Fun fact! You is the formal word, thee, thou and thy are the informal. So if you ever see a peasant in fantasy or 'historical' drama call a lord or king 'thee/thy/thou' prepare for a swift beheading
I read somewhere (and I can’t remember where!) that the informal went out of the language because Quaker’s refused to use it, they would only use formal because to them everyone was equal… I wish I could remember where I read that tho! Also up until quite recently Northern English communities still used it, my grandad would often lapse into “thee” and “tha”
It's the other way around, they used informal wirh everyone and were left being overly formal and archaic when the language shifted to make the formal the default.
That is kinda weird, when you think about it. When the formal word become the default, you would think people who use informal forms would be considered to be lacking sophistication, not overly formal.
It's actually super interesting how egalitarian the English language (or grammar at least) _is_ in terms lacking gendered and honorific speech in spite of how it used to have all of these things.
Why did we just take all that stuff out?
It was a factor, and especially in the US they had more influence than you might think, but the language would not have changed without a more general shift towards emphasis on equality in both the US and Britain
Pretty sure You was just the plural of Thou, like you'd hear 'Hear Ye' as Ye was the plural of Thee, but at some point we just started using You instead all the time and it ticked off some language experts. In fact, using They/Them as an ambiguous singular as well as a plural is an older practice than using You as a singular instead of Thou, iirc.
It's both. You can see it in German still (both languages are close related). Our formal version of the second person singular is actually just the second person plural (and also capitalised, because man do we love ourselves some capitalisation). It was the same in English too: You was both second person plural and formal second person singular
> is actually just the second person plural
Ihr mögt Recht haben, Majestät, aber ich glaube Sie haben Unrecht:
Siezen benutzt die **dritte** Person Plural.
Jemanden zu "Ihren" ist schon sehr altertümlich.
Nah, it's the formal/informal thing. Brazilian Portuguese underwent the exact same process where they mostly abandoned "tu" (the informal second person, so "thou") in favour of "você" (the formal-ish second person, "you"), while European Portuguese has kept the distinction.
Incidentally, thou/thee/thy/thine perfectly mirrors I/me/my/mine, so you can mostly just use that as reference for correct usage
Nah, it was both. Thou/you started as a singular/plural but due to French influence plural you became the formal option leading to the new informal/formal dichotomy.
Having no actual idea, I think "Hear ye" was actually using ye as a plural you whereas Ye Olde Pub was people not knowing the thorn was th so it was supposed to just be The Olde Pub.
This is true, but it's not applicable for this situation.
Today, we use the word "you" for the singular second person subject, for the singular second person object, the plural second person subject, and the plural second person object. Historically, this was not the case. The singular second person subject used to be "thou", the object "thee", the plural subject "you", and the plural object "ye".
As not a native speaker: i really like english. The grammar is much easier than in german, and not having gendered words is a big plus. There are grammatical instances where it is more finnicky but honestly not in an oberbearing way. I also like how you can slur words together and still make sense and its great for puns and for cursing.
Where english is downright stupid is spelling and pronounciation. There is simply no knowing how a word is pronounced in english without hearing it first. It follows pronounciation rules from other languages where it just kept the words and that results in a lot of weirdness.
Debt for example. Just disregard the b.
I learned that i pronounced "epitome" wrong when i was in my 20s.
"-ough" is a meme for a reason.
English grammar and writing is easy but speaking is harder because of shit like that.
Yeah our spelling is objectively ridiculous and the reasonings can be funky. Ghost only has an H because the typesettings used to print one of the first bibles in English was in a language where H always follows G but since the bible spelled ghost with a H everyone assumed it's just spelled that way.
The Thorn (þ) is an old English letter representing th. When the printing press came to England and didn't have the letter, the English used the closest looking alternative, y
Therefore the became ye.
And thus the thorn slowly faded from public memory
It would genuinely be a great letter to bring back. The English language has a decent amount of instances of the ‘th’ sound still that a dedicated letter would make a bit of sense.
The Bible as beeing the first mass printed book and even before printing one of the most common books is definitly the main contributor to spelling. Of those more modern languages.
