Come on, English is not that bad. No real verb conjugation in response to gender, person, or (to an extent) number. There are irregular verbs, sure, but due to a simpler conjugation you have to memorize way less than for eg Spanish or French. Simpler morphology - no significant agglutination, prefixes or suffixes. Only 26 glyphs. One downside is complicated phonetics though. Not just the sounds, but all the inconsistencies (like “dough”, “through”, “rough”, or “head”, “heat”, “read”).
“Read” - lol I did not miss that one, just did not elaborate. I really could go on and on :-) I personally struggled with “bear” vs “hear” (and “heard” vs “beard”), voicing of “th” (“this” vs “thin”, “than” va “thanks”), accent change in verb vs noun (“prOgress” vs “”progrEss”). But not with silent letters as in “psychology” or “bomb” because compared to Russian and French that is a piece of cake.
In Spanish when a 5 or 6 yr old learns to read, they can read virtually any word correctly, no crazy phonetics, vowels are very distinct, the language has somewhat complex but strict rules. Compared to it, English looks like spaghetti thrown to the wall.
In Greek, all letter combinations always have the same pronunciation. My Greek teacher told me she learned English by reading alone. When she first met an American, she apologized for arriving early, but she pronounced "early" like "yearly" because in her native Greek, the "ea" combination would always produce the same sound.
Yeah English pronunciation is probably the only part I'd say is difficult or annoying to learn. As a fluent speaker for more than 20 years, I still have to look up how to pronounce different words multiple times a week.
Overall it feels like a simple language though, none of the annoying stuff such as
gendered nouns and declension.
> As a fluent speaker for more than 20 years, I still have to look up how to pronounce different words multiple times a week.
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.
Is that not just regional accents? Don't most countries with a reasonably sized population have differences in punctuation? Or are you referring to something different?
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.
> Is Finnish unusual in having a more homogeneous pronunciation?
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 believe English has an easier to reach basic level, but it is perhaps the hardest language to master out of all of them.
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.
English also has phrasal verbs, which are basically a group of inconsistent, illogical idioms that you need to learn by heart in order to understand them.
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.
English is the superior language because of its infinite number of states.
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.
Well done satire will fool any community. That's the definition of good satire. I don't think HN is any more easily fooled than other communities. And frequently HN finds some aspect being ridiculed and shows that in fact it's not nearly as dismissable as the satire would have one believe.
I'm fairly sure 90% of comments on HN are written by people who haven't even clicked on the link to the article supposedly under discussion. Disclaimer: including myself, though not on this particular occasion.
Which would be fine, no one has to read everything, but for some reason people who only read the headline feel qualified to comment, and this particularly shows with satirical pieces.
mi sona ala e ni. toki pona li toki lili. toki sike li wile nimi mute. toki pona li jo ala e nimi mute. toki pona li jo nimi moku. toki pona li jo ala nimi "consume". sona suli li wile e nimi mute. toki siki li wile ala toki pona.
I don't think there is validity to that though I do appreciate the humor and sentiment. A book can be copy-written sure but many have re-created the spec and dictionary.
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.
Searching google for "toki pona dictionary online", in an incognito tab, brings up three dictionaries. One of them (the one on zrajm.github.io) is identical to the one in the book. You can also find a copy in the Toki Pona discord server. I have prepared a PDF version (1 page double-sided, a4 paper) which can be found here: http://0x0.st/ofqt.pdf from this groff input file: http://0x0.st/ofqv.roff (also by me).
Some people say writing and computers and law have frozen English as well. At least relatively. It really depends on your own goals and opinions of language and what kind of world-wide-web of communication you'd be wanting. I'm thinking in terms of world-wide cyberspace where word-language is just a tiny fraction of the total universal mediums people can communicate it.
Do you find Esperanto is closer to a full language? Does it avoid the burden of learning a full language? To me I am excited by the potential to learn a whole language in a day. Like learning the entire syntax of C vs. C++. To at least know the words well enough to enter into a language world and begin writing and parsing programs with the full syntax. Maybe we are not at the '1 day' learning stage yet but the potential seems there.
