) where are you from? do you pronounce "vaso" and "baso" in the same way? (in Argentina and Spain at least they are clearly distinct)
I'm from Málaga, by the way.
Yeah, I was all "Which exceptions"?!?
https://aclanthology.org/2021.sigtyp-1.1/
Finnish scored 98% accuracy on "writing" (model converting phonemes to written words) and 92% accuracy on "reading" (written words to phonemes) in this study. The only other languages with both scores above 90% in their comparison are Esperanto - which is explicitly designed for that, of course - Serbo-Croatian, and Turkish. I'd say that's a very good result for a natural language.
For comparison, Spanish is 70% writing / 85% reading, French is 28% writing / 80% reading, and English is at dismal 36% writing / 30% reading.
Well... in French you can totally say twenty-nine instead of just nine (although nine also works). I think that is pretty rare among languages but I'm not sure.
Not rare among the ones I know, you can do that all over the Nordics and in Germany. So from my perspective you think wrong.
I love it! except exceptions.
"read" vs "read" (I have read this book/I will read this book).
"bow" vs "bow" (At the end of the opera everybody takes a bow/We shoot the arrows with a bow).
etc.
while standing on the bow (of a boat).
How bout 'A bowed bow fired from the bow requires that we take a bow to receive a bow'
This poem is a classic example: https://icaltefl.com/dearest-creature-in-creation/
Overall it feels like a simple language though, none of the annoying stuff such as gendered nouns and declension.
And even more tellingly, there's so many words in english where native speakers don't even agree how it's pronounced since there's no consistent pattern. Just depends how each person first heard it and got used to it.
In finnish pronounciation and spelling are 1:1, competely predictable with no exceptions. The english language game of a spelling bee would be extremely boring in finnish as there are no trick spellings. It's always written the way it is said.
As an English person, there are parts of my own country where it will take me a bit of time to get my ear tuned to the local accent and dialect (just this evening my wife's mother, from south yorkshire, used a word I'd never heard). But I was under the impression this is pretty common, at least across Europe. I've heard French people complaining about how people from some other part of France speak, the same for Germany. Is Finnish unusual in having a more homogeneous pronunciation?
I'm not being defensive or anything, this is a genuine question. As someone who struggled to spell at school I'm well aware of what a mess English is.
AFAICS, I'd say yes, it is.
There are some dialects (way up north, and in the East) where stuff is pronounced differently, but that's so hilariously different that I think speakers of those dialects are themselves fully aware that the way they pronounce stuff, it oughta be spelled differently. And conversely, what with only the "official" spelling being taught in school, they automatically learn the "correct" nationwide pronunciation from that -- thanks to the "everything is spelled as it's pronounced, and vice versa" phenomenon.
I find it fascinating how differently languages have developed.
Comparatively, learning German to a level where you can get by is a bit harder, but building on top of that to master the language is not an extraordinary amount of work.
Like, one would get much further with natural language processing based on a purely mechanistic approach targeting German, while English would have more exceptions than contenders where a rule applies.
Coming from Spanish and our irregular verbs, memorizing the inconsistencies is a piece of cake. The sounds though...
For example:
"come around" (apparently change your mind?) "come down on" (apparently this means "attack or punish harshly", not oral sex) "come down with" (get sick with some disease, ok you go down because you lay in bed, although you dont lie "on" the bed) "come up" (you come up with new ideas, for example that one can "calm down"; why up and down?)
There are tons of those phrasal verbs that are easy to natives, but those are so illogical who has to learn them. For example when Tony Soprano tells to "do someone in", maybe you can figure it out from the context, but without context it is just a mess.
It will beat and humiliate the learner, leading them to feel accomplished when they have finally attained proficiency.
By the master, English can be beaten and humiliated into submission and used to accomplish amazing feats of literary insanity.
Think rules matter? In some languages grammar rules (and their exceptions) are strict. When you start to mess around, things fall apart. Meaning evaporates. People don't understand you.
In English? Verbing weirds language.
Logic and reason are the refuge of the unimaginative and dispassionate. The people who don't understand or appreciate the satirical nature of the above article.
The insanity of English is what makes it awesome.
Too bad the written language is a disaster for learners. 10000 unique characters to learn (30000 for literary fluency), and inconsistent and often unpredictable pronunciation.