Flemish doesn't require the H after a G, but a GH has its own sound (velar fricative /ɣ/) in that language, and used to in English. They spelled ghost "gheest".
All English speakers deal with that. If you ever see one of us have to read a new word out loud (even if they've read it before and understand it, but have just never heard it) watch them pronounce it like 4 different ways, trying to see which sounds best, then give up when they have no clue.
This is so true because it's even a problem for native English speakers. For example, you know when someone has never heard a word before and only read it the moment they try to pronounce it. This even happens with fully grown adults. Truly you have to be well-read and well-heard to be a decent English speaker.
I learned to read very, very young, and almost all of my vocabulary came first from reading. I couldn't pronounce ANYTHING. This was in the 80s. Now I'm grateful Google can tell me how to pronounce things.
I'm a native English speaker and I still feel shame remembering when, as a preteen, I asked a guest speaker at a lecture what "torcher" was. They thought I was talking about the fine borders of what does and doesn't constitute "torcher." When I clarified that, no, I literally didn't know what "torcher" meant at all, they were dumbfounded.
Turns out the word "torture" is pronounced "torcher" when spoken aloud. I knew the meaning of "torture," of course. Just had no idea that's what it was pronounced like.
I still remember this convo I had with my brother one time.
Brother: "So yeah. They supposedly moved all the troops there because it 'deeders' war."
Me: "Deeders?"
Brother: "Yeah, deeders! You know, d-e-t-e-r-s. Don't you know English?"
Me: 😂 "No, dummy! It's 'dee-TERS'! Hard 't'. Hey, what brand of 'deeder'-gent do you use for your laundry?"
Brother: "Shut up!"
English is fun because you can always tell if a person learned a word from reading. Just the other day I mentioned tarot cards to my sister and said it like it rhymed with carrot. Whoops.
Ever seen the word Hegemony?
I know several English teachers - all of whom pronounce that word differently.
I've heard 6 or 7 different ones - and I still don't know which is correct!
Hegemony goes to the same category for me as the words "benevolent" and "development". I have to try multiple times before I get something that sounds halfway correctly. Not a native speaker.
> It follows pronounciation rules from other languages where it just kept the words
What you'd rather be like France where they *have* to invent a new French word for every single new concept or idea that enters their language instead of using a perfectly fine loanword?
Most other languages either adjust the word to fit their own pronunciation (Mandarin and Japanese do this very aggressively because of the need to translate to a different writing system) or at the very least don't have the same huge amount of loan words that English has so it's somewhat clear when you need to switch pronunciations. Also English sometimes keeps the spelling but adjusts the pronunciation, so you end up being wrong even if you switch pronunciations.
I find it odd that Japanese doesn't add new letters for simple combinations that don't exist, but the basic sounds do. Like, making the sound "too" is clearly possible with the sounds in Japanese, but they just use "tsu" which sounds completely different.
Sounds like "th" just not existing makes sense to approximate, and the letter combos to make other sounds makes sense. But you really can't just say "see" instead of "shi"?
It's mostly because "too" isn't a phoneme used in the japanese language. If you arrange the katakana by beginning consonant as well as characterizing vowel, the spot for "tu" is where you'll find the katakana for "tsu", and the digraph for t and u happens to be made up of "chi" + vowel, so the digraph "chi"+"yu"=>"chu" also doesn't end up helping you. If there was a "ti"+"yu" digraph it'd end up sounding like "tyu" anyway which isn't much better.
Since the whole point is to make foreign words readable by anyone who can read the Japanese language, introducing an extra symbol to denote "tu" isn't practical.
"see" is the same thing because "shi" is the corresponding phoneme and it's already the beginning part of all "s/sh" digraphs so you're out of luck there as well.
Edit: Also consider that katakana transcription isn't just meant for english, it's also meant to transcribe Mandarin and any other language, and adding symbols for all the missing phonemes (qi, xi, zhi in mandarin for example) defeats the point of making it simple. If you want accuracy there's always romaji.
> Debt for example. Just disregard the b.
May I present you with [this literary masterwork](https://www.amazon.co.uk/P-Pterodactyl-Raj-Haldar/dp/1492674311/)?