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.
I definitely consider Esperanto to be a full language. I like how the vocabulary is based on a prefix/suffix system that reduces the amount of words you have to know, and the grammar is very simple and consistent.
> 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.
After I commented I realized you're referring to Toki Pona in the second part of your comment. Yeah you're definitely going to be limited with your thinking. That's not really a problem with Esperanto.
I like Couturat et al.'s Ido even better. I can't "think" in it yet, but it is very regular and easy to learn. The main (irrational, personal) issue I have with it is the monotony of endings, -o is always a singular noun, etc. Plus it is Eurocentric. It does have pan-gender words like lu, saving having to say he/she/it. Tradeoffs.
There’s extremely few exceptions though, very much unlike other languages.
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.
This is something I really like about Finnish. Being a native Spanish speaker, I am accustomed to knowing how a word is spelled just by hearing it, although there are some cases where there might be doubt (like the homophones b and v, or the always silent h). But the letters are not always pronounced the same. For example, c and g are pronounced differently, depending on what the following vowel is. Even worse, u is silent after a q, or when between a g and an e or i. I mean, I don't have any problem with all of this, since I've been dealing with it for all my life :) . But I can understand how annoying it can be for a foreign learner, even if it's not as infuriating as English.
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.
> Being a native Spanish speaker, I am accustomed to knowing how a word is spelled just by hearing it, although there are some cases where there might be doubt (like the homophones b and v, or the always silent h) […]
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).
However, the languages evolved much faster historically than they do today. On one hand, the states are now effectively enforcing standard forms of language on populations via universal primary education, and then mass culture and media further reinforce that, often aided by social conventions (where the enforced standard often becomes socially proper "educated speech" that people strive to emulate to present themselves better and/or to not be discriminated against). And at the same time, modern borders significantly reduce migration rates, making it harder for language innovations to spread.
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.
I stand corrected! I have visited Catalonia quite a few times and never noticed they being homophones. In Argentina, or at least in Buenos Aires, they even teach you in primary school to pronounce the v using your upper teeth and lower lips (it makes it sound closer to f), and the b only with both lips. I'm very surprised to learn this, can't imagine pronouncing vacaciones as bacaciones hahah that's amazing, I wonder where this difference comes from.
Indeed. I remember seeing spelling bees in American TV shows and movies (which were subtitled) as a child, before I learned English, and wondered what the point was. It would be trivially easy in Finnish and anyone who knew how to read and write could easily get perfect points in such a competition.
That's a digraph, and they're only a problem if they can be pronounced differently. If "ng" is always the velar nasal [ŋ] and can never be the sequence [ng], then you can just treat it as a distinct symbol that happens to be composed of shapes used for other symbols.
There's an amusing way to quantify just how systemic the language orthography is: train an ML model to converts words to phonemes and back, and then see how many mistakes it makes. With similar sized training corpus in different languages, you get numbers that are directly comparable. Of course, it's a very rough estimate, but still interesting:
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.
German exceptions are nothing compared to French exceptions. French is basically all exceptions and no rules! And some math (in French when you want to say 99, you literally say four twentieths and 10 and 9).
People make a big deal about "quatre-vingt", but no French speaker thinks about that word as anything except "80". No one is doing multiplication in real time.
The context is people learning the language though... this sort of efficiency will always come with familiarity, like how you can read 21:00 as 9 without thinking about it
> like how you can read 21:00 as 9 without thinking about it
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.
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.
Japanese grammar is starkly minimalist. It's not hard to learn at all, the basic structure is almost purely agglutinative, and the word order is consistently head-final in all cases (e.g. SOV for sentence and modifier-modified for not only adjectives but also relative and appositive clauses), and it helps that Japanese doesn't grammatically track several things that other languages do, such as person, number, or gender.
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.