Tonality, which is famously hard for speakers of non-tonal languages to pick up?
Amusingly enough, English has its own tonal-equivalent learning problem in the form of phoneme stress. One of the final bosses for non-native but highly fluent speakers is the ability to never mess up the stress on certain words.
1000 characters suffices for basic literacy. HSK 6 (the highest level of the Chinese as a second language exam) includes fewer than 3000 characters. A highly educated person allegedly knows 8000+ characters, though I'd take that with a grain of salt.
And the only way to express these ideas is with phrases (combination of characters), as Chinese characters (spoken) on their own already are overloaded.
Moreover, they are not unique, but composed from common radicals, like prefix/suffix in English.
Grammatically, yes (with a few caveats). Phonetically… perhaps not so much. Mandarin has a pretty poor phonetic inventory having lost a large number of sounds (including finals) throughout the history of its development. Words in Mandarin tend to be longer (as in having 3 syllables on the average) compared to other Chinese languages that have retained more sounds.
> The only ”weird” parts are tonality and those darned counting words.
There is nothing specifically weird about them. English has them too, they are called «collective nouns», i.e. «a flock of birds», «two shivers of sharks», «an ambush of DevOps engineers», «three pandemoniums of webdevs», «murders of Deloitte consultants», «a dazzle of Rust developers» or «a pitying of enterprise architects». Flock, shiver, ambush, pandemonium, murders, dazzle, pitying are your «darned» counting words.
English: one animal, one person, one book
Korean: han mari, han myeong, han gweon.
Where 'han' is one, and the other three words are the counting words specific for counting animals, people, and books respectively.
It is not unfathomable (in fact, it is rather common) to conjure up the following conversation:
- How much milk (bread) do I have to buy?
- Two packets (two loaves), please.
In this context, packets and loaves fulfill the same role as the Korean counting words although they are multifunctional words, indeed.
For instance all Chinese movies/shows have subtitles that everyone reads along with (even in Beijing/Taipei). At first I thought this was for people that have poor Mandarin (minorities, old people that only speak a local dialect etc) but it seems even people that only speak standard mandarin also "need" subtitles to make out all the words. Without them a lot of words aren't distinct enough to make out over speakers/headphones. In every day speech as I understand it's common to not make out words as well and to kinda guess along what the other person said. It's possible to speak clearly, like a tv announcer, but as soon as you get a bit lazy or speak to fast it's easy to become unintelligible
I'd be curious to hear some native speaker's thoughts on this
The Rabbinic tradition is that the original language before Babel was Hebrew and after my studies of the language in college, I can totally buy that.
The other challenge with Arabic is that the script is considerably more complicated since most letters have distinct initial, medial and final forms whereas Hebrew only has special final forms for three letters. That said, I know almost no Arabic so I can’t speak with much authority on its learnability.
"The Complete Dictionary of Hebrew Language" has about 35,000 words in total. I bet that over a half of that aren't used, and would sound completely new to anyone except Hebrew linguists.
Hebrew is a "tabular" language that can be represented as a (sparsely populated) table with the roots as rows and "morphemes" (construction patterns) as columns. If a word exists, it will be in its proper place at an appropriate row and column.
Here's an example of a construction pattern for the category of "tools":
maXXeXa
The X denotes a place to put the root letters. Most of the roots are composed of three letters, and so there are three places.
When you combine it with the root S.R.T which has a meaning of "ribbon" (and also, film), you get "maSReTa" — "a tool for making films" (video camera).
If you combine it with the root Ts.L.M which has a meaning of "image", you get "maTsLeMa" — "a tool for making images" (still camera).
Even if you never heard the word "maVReGa" but are able to separate it into the morpheme of "tools" and the root V.R.G (which has a meaning of clock-wise motion), you can use that to understand the word as "a tool for making clock-wise motion" — a screwdriver.
The lack of vowels also trips up non-native speakers/readers.
Jesus... I studied Latin in high school and this triggered some PTSD. And Latin only has 6 cases!
The answer with Latin is obviously the cases, imho Spanish would be my vote for a lingua franca – simple, phonetic, sounds beautiful with any accent sung or spoken, and already has massive influence and history.