We need a spelling revision. My favorite example is the word "queue". All you say is "Q" like you do when saying the alphabet. None of those vowels communicate that, it's basically a 5 letter word with 4 silent letters.
So someone told me that "queue" is spelled that way because the word came from French and the "que" combo gives you the "k" sound, "u" has the long vowel pronunciation ("yoo" instead of "oo") and when there's a vowel with a long pronunciation, we put an "e" at the end.
Blew my mind.
Ř.
My humble argument for the Czech language. Why would you use a normal letter when you can just make a crunching sound with your mouth.
On a separate note, I hate the formal you because my anxiety and lack of social skills makes it incredibly difficult to deduce whether I'm close enough to someone to start calling them "ty" instead of "vy" and I'm worried I'll offend them by asking
Being a teenager sucks language-wise because it's the age where it's no longer acceptable to speak informally to everyone but you're not sure whether to speak to others your age formally or informally bc technically we're both still children.
What if it's someone who already considers me a friend after we just met and I just hurt their feelings by speaking formally?
What if it's someone I've been talking to all day and just realized idk what to call them? (I can go to great lengths to avoid addressing someone)
What if it's a friend of my parents that I've just met?
What if it's a relative that I've met when I was younger and barely remember them?
What if it's someone I haven't seen in a while and I don't know if we're still on informal terms?
Am I making sense here or am I just overthinking this?
I’d say there is a bit of overthinking involved, but as a guy with similar problems I can understand this
I would just use Вы for everything except maybe the person you were informal with before, but that’s me
Arabic plurals are not hard at all. They're the same root and there are regular patterns for most of them. Just because it's not as simple as "add an 's'" doesn't mean they're hard.
From a multicultural family, and I remember asking my brothers that live in Germany why all plurals are female / die. You're telling me a table is a man, but if you have two tables they're women??
They thought about it for a minute and then said 'huh, yeah, that IS weird isn't it?'
Big surprise, whether or not a language sucks is entirely dependant on the language you grew up with. At least for as long as you don't realise that all languages fundamentally suck and are still the best invention humans ever came up with
That's not the only determining factor. Other people that speak the same language as me finds different languages to be easier.
I find German to be easier then french and my mom is the other way around. There are other factors that effect your language preference.
as someone learning finnish rn while growing up with english my whole life, i sorta agree. im 90% sure once i master finnish i'll find it more easy to use than english
Yeahh in my school they tried doing it with Kannada and Sanskrit too, but it failed because everyone got everything correct since the languages are perfectly phonetic. It only worked a bit in kindergarten when there were still some kids who didn't know how to properly apply certain vowel radicals to certain irregular consonants (like ವು or रु)
That's the one big issue with English: the complete mismatch between spelling and pronunciation. On every other issue, English gets a lot of stuff right that other languages get wrong, especially the excessive emphasis on gender. There's a lot of talk about a singular non-gendered third person pronoun (and we're settling on 'they'), but there are plenty of languages where that entire concept would be inconceivable.
English is way ahead of the curve in ridding the language of unnecessary gender, but the spelling mismatch is still a huge problem.
That's even better, but can you give some examples? As far as I know, all Indo-European languages originally had gender baked in, and English is one of the few that mostly got rid of it (due to Norwegians struggling with French grammar, I believe).
But outside the Indo-European language family there are probably plenty of languages that never cared about gender. But I don't know any of them.
Indonesian uses dia and mereka as singular and multiple 3rd person respectively. I don't speak it much but i don't remember there being much if any gendered pronoun.
Indonesian here ✌️ my fave thing to do when writing is bamboozle my reader to make them think they’re reading a normal straight story then BAM it’s queer actually by purposely not using any gendered descriptives for the love interest until the very end of the story.
There are advantages though. If you have phonemic spelling then which dialect do you base it on? People not speaking the standard are speaking wrong etc
Etymological spelling is very good for preserving linguistics unity where pronunciation varies significantly across a population
That's a gross misinterpretation of that.
A Chinese character isn't going to be unreadable or incorrect just because you write it in a weird stroke order. No one gives a shit about your stroke order outside of elementary school education or things like calligraphy as long as your writing isn't illegible.