You're forgetting the difficulty of learning the elaborate system of honorifics, without which you'll be unable to talk to a native speaker without insulting them. The title of this book gives some idea: https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/4770016247/ref=nosim...
While that is technically true standard 敬語/honorifics (です/ます and a few word choices) aren't really that complicated.
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.
Just to relate back to the original point of adopting a universal language, I would guess that if any language were adopted as a world-wide language, then things like honorifics and formal-informal distinctions and gendered articles/nouns would be dropped pretty quickly.
You're mistaking simplicity and lack of capabilities.
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.
I understand that simple is better than easy in many cases, that's the whole idea of lisp like languages, but I am not sure it is true for languages, especially for comprehension. Because things sound the same and there is no distinction it makes it hard for listening or even reading comprehension. Many time it is much easier to quickly decipher what a javascript function is doing than lisp because the lisp simplicity doesn't give you those immediate anchors to look at, it all looks the same.
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.
Kanji is indeed complex but you can memorize Katakana and Hiragana in a couple of hours and they will help you tremendously in things like navigating the public transport signage. They have a few more characters than 26, but each letter has exactly one pronunciation. None of that context-dependent pronunciation stuff like English is full of.
Tackle Kanji after mastering Katakana and Hiragana.
Japanese uses Chinese characters heavily, but they're obviously pronounced nothing like they are in Mandarin, and their contextual meaning has drifted over the last thousand years. Japan and China have also made many different choices in technical loanwords-- Japanese tends to transcribe loanwords directly but English is often lightly mangled by Japanese phonology: you can puzzle over キーボード (kiiboodo) for a while but unless it's in context the English word "keyboard" won't jump out.
I had to work with some code from a Japanese manufacturer and translated some of the comments. I got stuck on デバドラ (debadora) for a while. It was clearly Japanized English but it took a while to realize it is "device driver".
They like four-character abbreviations a lot (obviously you have 四字熟語, but most onomatopoeia are four kana, and a lot of other emphatic words are four kana). I was watching a let's play YouTuber who started referring to Breath of the Wild as ブレワイ (burewai).
I guess we do the same in English - obviously there’s using an acronym (BotW) but often people will use a single word in a multi-word title - like “Smash” for one of the Smash Brothers games
From my experience, the Japanese love four-katakana abbrevations as much as English-speakers love our two-letter and three-letter acronyms.
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.
Man, I had a similar experience working with code from a French manufacturer. The comments were mostly translatable, but the variable names were hell. It's bad enough trying to figure out in English whether acc is an abbreviation of acceleration, or accuracy, or some acronym, etc. Trying to expand a three letter abbreviations in a language you don't know it's nearly impossible.
Made me really lean towards never abbreviating in variable names unless it was extremely necessary for brevity, and also provide good comments.
It's not that bad, most sequences of kanji have just a single (common) way to pronounce them.
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?
Most Kanji have at least two ways to pronounce them, the On reading and the Kun reading. For example, 水 (meaning water) can be pronounced as both “Mizu” and “Sui.”
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. For instance 水 in isolation is (almost?) never pronounced 'sui'. To say it has 2 different pronunciations is a bit like pointing out 'ou' has about 4~5 different pronunciations in English.
Thanks for your reply. Maybe I can help clear this up a bit.
> "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.
Thanks for the detailed response. I think I do understand your point.
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).
Kanji are fun to learn, because they are constructive to some degree, and actually pictorial to some degree.
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.
So you can't say "rest" without mentioning a tree? Finnish is funny in similar ways due to its ubiquitous forests. To "hunt" is "metsästää", "metsä" being "forest" the place you went to look for food.
You can say you metsästää for mushrooms (and other edibles) in the forest too, though, can't you? So maybe it's actually more of a direct correspondence to "forage". And, is that perhaps derived from / related to "forest"? (Or fodder?)
Not really, metsästää implies hunting for living things.
There's a dedicated verb for mushroom foraging, sienestää, or you can say sienimetsässä, "in the mushroom forest".