I'm also a fan of auxiliary languages and think some of these constructed languages are a much better choice for a "world language" because of just how fast one can learn them. My personal favourite being Interlingue (aka Occidental). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingue
Related to both these points, there is a savant called Daniel Tammet, who is a polyglot amongst other things. I hear his favourite language is Finnish and he has constructed a language based on it (and other Finnic languages) called Mänti. I haven't checked it out yet, but it sounds appealing to me at least. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet
As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English".
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.
Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.
Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.
By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".
During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl.
Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi TU understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.
Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.
"Koira, koiran, koiraa, koiran again"
What do you mean Finnish is difficult?
English: A dog
Swedish: What
English: The dog
English: Two dogs
Swedish:
Swedish:
Swedish: En hund, hunden
Swedish: Två hundar, hundarna
German:
English: No, go away
Swedish: No one invited you
German: Der Hund
English: I said go away
German: Ein Hund, zwei Hunde
Swedish: Stop it
German: Den Hund, einen Hund, dem Hund, einem Hund, des Hundes, eines Hundes, den Hunden, der Hunden
Finnish: Sup
English: NO
Swedish: NO
German: NO
Finnish:
English:
German:
Swedish:
Finnish: Koira, koiran, koiraa, koiran again, koirassa, koirasta, koiraan, koiralla, koiralta, koiralle, koirana, koiraksi, koiratta, koirineen, koirin German: Swedish: Finnish: English: Finnish: Aaaand... koirasi, koirani, koiransa, koiramme, koiranne, koiraani, koiraasi, koiraansa, koiraamme, koiraanne, koirassani, koirassasi, koirassansa, koirassamme, koirassanne, koirastani, koirastasi, koirastansa, koirastamme, koirastanne, koirallani, koirallasi, koirallansa, koirallamme, koirallanne, koiranani, koiranasi, koiranansa, koiranamme, koirananne, koirakseni, koiraksesi, koiraksensa, koiraksemme, koiraksenne, koirattani, koirattasi, koirattansa, koirattamme, koirattanne, koirineni, koirinesi, koirinensa, koirinemme, koirinenne English: Swedish: German: Finnish: Wait! then theres koirakaan, koirankaan, koiraakaan, koirassakaan, koirastakaan, koiraankaan, koirallakaan, koiraltakaan, koirallekaan, koiranakaan, koiraksikaan, koirattakaan, koirineenkaan, koirinkaan, koirako, koiranko, koiraako, koirassako, koirastako, koiraanko, koirallako, koiraltako, koiralleko, koiranako, koiraksiko, koirattako, koirineenko, koirinko, koirasikaan, koiranikaan, koiransakaan, koirammekaan, koirannekaan, koiraanikaan, koiraasikaan, koiraansakaan, koiraammekaan, koiraannekaan, koirassanikaan, koirassasikaan, koirassansakaan, koirassammekaan, koirassannekaan, koirastanikaan, koirastasikaan, koirastansakaan, koirastammekaan, koirastannekaan, koirallanikaan, koirallasikaan, koirallansakaan, koirallammekaan, koirallannekaan, koirananikaan, koiranasikaan, koiranansakaan, koiranammekaan, koiranannekaan, koiraksenikaan, koiraksesikaan, koiraksensakaan, koiraksemmekaan, koiraksennekaan, koirattanikaan, koirattasikaan, koirattansakaan, koirattammekaan, koirattannekaan, koirinenikaan, koirinesikaan, koirinensakaan, koirinemmekaan, koirinennekaan, koirasiko, koiraniko, koiransako, koirammeko, koiranneko, koiraaniko, koiraasiko, koiraansako, koiraammeko, koiraanneko, koirassaniko, koirassasiko, koirassansako, koirassammeko, koirassanneko, koirastaniko, koirastasiko, koirastansako, koirastammeko, koirastanneko, koirallaniko, koirallasiko, koirallansako, koirallammeko, koirallanneko, koirananiko, koiranasiko, koiranansako, koiranammeko, koirananneko, koirakseniko, koiraksesiko, koiraksensako, koiraksemmeko, koiraksenneko, koirattaniko, koirattasiko, koirattansako, koirattammeko, koirattanneko, koirineniko, koirinesiko, koirinensako, koirinemmeko, koirinenneko, koirasikaanko