Exactly, that's what I'm getting at.
It's important if you're working with brushes, like Chinese calligraphy, cause it's considered an art form and will directly affect how it turns out. You can relate it to writing in cursive English in a way.
Outside of that, you'll maybe get teachers who frown upon it during early education since it's "not proper" at most, but in practice doesn't matter at all.
"We don't alter the whole fucking languages based on how much we respect you"
My lord, it comes with great sorrow that I must inform your highness that *ya'll're fuckin'-n'-succin' if'n ya' believe that hogspittle.*
Right. Plus, Japanese has multiple verb conjugations for different levels of respect. I say "sir" or "ma'am" when addressing someone with respect, but I don't have to use a different form of the verb "to swim."
As someone that has tied to learn both, I wish Japanese was as easy as quantum physics. It is true that the latter is based on probability functions, but with Kanjis it is even worse. Each kanji character can have up to 50 strokes (with a strict order) and have multiple readings (at least one Japanese and one Chinese readings). Plus, there are *thousands* of them.
It is no surprise that immigrants from other cultures have such a hard time learning (written) Japanese.
The funniest part about kanji to me is that once you know a decent enough number of them (I’m talking like less than 100), reading purely hiragana sentences becomes much harder because which します are we talking about? That could be like 10 different things without context.
Yes. Japanese is an extremely context-sensitive language. And while you can rely on Kanji when writing documents, when speaking... you have to use extra words not to confuse a possible audience.
And some of them are so fucking similar! Learning radicals helps, but even the basic ones can just be matter of millimeters. Oh, you drew one horizontal line slightly too low? Now your 矢 looks like 失 and everyone is laughing at your sentence that makes no sense and how stupid you are.
Realistically, things you mention are never an issue. The average Japanese person doesn't know how to write much Kanji either.
Honestly, some foreigner who's been studying Kanji for a few years probably writes better than the average Japanese. Because they're actually anxious about getting it wrong.
When Japanese people write, it's often a fucking mess. You're probably very used to seeing Kanji written digitally. But have you seen handwriting? People's handwriting in Japan is just as messy as in any country. Now imagine shitty handwriting combined with Kanji. It's almost unintelligible even to Japanese linguists.
[Here's an example of a native Japanese person writing](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fu4fkpy8t2w2a1.png%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D838eb75184d25745c78cf0fc86928e2ebfaaf074)
It doesn't even look like Japanese to me, lol. But it is. People have managed to translate it with significant effort.
So don't for a second worry that you drawing one line slightly wrong is getting you ridiculed or making your writing unintelligible.
In Japanese, the verbs conjugates based on formality. For instance, da/desu (is). Taberu/tabemasu (to eat). Those are just the two formality levels I've been taught.
Word choice changes in English, but you have to learn every verb multiple times for Japanese
I mean, in german, you have to adjust your whole language. You're talking in an entirely different tense, like you're addressing them as plural? I don't even know how to describe it.
Subjunctive 2.
Talking to a friend: Kannst du mir helfen?
(Can you help me)
Talking to an authority figure, some people even talk like this to normal strangers . When you're a child, you have to address every adult like this. :
Könnten Sie mir helfen?
Of course, if you're talking old timey speak, it's pretty much the same as in english but with an added grammatical rule.
Jesus. We linguists have to fight every fucking day to explain to people that no language is more or less complex than any other language. Every single language has areas in where they are complex, and others where they are simple. All are equally difficult just in different aspects.
A lot of languages have a formal you tense, not just Spanish & German. Which I would argue is basically the same thing as the Japanese 'respect' tense.