Some make direct sense like the tree/forest, others you have to deep dive into their history for them to make sense (if at all).
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.
A good chunk of the roughly ~2100 Kanji have two versions of expression. Some of them have upto 8-10 ways of usage (although very few). As a Japanese resident,
(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.
It is literally the hardest language to learn for English speakers. Regardless of what you hear about the elegance of its grammar, this is a real fact backed up with evidence from past learners. Know what you're getting yourself into.
Check out Cure Dolly on YouTube and weep at the poor quality of instruction that you’re probably receiving.
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.
Reminds me of Peter the Great's influence on Russian Cyrillic. Among other contributions, he happened to like the shape of the Latin letter R, so he just bunged a backwards one into the alphabet where it represents the sound 'ya'.
Hangul is far less capricious, though, a marvel of careful design.
> Reminds me of Peter the Great's influence on Russian Cyrillic. Among other contributions, he happened to like the shape of the Latin letter R, so he just bunged a backwards one into the alphabet where it represents the sound 'ya'
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.
IDK about Я, but Peter I definitely reshaped, along the European typesetting guidelines, some letters like lowercase a (which traditionally looked more like the Greek alpha, α), and most drastically the t (т) which for the best part of 17th century looked like Latin m. (This shape still remains in Cyrillic cursive.)
sometimes when I visit twitter, browser or whatever starts to think that Russian twits are actually Bulgarian, and this changes shape of some Cyrillic letters, making text looking somewhat funny to russian eye. T is one of them, IIRC.
He didn't invent those shapes, though; just picked the preferred ones. In particular, the m/т distinction is still present across different Slavic scripts even in non-cursive form, because they standardized on different variants:
Я evolved from the letter Ѧ, the pronunciation of which happened to match that of Ꙗ (that is, a digraph IA, representing the iotated A sound) in Eastern Slavic languages very early on. Its handwritten cursive version looked like this:
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".
I have heard that hangul and Mongolic script are related, which might explain how the king was able to create a fully featured beautiful script like that in one go.
"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.
Korean is the correct answer for world language. Revive the hangul triangle and other characters to represent sounds not present in Korea and you're good! Highly efficient. Beautiful. Calligraphy is art.
Japanese is a language with no future tense and a very choppy system of plurals (many of which have to be inferred). I don't think it's a good candidate.
There's an argument to be made that that isn't a true future tense, as it's not an inflected verb form. Thus English doesn't have a future tense in the same way it has a past tense (-ed for regular verbs) or a present tense (-s for third person singular verbs), .i. marked by inflection of a verb. Instead, it uses an auxiliary verb to express the future. Now, whether that counts as 'tense' or not is a matter for linguistic debate.
This is my syntax bias for sure, and you're not wrong it is a debate for some reason, but I find it very silly. An inflectional rule or an auxiliary word can assign a `TENSE fut` feature, just like an inflectional ending or an adposition can assign a case feature. They're just different mechanisms.
Yeah, but we're just trying to be consistent: when people say "Japanese has no future tense", they mean a morphological tense, and it's equally true that English has no morphological future tense either.
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).
Eh, you're right if you treat it as just clipping "morphological". But it doesn't sound like it to most people, they think "English and Japanese are in the same category of lacking a future tense" in some non-extremely-limited way. When really English is far closer to a language with morphological future tense than it is to Japanese.
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.
> When really English is far closer to a language with morphological future tense than it is to Japanese.
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.
I don't have a strong knowledge of Japanese (year in college as part of linguistics degree, wife speaks it), so it's possible I'm mistaken about the nature of it grammatically. But my point isn't to make some Sapir-Whorf / Hopi Time-esque argument about its pragmatics, just to argue a point about the grammatical structure (whether the future tense is grammaticalized or not). That point might not hit exactly with Japanese if there's more grammaticalization of the future tense in Japanese than I thought, but my point is regardless to compare a language like English that has a grammaticalized future tense via auxiliary verb to languages that don't grammaticalize future tense.
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.