, koiranikaanko, koiransakaanko, koirammekaanko, koirannekaanko, koiraanikaanko, koiraasikaanko, koiraansakaanko, koiraammekaanko, koiraannekaanko, koirassanikaanko, koirassasikaanko, koirassansakaanko, koirassammekaanko, koirassannekaanko, koirastanikaanko, koirastasikaanko, koirastansakaanko, koirastammekaanko, koirastannekaanko, koirallanikaanko, koirallasikaanko, koirallansakaanko, koirallammekaanko, koirallannekaanko, koirananikaanko, koiranasikaanko, koiranansakaanko, koiranammekaanko, koiranannekaanko, koiraksenikaanko, koiraksesikaanko, koiraksensakaanko, koiraksemmekaanko, koiraksennekaanko, koirattanikaanko, koirattasikaanko, koirattansakaanko, koirattammekaanko, koirattannekaanko, koirinenikaanko, koirinesikaanko, koirinensakaanko, koirinemmekaanko, koirinennekaanko, koirasikokaan, koiranikokaan, koiransakokaan, koirammekokaan, koirannekokaan, koiraanikokaan, koiraasikokaan, koiraansakokaan, koiraammekokaan, koiraannekokaan, koirassanikokaan, koirassasikokaan, koirassansakokaan, koirassammekokaan, koirassannekokaan, koirastanikokaan, koirastasikokaan, koirastansakokaan, koirastammekokaan, koirastannekokaan, koirallanikokaan, koirallasikokaan, koirallansakokaan, koirallammekokaan, koirallannekokaan, koirananikokaan, koiranasikokaan, koiranansakokaan, koiranammekokaan, koiranannekokaan, koiraksenikokaan, koiraksesikokaan, koiraksensakokaan, koiraksemmekokaan, koiraksennekokaan, koirattanikokaan, koirattasikokaan, koirattansakokaan, koirattammekokaan, koirattannekokaan, koirinenikokaan, koirinesikokaan, koirinensakokaan, koirinemmekokaan, koirinennekokaan Swedish:
German:
English: Okay, now you're just making things up!
Finnish:
Finnish: And now the plural forms...
No, what you showed is a lame/inaccurate transcription of the countryball gag, which came first. Source: KC hivemind
https://translate.google.com/?sl=sk&tl=en&text=zmrzlina&op=t...
My eyes can tell, gotta use diff.
prrrrrrrrrd
The word "prv" is archaic and could confuse some younger speakers, but the sentence works even without the word as "Chrt zhlt hrst zrn" and that's all valid modern Czech.
So I think the verb “smrsknout se” would more correctly be used as “smrskl[a] jsi se”, and contracted as “smrskl[a]s se” - but then I’m a foreigner who repeatedly messes Czech up so I’m likely talking nonsense :-D
It's called "příklonné -s" and yes, it's mostly used in Common Czech (the informal dialect we use in day-to-day life). I wouldn't call Common Czech slang because basically everyone speaks it or some form of it, it's not restricted to members of a subculture, profession, etc.
> would more correctly be used as “smrskl[a] jsi se”
Even native speakers almost never get this right -- “smrskl[a] jsi se” is the formal-ish-sounding form, but it's actually incorrect. "smrskl[a] ses" is the correct (codified) form. And yes, the verb is reflective, although I can think of some reaaally relaxed Common Czech sentences where it wouldn't be. (Smrskls trochu ty minimální požadavky [pro ten software]?)
BTW where do you come from? You seem to know your way around Czech grammar. Foreigners tend to struggle a LOT with the language.
I'm from Scotland, but in truth I'm only really fine with Czech when i have time to sit and think about it (like reading) or when I'm talking. I totally panic when listening and get all mixed up :)
disapproving noises in Moravian
So in that sense, a word that may look bad (eg bwyta, to eat) actually has no consonant clusters in it - actually being pronounced 'boy-ta'.
Finnish was often a go-to example because it more or less had every feature enabled.
Case and declination? Sure. Tenses? Yes. Agglutinative? Yes.
It was asserted that there a disproportionate number of linguists are Finnish because their language is a superset of many others, and by necessity almost all Finns are multilingual, and that when they are, the language families they tend to learn (Germanic, Romance, and Slavic) are all distinctly different. So by the time Finnish academics get an advanced degree their language faculties can be extraordinary.
EDIT oh yeah gender was the exception to the feature flags
Edit: maybe ASL? https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...