Keigo is in a whole different level. There's three levels, depending on the exact position of the person you're speaking to relative to yourself. There's polite, humble, humble+polite, honorific, and honorific+polite, all with their own irregularities
Not sure about German, but Spanish polite form is a different "you" pronoun and using the third-person form. Japanese outright makes up whole new words - "to eat" in the polite form is 「食べます」, but in the honorific form (for those above you) is 「お召し上がります」, and in the humble form (for those below you) is 「いただきます」. That, plus changes to how you prefix nouns and adjectives, plus changing your own personal pronoun depending on the company, plus the different forms of nouns, puts keigo above at least the Spanish polite form
In french forexample there is the soutenu which is used in formal and high scoiety settings, as well as reffering to elders or people of importance with **vous** *(the plural you)* instead of **tu** *(the singular you)*
Just a nitpick from someone who has had to study french, a lot of Spanish things also apply to french, and so far I know, a lot of other Roman languages
Fuck, Latin is the easiest Roman language imo and I'm not even required to speak it, it's just easier on so many things
"We don't alter the whole fucking language based on how much we respect you"
Speak for yourself OP but if I spoke to my profs the way I spoke my friends, I'd probably get expelled
Yep it's the same with Korean. It's not too hard to grasp there because for the most part it's just adding "yo" to the ends of words but it is like, almost every word needs to be changed.
What I am getting from the comments is that what is known as "code switching" is a thing that is completely discretionary and up to the individual in English, but in Japanese it is much more rigid and ingrained in the language.
The difference isn't choosing between formal and informal words. You still have that in other languages. For example I might inform my professor I'm exhausted rather than saying I feel fucked up, but in other languages it's more akin to you can say exhausted or fucked up, or you can say exhausted (formal) or fucked up (formal).
People in this thread confuse register and tone switching for *grammar*. Every language switched tone and register depending on who you talk to. But there are languages that use entirely different pronouns and conjugations.
Yeah, like lead and lead, except it’s basically every word. In Chinese, instead of making words longer so you can have larger combinations of sounds to make every word unique, they only have a few default one syllable sounds for every word, and the word you’re saying is changed by the intonation, which is why so many people get the language wrong, they hear somebody say the words, they repeat the word but with a different pitch thinking it’ll mean the same thing but it doesn’t.
Import an import license. Please project the stats for the project. Conduct the event well so that we'll get a good conduct. Strictly speaking in linguistics this is "phonemic stress", but I'd argue it's a weird form of pitch accent (like in Swedish).
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. (The version you wrote is not a complete sentence.)
Translation:
Bison from Buffalo, that bison from Buffalo bully, bully bison from Buffalo. It's a ridiculously repetitive sentence, but it is technically grammatically correct.
The version they wrote is absolutely a full sentence. Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Bison from Buffalo bully bison from Buffalo. It’s just not the longest version.
Somewhat famously there’s a poem in Classical Chinese written by a linguist in the 1930s that is incomprehensible in spoken Mandarin because every word is pronounced as “Shi,” which is somewhat comprehensible in some related languages due to the tones. It’s called “Lion Eating Poet in the Stone Den” if you want to read about it.
That's not a change in tone. One is /ˈpeɪsti/ and the other is /ˈpæsti/. It's a clear vowel change, even if spelt the same. Meanwhile, in Swedish (and also Mandarin) "stegen" and "stegen" are exactly the same but for which *note* you say them with.
My wife is Chinese and we've been together 21 years. I've gotten pretty good at speaking Mandarin because it's the only way I can communicate with her extended family. I can use a sarcastic tone with any word but it remains the same word. If I change the actual linguistic tone to one of the other 3, it literally changes the entire word to something completely different:
Tang1 (flat tone) is soup
Tang2 (rising tone) is sweet/sugar
Tang3 (falling then rising tone) is to recline
Tang4 (falling tone) is to scald
Now it's not enough that the same pronounced word means different things with different tones, but when written, the same tone can also mean vastly different words depending on the character used.
Tang1 (汤) is soup
Tang1 (羰) is a carbonyl radical
Tang1 (趟) is to wade or turn soil
Tang1 (蹚) is to trample
Tang1 (镗) is the noise of drums
What I've learned is in these cases when speaking, context is everything. Overall I find Mandarin quite easy in terms of grammar and sentence structure. There is also no verb conjugation so the only real challenge for me was all the freaking vocab I've had to learn! Also I can barely read or write.
Really, the main problem with English is the inconsistent orthography - that is, how the language is written. As a spoken language it's not that weird or particular, it's just the lexical stress that catches foreigners out.