> but my point is regardless to compare a language like English that has a grammaticalized future tense via auxiliary verb to languages that don't grammaticalize future tense.
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.
There's nothing inherently "western-exceptional" in recognising that Indo-European languages are structured fundamentally differently than Japanese. That's just a basic fact of linguistic typology.
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» 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.
Ah, yes, you are correct. I got temporarily transfixed on something else.
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.
> 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.
They are used in Romance languages as well. Half the tenses in French are auxiliary+participle combinations (Latin even has future participles).
English has basically most (all?) the tenses that a language like French has but may lean on pairing the verb with additional words. (Though it's been way too long since I studied French to even remember the names for all these tenses much less the French forms.)
french has a lot more tenses, behold:
avoir, tu avais, tu as eu, tu as, tu auras, tu auras eu, tu aurais, tu aurais eu, tu eus, tu eus eu, que tu aies, que tu aies eu, que tu eusses, que tu eusses eu, aie, aie eu
Some of them have mostly the same meaning as others but are only used in written form to express that you feel really intellectually superior to your audience. Such levels of snobbery do not translate to english.
There are very few things that you really cannot express in one language. Usually there are work around a using specific phrases or prepositions. Both French and English are more or less complete in that sense.
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.
When people say English doesn't have a future tense, they mean it doesn't have an inflectional future tense like other languages. It uses modal auxiliaries instead, as in your examples.
Compare "I walked" (inflection) with the simple future "I will walk" ("will" as a modal auxiliary).
Many descriptions of future events can use the present tense. For example: "He's fixing that tomorrow." If English has a distinct future tense, that should sound just as wrong as "He fixed that tomorrow" does. But it doesn't. This suggests the future tense in English is marginal, and constructed optionally, out of verbs and verb modifiers that are fundamentally expressed in the present tense.
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?"
That just shows that English doesn't have an inflectional future, it doesn't show that it has no future tense. A tense being marked by a modal verb is not uncommon at all, German marks the future by means of the verb "werden", and French and Spanish also have an additional future (next to the inflectional one) using the auxiliary "to go" (e.g. "voy a comer").
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.
> 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".
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 a strict linguistic sense, these are not tenses, they are... aspects, I think.
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).
Those are modal auxiliaries. If English had a true future morphological tense, there would be some inflection to the word "go" itself that would mean "go-but-in-the-future"
Not having a future tense is an advantage, not a disadvantage.
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".
> speaks a significant amount of Japanese and they don't even know it
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.
Not to mention some words like パターン (pataan/pattern) have either very specific meanings that an English speaker would not understand naturally or other words like テンション (tenshon/tension) have completely different meanings that an English speaker would not recognise as English.
I find it inelegant. Two alphabets and a borrowed character system from chinese which is entirely different.
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.
Katakana are used for far more than loan words, loan words is just the first example you learn when you first start learning Japanese.
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).
Also if you go back in time a hundred years, you'll find things using katakana where hiragana is used today (to the point of having full sentences in katakana)
Japanese, the language that has an entire sub-alphabet of broken Chinese letterforms dedicated to segregating native Japanese particles and inflections - lest they somehow taint the original kanbun.
> 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.
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.
You're right that English grammar is fairly simple in terms of things like morphology and grammatical gender.
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.
> 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)
Tolerance of different pronunciations is helpful for people learning to speak English, but not so much for following what they're saying. Plus of course we have a significant number of words where an attempted phonetic pronunciation might not be a bit unusual so much as completely unintelligible.
At least we're not that fussy about stress and apart from implied questions don't really convey much important meaning with tone.
I don't know about you, but I have a very hard time understanding a lot of Indian accents specifically because of the unfamiliar stress patterns. (That, and their avoidance of aspirated consonants, which drives me crazy.)
tbh I find the unfamiliar stress patterns of reasonably fluent Indian English speakers a lot less problematic than some of the quirks my fellow Brits' stronger regional accents! The tendency to enunciate syllables we often mash together actually tends to be clearer
Yeah I do decent with Indian accents as well. And I have more trouble with Chinese accents and many British accents. But I mostly can’t stand the southern English and their inability to pronounce the letter R. It sounds like someone with a speech impediment. As an American I greatly prefer speaking to a Scot or Irishman.