I'd guess Finnish has more than one demonstrative pronoun, too :)
> I'd guess Finnish has more than one demonstrative pronoun, too :)
One of the most common ways to do that in Finnish is talking about how "One (did something) and the other (did something else)"... With the only tiny little problem being that the Finnish for both "one" and "the other", in this context, is "toinen"!
Is there any list for what those features can be? (Not constrained to Fin.)
[0]: https://wals.info/
??
Finnish isn't Indo-European. It's a Uralic language of which their are only about 25 million speakers collectively, mostly in Finland, Hungary, and Estonia.
ADDED: Perhaps the intended point is that the language has many language features. But the language itself isn't a superset.
* Tulin Norjasta — I came from Norway.
* Pidän Norjasta — I like Norway.
* Puhu Norjasta — Talk about Norway.
How come the same case is used in these?!
"Löytyy apteekista" — "Can be found at the pharmacy", literally "Find from the pharmacy". Saying "Löytyy apteekissa", which would literally mean "find at the pharmacy" is grammatically incorrect.
So, yeah, Finnish grammar is nicely structured and consistent, but sometimes it just goes against intuition of speakers of other languages.
"Pidän koiran" - I will keep the dog (for good).
"Pitää" is one of these ancient words that means many things, but primarily: to hold, and Finns apparently think that to like something is to hold that which comes out of it!
You would still say that the man is in the pharmacy (mies on apteekissa) but the stuff he found is from it (lääkkeet apteekista).
I find it helps to think of it as "I think highly of the dog".
Or in Swedish, "Jag håller av hunden". Which, come to think of it, is pretty much a literal word for word translation -- because the base meaning of "pidä" is "to hold", not "to like".
They're definitely Finlanders. Rooting for Finland in Finland - Sweden sportsball games, general disdain for Swedes as "sissies", etc, etc.
Source: I'm an immigrant from Sweden to Finland; my son is a Finland-Swede.
Alternative source: I think I've read somewhere on the internet (or seen in some YouTube video?) an offhand quip along those same "Sissy Sweden-Swedes" lines by the internationally most well-known -- at least among the kind of people frequenting HN, I'd assume -- Finland-Swede, Linus Torvalds.
Perkele, consider the matter closed.
Saatanan kyrpä, kun saavun numeron loppuun, en muista vitun alkun.
I make fun because I love
Well, not the near-undecipherable real deal[1] Stadin Slangi, but just ordinary contemporary colloquial, I guess.
___
[1]: Near-half (old-fashioned) Swedish, near-half (old-fashioned) Russian, a tiny smattering of (old-fashioned) Finnish.
So "seiskafemma" is just the digita concatenated; "seven-five" in stead of "seventy-five". Doesn't feel all that weird to me. For one thing, other languages do that too. And for another, it's all the "-kymmenen" bits that are too long to pronounce, so leaving them out (when that doesn't introduce confusion, of course) seems eminently sensible. Really not weird at all.
They do on the TV (and, I assume, radio) news. But even they sometimes stumble over them, which leads me to further assume that the announcers only speak that way on the air.
Recreating a spec is the entire idea of teaching something from scratch. It's too fundamental for law like that. Unless you know examples of actual legal threats and aggressive positioning, maybe like what happened around Lojban.
Not if it's copyrighted, one would think?
The big question is really if its possible to 'think' in the language. Have you been able to get into the stage where its like thinking? But then your thought feels limited? I feel like people have proven its possible to think in it though I'm not there yet. I am still at the puzzle stage. Thinking it in unlocks abilities like how AI are now are able to think in terms of human language.
> The big question is really if its possible to 'think' in the language. Have you been able to get into the stage where its like thinking?
I was approaching that stage when I was learning it, but I'm a bit rusty now since I haven't used it in a while. There are definitely people at that level though. Check out Esperanto youtubers like Evildea.
> But then your thought feels limited?
Usually if you can't think of a word, you can insert the English word in your thinking and make a mental note to look up the vocabulary later.
It's a really fun language. It's a shame there aren't more speakers.