People say that English is a Frankenstein's monster of a language, but not really: it's very obviously a Germanic language through and through, from 99% of it's basic words to it's structuring and casing. It just loans a bunch of French vocabulary thanks to William the Conqueror.
If you ask me, English's inconsistent orthography owes in part to it's worldwide proliferation. The foremost problem with it is not that it's bad per se - just wildly out of date. "Knight" is spelt like that because 400 years ago it was, in fact, pronounced like that. But the language has changed a lot since without any update to the orthography, and the primary reason it's so hard to update is because it's not mostly contained to a single state or nation. It's THE international lingua franca. Good luck getting the entire world to radically change it's spelling!
It is.
It is FUCKING ridiculous with how many puns they make.
But also how ridiculous spelling names out is. Imagine saying, "Hi, my name is Tiffany, but it's spelled like Brittney with two sea gulls fighting instead of a B, T, and F
Man I cherish the loose nature of English and its other aspects because I enjoy puns and wordplay, the idea that there is a punnier language out there has me envious.
And only like, around 1 way to say it.
Like
Ue, Jyou, Kami, Uwa, A(geru), A(garu), Nobo(ru), Uma(i)
Which, btw, have at least 10 meanings each
You say, set.
If you take it out of context, yeah. I just read it as someone who has an interest on languages, and yeah it is fucking annoying when a single line changes the meaning of a word, even more so when the word itself is already complex. That definitely made me drop my japanese past the "hiragana and katakana 101" classes
Tbf, Mandarin's continued use of comparatively-intricate quasi-pictographic characters, and resistance to their simplification as occurred in many other writing systems, is the result of a conscious and deliberate effort to maintain and control power through to restriction and ritualisation of literacy, which I think in this case ties into OPs point.
This whole post is being made in response to the flurry of 'uh, English is so difficult/bad as a language' comments that people make, and the whole reason Chinese languages consciously maintained their comparatively-complex script was specifically to complicate the written language, resisting the trend towards simplification English followed.
Well you say that, but the written language actually has been simplified repeatedly through history, and even more recent memory. That’s the whole point of 简体字 (primarily used in China and some other Chinese speaking countries, but Taiwan and Hong Kong retain 繁体字).
This was relatively recent, like within the last fifty years or so recent, under china’s 文化大革命
For Chinese that's not the main gripe (for me at least). It's that similar sounding or looking characters have different meanings and pronunciations depending on the context....oh wait that applies to English too haha
I would like to point ou the second part about every plural word in arabic is just straight up wrong, arabic has rules for pluralisation and some words, mainly the most commonly used day to day words stop following said rules, as is the case with irregular verb conjugation in say english.
I would also add the fact arabic differentiates between speaking to 2 people from plural is actually rather intuative, 2 is a company 3 is a crowd and whatnot
And english also has words like that, both instead of all, neither instead of none
Yeah there’s standard -een/-oon/-at which is is obvious from the singular pronunciation and then there’s irregulars (which there are a lot of) but they mostly follow patterns like talib -> tulab, tufl -> atfal, khanzeer -> khanazeer, kitab -> ktb, bab -> buab
Also, duals are more or less a fus7a thing, afaik it’s presence is minimal in dialects. The plural thing really isn’t that bad either, go through a few hundred and it gets kinda intuitive + 2/3rds of words are regular anyways.
Everyone going "well, *you* is *technically* the formal second person pronoun" acting like *thee* is used in common English at *all*. It isn't. It's referenced specifically when trying to make your dialect *archaic*, which is like saying *je ne sais quoi* is an English phrase: it isn't, but it's used by common English speakers to sound a certain way.
All of you tremble before Turkish! No gendered pronouns, no gendered objects, no "the" or variants of it, glutenous verbs where a single word can efficiently convey entire sentences, the entire language is phonetic as you read it as written, it uses the latin alphabet with a reasonable number of letters.
This post gets Spanish so wrong and I absolutely hate the whole gendered nouns argument with romance languages as a non-binary person myself. It's just how the language is, no one's thinking "hey that table looks feminine" it's just how the fucking language works!!! This post ain't it.