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.
English verb and noun morphology are simple. English phonology and syntax are extremely complex. This is why people say “English has simple grammar”: they’re thinking only about morphology, which is the hard part of Latin, Greek, Russian, etc.
As a native Russian speaker, I would say that getting the morphology wrong won't prevent you from being understood. You will sound pretty weird, but people will still understand you.
Similarly, English syntax errors - which are extremely common among non-native speakers - usually don’t prevent you from being understood, either.
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”).
And, given the sheer number of accents, getting the pronunciation wrong is not that big of a deal either, especially if you do it consistently. Native speakers adapt very quickly.
The real problem is understanding English spoken by those native speakers in all their accents...
Of course English has gender but mostly in pronouns which are easy to master (until you talk about ships where it gets weird.)
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."
> Of course English has gender but mostly in pronouns which are easy to master (until you talk about ships where it gets weird.)
"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.
To me, any use of “she” to refer to ships (or countries, or whatever other inanimate things people sometimes call “she”) sounds dated, weird, and somewhat poetic/figurative. I suspect this usage is almost totally dying out among the younger generations.
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...).
I think Koran is quite interesting. The symbols were designed from scratch iirc. and they are extremly logical. I'd argue that most people will be able to read and correctly pronounce Korean in a couple of days (even if they don't understand a single word the are saying) which is quite astonishing. I was pleasently surprised at the logical structure. When I first saw the symbols my western brain said "oh my, this is complex and hard". I was shocked how wrong I was.
In the 15th century, the Korean king at the time decided to revamp the entire alphabet. It's consistent and phonetic. There are 24 basic "letters" and 27 complex "letters" that are a combination of the basic letters.
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!
The interesting part about Hangeul isn't so much so that it's phonetic - that property is not that uncommon; e.g. modern Serbo-Croatian and Macedonian orthographies are about 99% phonetic. It's that it's featural, meaning that the shapes of the letters are mnemonic and represent their sound values and/or relations between them (e.g. vowel harmony).
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.
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 think Korean is being learned at far greater pace, zoomers think Korea is cool and want to live that ideal kpop world. No need to learn kanji which means its a lot more approacheable.
I would say hebrew is also another interesting alphabet system
Not anymore. Certainly never to the extent Japanese relies on it on a daily use case basis. Go ahead and downvote me for this
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.
I agree! Hangul is the most interesting writing system I’ve studied so far (I’m also fluent in Japanese and can read/write kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana) and it only took me 2 hours to learn. Being fluent in Japanese already made learning Korean a lot easier too, since the phonetics and grammar structures are so similar.
> 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.
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.
A world were everyone could speak scheme is a beautiful idea. Like if we were cyborgs. I'd hope there is still value in learning the thought patterns of Scheme 1.0.
I once fancied a girl who was doing postgrad work in linguistics, and one time she made a remark like "I love lambda calculus!" And I was like, really? That's a programming/CS thing, how does it apply in your field? Turns out LC is used as a representation to normalize semantics in linguistics.
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".
Domination of English has more to do with British empire bringing it to large swaths of the world (India, Africa), and the US being the principal winner of WWII and expanding its industrial, scientific, and cultural might around the world.
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.)
I don't doubt that the Empire and America had a lot to do with English dominance. However I do feel there is something inherently fun about English that is lacking in other languages I've encountered. Maybe it's just because it's my native language but I can't help but feel this sense of playfulness is picked up on by non native speakers as well. The article below is really interesting; it's by non English stand up comedians who have started performing in English. The general feel is that they prefer writing/performing in English and can have more fun with it than their native languages.
I'd say each language has pockets of playfulness that aren't found in others. Sometimes you find pockets that coincide to a surprising extent. It's like stacking layers of Swiss cheese.