Check out this talk by Tim Owen where he goes over the basics of Esperanto and why it's so easy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCiFMD8RNbg
Here's a cheat sheet you might find interesting: https://i.imgur.com/FKasIpP.jpg
The need to learn new languages is slowly disappearing. And not because English is so dominant (which it is) but because machines are getting better at translations. That is about to become very disruptive. Right now, using machine translations is nice when you really need them but still a bit awkward and tedious. And they still get a lot wrong.
But that's not going to last very long. Real time subtitles are already a thing in video chats and on Youtube. They aren't necessarily very good yet but improving over time. Once we hit the good enough stage, Having real time conversations with people you don't share any language with also becomes a possibility. Right now you can use your phone for simple stuff but it's a bit awkward.
I think in a decade or so, you'll be able to go wherever and have meaningful conversations with just about anyone you meet. I think that's going to be massive enabler for businesses.
This feels like the same kind of attitude that makes immigrants from English-speaking countries think they're not immigrants (which you were, if only for a while) but "expats" (see other recent HN threads on that subject).
It seems to offend people that I don't dedicate a large chunk of my life trying to master new languages; which is something I simply neither value nor enjoy. Sorry, I have more interesting things to do than trying to level up my language skills and my job is taking a lot of energy.
I mastered English and that was a lot of work and it took many years. I use it more than my native language Dutch. It will have to do. Adding a third and a fourth language to that mix is just never going to be a thing for me.
I am a Brit. You might know a bit about where I live - a set of islands to the left of mainland Europe, one of which Britain (UK) shares with the Republic of Ireland.
We generally speak one of several varieties of English around here along with roughly 100 other languages - our rather complicated history means that this is a very diverse society nowadays.
Brythonic/Pretonic etc are the languages from before the Angles/Saxons/Vikings rocked up - that's where the modern word Briton ultimately comes from. A greek bloke called Pytheas who circumnavigated these isles called the natives here Pretanike - ie Pretish/British peoples.
We have Welsh, Scottish, Irish and the rest in rude health. Cornish is being gradually resurrected. Cumbric is nigh on dead as are loads of other old languages.
This discussion about a lingua franca (French) is mostly carried out in English for a good reason. English is extremely malleable and not too fussy. It can be complicated or not as required. There are loads of pidgins too. There are no diacritics in English (a few French borrow words perhaps, and that weird double dot over naive that I've left out here). It is also accepted that vowels can wander a bit and consonants can also trot around and find some greener grass.
old tupi I guess is as good and any Extinct Language.
kat, price, cirkle, cirkumference, kick.
I think if someone sent me those words I could parse it!
Simple rules, simple writing system, few exceptions and none in pronunciation (that I know of), and piling suffixes sometimes feels like programming, there's suffix for everything and you just add them logically or with simple combination rules: https://trstem.com/en/verb/conjunct/gel/, you can learn entire conjugation in time it would take you to learn 5 verbs in Spanish ;)
Also (like Finnish?) has a political advantage of not being in either of the superpower language families, so every one suffers the ~same amount :)
Also you should pleasure your ears by listening to this if you think Finnish is a global language...
(ALSO I See Torvalds behind this)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz_uq7ypZnc
I have never been so beautifully scolded in a language I cannot understand
Overall it’s all about where I call home
At the same time, (to this ESL person it seems that) a short Finnish expression can express much more complex concepts than a few English words can usually convey. The complete sentence "Juoksutellaan." means something like "[Yes,] we shall[/should/agree to] make them/him/her/it run around[/work hard/be busy]." The "-lla" implies a non-contiguous form of "to make run", where the subject mostly needs to run, but not all the time. Think of exercising a horse, or keeping an intern busy for a day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadsat
or Newspeak?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
both expressive languages developed by forward thinkers for our modern era.
> c. is it possible to avoid using the noun?
And now you know why the most extroverted Finns are the ones who look at your shoes instead of on the ground in front of you!
Then English is obviously more logical, since the rules can be applied just as reliably in all situations as Finnish, and has even more exceptions.
Tongue is in cheek here, as it is in the original article.
It's always surprising how many people believe that spelling is somehow linguistically significant. There is no real difference between Czech 'zrm' and English 'zerm', but somehow the Czechs are dealing with an unpronounceable vowel shortage.
I don't think Finland has the economic or cultural capacity to make that real. China is the next best bet, but they haven't succeeded in the cultural invasion aspect. Japan with anime and Korea with kpop (the cultural export was funded by the S.Korean gov to start) has made better inroads.
nobody is learning Finnish before Korean or Japanese.