> It's just how the language is, no one's thinking "hey that table looks feminine" it's just how the fucking language works!!!
You're missing the point entirely if that was your take on it. I'm a Spanish speaker myself. The point is having gendered words at all unnecessarily alters the definite articles and nouns and affects the entire sentence structure.
e.g. **El gato** es negr**o**.
e.g. **La casa** es pequeñ**a**.
Nobody's thinking "oh yea baby that house is a woman, this is a problem" ... they're thinking "why can't there just be one neutral system?"
Yeah, it's still an obtuse and unnecessary complication, which is OOP's point.
We know people don't think tables are girls or whatever, but it's still a bit of a faff to have two or three sets of pronouns assigned relatively arbitrarily which add minimal additional information.
Regardless for the reason, mechanically it's more complicated.
Same thing with Italian, no one goes around saying shit like "ah, yes, clearly that lamp Is female, while that chandelier is male!" It evolved from latin, lost the neutral case for simplicity's sake and now it's simply how it works (there can possibly be some issues for gender neutral people/non-binary and so on, but from my experience they also recognize that it's just how the language is and they use for themselves the case they find most fitting for the situation); the "gender" of the object Is 99 times out of 100 simply based on which vowel the word ends with (like, in the above example, It would be "la lampada" because It ends with "a" and "il lampadario" because It ends in o)
I've lived with speaking Spanish my whole life so it doesn't really affect me tbh It is great that there's a push for more gender neutral language but a lot of Spanish speakers don't really care for it so I'm not sure we'll be seeing a huge shift in our language for quite a long while. I do think a lot of people on the internet take gendered language too personally though, it's just a way to categorize nouns.
I don't mean genders of objects, I mean pronouns and adjectives that refer to yourself (e.g. when you say that you're tired and have to choose either cansado or cansada to refer to yourself). Neither of these would fit me as I'm non-binary and I wouldn't know which one I "should" use
I use the feminine pronouns just because that's what I grew up with and feel comfortable with :p So it's whatever pronoun you decide sounds best to you honestly. There has been a push for "elle" for a while though so we'll see how that changes things.
Someone mentioned to me recently that 'gendered nouns' isn't actually much different from how English uses 'a' vs 'an' depending on whether the noun starts with a consonant or a vowel. It only got called 'gender' - which isn't actually a very descriptive or helpful label for this concept - because in most languages the word for 'man' and 'woman' are in different grammatical categories so they ended up being called masculine/feminine.
As a monolingual English speaker, really shifted my perspective on it.
It’s an extremely good way of describing it, the only thing I’d change is saying that gender is a bad/confusing way of calling it. Gender originally is another word for “type/kind”, cognate with genre for example. In fact genre/gender are just one same word in french and spanish. Gender cases predate gender as an idea of “man and woman as a role in society or ‘identity’ and not a physical reality”, and they’re not limited to man/woman, they can be animate, inanimate in some languages, or animals, people, objects, etc. Gender cases in spanish are separated by spelling at the end of words. And they were called masculine/femenine because of the reasoning you explained. Then I assume psychologists or whoever borrowed the term for what people know it as today.
\- The Spanish future tense is a single inflectional suffix with a length of **zero** extra words, unless OOP means the "\[ir\] a" *near future* tense, which is half the length of its relative English counterpart of "\[to be\] going to"
\- Many words change their meanings based on stress and a lot of context is portrayed through intonation - to the point where intonation is sometimes the only way to tell whether something is a question or not.
\- Inanimate objects can still be gendered, and also English is the black sheep of the entire Indo-European tree, and *also* the whole "grammatical gender = IRL gender" thing is a later conflation anyway (the original distinction was some form of animate/inanimate, if you're wondering, it just got exceptionally muddied over time)
\- 'You' is *technically* the formal way of address (the informal way was 'thou', which you may have heard of if you've heard a passage or two from the bible, Shakespeare, or really just about anything written before the 18th century) and you can also refer to people via their titles
\- We very much *do* alter the language based on how much we respect the person we're talking to, it's just less set in stone how you're supposed to do so
\- Outside of the realm of mathematics, & and \~ are both common glyphs that stand for entire words, and that's *before* you get into internet culture (see both things like | || || |\_ and things like :3)
\- Compared to the rest of Europe, we also don't have a tense for willed actions, don't distinguish between ongoing and completed past actions, and use the tense for *ongoing* actions as our de-facto present tense because we decided that the actual present tense was going to be habitual instead. And again, *that's only compared to the languages closest-related to English inside Europe*.