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.
> Hackernews armchair linguists seem to think an ideal language for world communication can somehow be engineered from some small set of primitives, like Scheme
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.
> 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.
There's one reason (of many) that Japanese still uses kanji: it has a lot of homophones due to the lack of different sounds in the language (relative to Mandarin, which still has a lot of homophones). Even more, it has pitch intonation which differs the meaning of words. The simplicity of the sounds and grammar belies the difficulty of the language. There have been movements to try and romanize the Japanese language, and for the most part, none have caught on.
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)
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).
Japanese grammar was pretty easy for me to learn. There are only three verb groups in Japanese (i.e., Godan, Ichidan, and irregular verbs). The irregular verb group only has two verbs する and くる. The others are pretty consistent in following a few simple rules that map quite cleanly into a spreadsheet. There are 14 conjugation forms, which seems like a lot at first, but again, the rules are pretty consistent and easy to learn. At least I think so.
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).
Yes, I think some have missed that this is a dig against English being one of the top "World Languages". English, of course, being illogical, inconsistent and hard to learn.
When I studied syntax as part of linguistics at the college level,
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
Nope. Even better: Many dialects of Finnish use "it" for everything in informal speech, so we're not just ahead in gender equality, but animal rights as well.
How do you say it was a "he-said-she-said argument" then? ;)
Actually it's often occurred to me pronouns didn't need to be gendered but we should have different pronouns for "the 1st aforementioned person" and "the 2nd aforementioned person". Not sure if any languages do.
There are languages like that---the distinction is referred to as "proximative" vs. "obviative". (Though strictly speaking, it differentiates between "more topical" and "less topical" third persons, which might not necessarily correspond with the order in which they're mentioned.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obviative Apparently, there's even an Algonquian language which has a "further obviative" too, thus distinguishing three different levels of topicality.
Not Finnish, but in Turkish (another language without gendered pronouns) I'd use something like "o ne dedi bu ne dedi" (what did that say, what did this say)
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"!
It's very informal and I'm not sure how widely spread it is outside of the Helsinki region, but at least least here in the Helsinki region, you can also use demonstrative pronouns (tää (= this), toi (= that)) as third person pronouns in certain specific circumstances to further specify how the people referred to in the conversation relate to you, the speaker, and whoever the listener happens to be. So you can have people A,B,C conversing, with D present but not participating in the conversation, and E not present but being discussed, and A can tell B "this told that that it/he/she did something" and it will be understood as "C told D that E did something". Not the exact distinction you were asking about, but it's another related axis of distinction in pronouns that I thought might be interesting enough to mention here.
English definitely needs better pronouns, but I have no idea how you can introduce them. We can't even agree on what cases you can use "they/their/them" for an individual person!
One thing you do occasionally hear people doing if they don't want to repeat full names and need to disambiguate pronouns is to refer to people by the first letter of their name ("John told Adam J wasn't the right person for A"), but obviously that won't work if you don't know their names.
Not a complete list of every feature and language, but WALS [0] would probably be of interest to you. It has a decent list of language features you can browse and read about, shows you a map with the occurrence of each feature with languages placed on that map for each feature, and lists which languages have each feature (to the extent that is recorded in that particular database).
Polish _actually_ had every grammatic feature known to man, and as a bonus tons of inconsistenties andere exceptions (which Finish does bot, at least that's my impression from here).
>It was asserted that there a disproportionate number of linguists are Finnish because their language is a superset of many others
??
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.
I was waiting for it! Thank you. I knew the most educated, elite among us would arise. All hail Esperanto. Duly elected leader of the post industrial, constructed languages =)
I actually like Esperanto and the concept of constructed languages in general a lot. Esperanto's grammar is very logical and easy to learn. Its a shame there's not much online content in it and the community is fairly small in comparison to what is often claimed. They actually have a Duolingo course and Google Translate works with it, so that's something.