Curious on the traits that sound similar to you.
To me they sound pretty different as a native Greek speaker. I can spot the loan words etc and can make some meanings, but that's where that stops. Spanish is pretty different from Latin too, in that it is simplified. Spanish has a really interesting history but a Latin speaker wouldn't be able to communicate with a Spanish native speaker in any way -- i.e. it has deviated substantially.
Μένεις στην Ελλάδα?
Μένω στις Ηνωμένες Πολιτείες, αλλά θέλω να ζήσω κάποτε στην Ελλάδα.
So why the heck did they rename Occidental to something that differs by one letter from another language that they must have known about?!? Just totally baffling.
As for the name change, I think it has a very general meaning, like amongst-language with the e ending being typical for Occidental nouns and the a ending for Interlingua nouns (maybe). Weirdly enough, the name push was by a guy called Ric Berger who was a Occidentalist who moved to Interlingua and probably played a part in naming both languages. BTW, both languages are very similar in vocabulary roots with Interlingua drawing inspiration from Occidental during its development (if I understood correctly).
First thing that springs to mind: So maybe this Berger guy was trying to force or at least encourage a merger?
For me, there was something that just seemed off about the language. I mean it's usable and useful and all that jazz, but I just didn't like using it. In some ways, as a language, it feels unfinished, or unpolished, and it seems stuck in its ways. But then there are those who would argue anything different would not be Esperanto, and I can see their point.
For me, the great international language has still to be invented, or perhaps has existed for many decades, but has yet to go viral.
The whole concept of an international language might just be like religion though. There are some that will never embrace it. There are some that will prefer one over the other and never change, and some that might convert.
The solution to a universal language might be multiple universal languages (lol). For example, Occidental, Oriental and African. As long as they are easy to learn while being precise enough that miscommunication through ambiguity is difficult.
You start with the language that is local to you, thus giving you access to many people and local trading partners. Then if you want, you can branch out to areas that interest you. It should even be possible for someone from the African area to speak with another from the Oriental area if both have learned Occidental, for example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Week_(1920_film)
It expertly treated its subject matter with great humor--sans verbal language (interstitials aside).
Of course not. There is even a book about it:
https://sciter.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/master-finnish...
Heard a bit of a "Newspodd" on Radio Vega, where someone claimed the most common reaction abroad to the recent storm-in-a-teacup news brouhaha was "Are you just jealous because she's hot and cool?"
Great, trying to sell it as a World Language and they managed to insult 99.95% of the world with one line!
(Well maybe less than 99.95%. We can all agree that English swear words aren't that great.)
It really does look like that, it's unnaturally systematic in a lot of ways.
That already makes adoption of the language doomed, hahaha. Swearing also needs no logic, I dun give a fuck. Fuck yeah? fuuuuuuck. “fuck” as the universal language and word.
I remember my younger days when Hristo Stoichkov came to play with Barcelona FC. A very aggresive and sweary player, a few years later he left to play for Parma FC, and while playing in Italy, he kept swearing in spanish!
I even saw him doing the same while playing for Bulgaria.
Anyway, one thing that the post did not touch on was word stress. Finnish is awesomely simple and consistent! (again, especially compared to English)
https://scholarworks.smith.edu/theses/1504/
Seen many funny instances were blatant satire gets hilarious responses from people that treat it as real.
Of course Autistic Savants often takes things far to literally. Took me ages when younger to get the hang of it.
> The rules are absolute and reliable in all situations, except exceptions.
> Learning Finnish builds confidence. If you can learn Finnish, then you can learn anything.
> and shifts the burden of labour over to the person you are talking to.
> First let's have fun. There are two texts about Finnish language: the English original and a German translation. Don't take them too serious:
> Finnish as a world language?
> Finnisch, die Weltsprache
I love the site; great fun to explore.
so... the rules are not absolute and reliable in all situations?
I twice misread this as "fjording" and found it quite clever, but alas.
Compare this to e.g. Spanish and French, languages so close to each other but sounding so different. I wonder if there is some deep reason why prosody is well conserved in the Finnish-Hungarian pair and apparently entirely meaningless in Romance.
This language was created by a Bishop and was later promoted by Russians for political reasons (to piss off the Swedes).