It went for regularity instead of naturality. If you want to sacrifice a little regularity, for naturality, check out Interlingue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingue
Knowing nothing about either language as such, the name seems utterly weird: According to Wikipedia, it was created (as "Occidental") in 1922 and renamed to "Interlingue" in 1949. WP also notes: "Not to be confused with Interlingua..." But the linked page for Interlingua says: "Interlingua [...] is an international auxiliary language (IAL) developed between 1937 and 1951..."
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.
It was renamed from Occidental because some weird group (communist I think) calling themselves something similar and that was being associating with the language Occidentalists.
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).
Yes, I think that is the case. There is a bit more history between Interlingue and Interlingua than I have mentioned, and I think Ric played a part of that.
Because it's the most popular constructed language, and despite all it's publicity and fanaticism, it still didn't take off.
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.
Why not bring back Latin? The alphabet is already in wide use, many languages evolved from it making it easy-ish for them to learn, and Latin was already in wide use as the lingua franca for academia and the church up until the 1700s.
Seriously though. I found myself once on Interlingua TikTok and had a shocking experience of understanding the speaker almost entirely but not recognizing the language. Vocabulary was close to Spanish (that I have basic knowledge of), but declension and overall flow was more like Italian (that I do not speak). I also could speak French long ago, but not anymore so that may have helped as well.
Latin never went anywhere! Carpe Diem, ad hoc, et al. I love learning more about Latin, and while it would be cool to be as fluent as possible as a speaker, I really love parsing and consuming Latin texts, I learn so much not only about history or religion but also just about our current society and language habits.
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.
It's right there smack in your face, the entire page has a .de domain and is written in english without Google translation help. English is and always will be the international language, for better or worse. Dare to fight it? You'll have to present your argument in English!
If they wanted to find an example of a word with highest density of consonants, there is a Russian word “взбзднуть“ (“vzbzdnut’” meaning approximately “to fart unexpectedly a tiny bit”) with one vowel, seven consonants and one letter that palatalizes the last consonant.
Nice, I first parsed that as Welsh or something, before realizing it was Czech.
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.
I'm gonna strike right back with the Czech, perfectly valid, words "vchrstls" and "smrskls" (roughly "you have splashed/thrown/hurled" and "you have shrunk", respectively).
Ha nice, I hadnt heard either before. These both rely on (I think) informal/slang way to contract past-tenses. Plus it seems (only after I looked them up on prirucka.ujc.cas.cz) the second one is a missing “se” as it’s reflective.
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
> These both rely on (I think) informal/slang way to contract past-tenses.
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.
This is actually great - I didn't know the proper name of that! I first encountered it when I was first learning Czech and one friend prompted me to ask another "srals?" when they returned from the bathroom after spending a while there (I didn't know what it meant at the time) so I always just assumed it was a sort of informal/slang thing :D And I've encountered "<verb> ses" before but never really picked up on why or how it should be applied, thx the example!
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 :)
The main difference here is orthography as opposed to the actual pronunciation of the word - Welsh uses y and w as vowels, as well as multiple 2-letter clusters for a single sound (eg, dd is the same as one of the English th sounds, or rh and ll are both single sounds).
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'.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 334 ms ] threadPerkele, consider the matter closed.
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.
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.
[1] https://www.hagen-schmidt.de/suomi/
https://youtu.be/SPmxsRDSmTc?t=108
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
"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.
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.
https://youtu.be/unKrseRCOKo
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.
http://www.stmoroky.com/links/sywtlj.htm
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary
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...
https://jackhumbert.github.io/zbalermorna/write-up/
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.
-------
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.
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.
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?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ric_Berger
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.
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
"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...
No, what you showed is a lame/inaccurate transcription of the countryball gag, which came first. Source: KC hivemind
Jesus... I studied Latin in high school and this triggered some PTSD. And Latin only has 6 cases!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case#Latin
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.
This language was created by a Bishop and was later promoted by Russians for political reasons (to piss off the Swedes).
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.
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'.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrz%C4%85szcz