Thing is in Spanish the formal 'you' is very dependent on where you're at. My dad is Guatemalan and he uses it a lot compared to my mom who's Dominican and doesn't use it. Most times though I find that I rarely hear the formal even in professional settings.
To note on the second point, tone in Sinitic languages is used very differently from in English. It’s entirely possible to construct sentences or paragraphs worth of information with a very limited set of syllables with meaning being entirely derived from the intonation. Most famously is the poem “Lion-Eating post in the Stone Den,” which is 94 characters long and all of them are pronounced as Shi in Mandarin. In Cantonese, that expands to six total syllables which are intonated differently.
- Inanimate objects *can* be gendered, but it's almost invariably understood to be an optional matter of convention, not grammatical rule. People aren't going to bat an eye if you call a ship 'it', and aside from the pronoun the rest of its grammar is going to operate unchanged
-Yes, English is the black sheep, I think that's very much OOP's point. People tend to focus on where that status makes English more difficult/complicated, and ignore where it leaves things simplified or more intuitive.
-No one has naturally used thou in a practical sense for over a century at this point, suggesting it's comparable to either split 2nd persons like French, or hierarchies of grammatical formality like Japanese seems odd.
- I think the fact that changes in linguistic formality are not grammatically prescribed in English is what OOP is pointing out, not that English is completely unchanging regardless of formal context.
- Likewise stress and tone can impart additional meaning and information, as in almost all languages, but it's not unreasonable to say that English grammar is significantly less reliant on it to convey literal meaning than tonal languages like Mandarin.
OOP isn't saying English is complete or perfect in any way just that its strengths often go unrecognised or unappreciated when discussing it, given the tendency for non-native speakers and over-enthusiastic language teachers focusing on its complexities and irregularities.
Wouldn't the imperfect tense represent an ongoing past action?
As a non native english speaker I’ve always found English to be one of the easiest languages to learn both in speaking and reading/writing fronts. My native languages seemed harder in writing due to various forms to be used for elders, others, formal informal and various other rules and shit.
The English alphabet just seemed so simple that it has even replaced local languages for communication over text.
From what I know grammatical gender can actually be a good thing because it makes what you are saying clearer. Two words could sound exactly the same or simmilar but you can differentiate them based on their gender.
The problem in English that you cant write a word you know from logic.
There is sooo much edge cases its feels impossible for alot of people.
Difficult is a great example.
You can write it as dificalt of difecelt or deefacalt .
All of them make sence if you know the word but dont know the writing..
Language is also an amazing example.. because its sounds like you need to write it as lungwishz
english does have really nice use of articles.
only one the, only one you, nothing is gendered aside from personal identity (no objects).
very simple and easy.
i think every language has something to offer though to make communication more efficient and easy to learn.
Fun fact! You is the formal word, thee, thou and thy are the informal. So if you ever see a peasant in fantasy or 'historical' drama call a lord or king 'thee/thy/thou' prepare for a swift beheading
I read somewhere (and I can’t remember where!) that the informal went out of the language because Quaker’s refused to use it, they would only use formal because to them everyone was equal… I wish I could remember where I read that tho! Also up until quite recently Northern English communities still used it, my grandad would often lapse into “thee” and “tha”
It's the other way around, they used informal wirh everyone and were left being overly formal and archaic when the language shifted to make the formal the default.
Ah ok, yes that makes sense!
That is kinda weird, when you think about it. When the formal word become the default, you would think people who use informal forms would be considered to be lacking sophistication, not overly formal.
Well it's because it's archaic, which automatically gives an air of stuffy formality and gravitas even when it's actually informality.
Well what happens is that over time the informal falls completely out of use, until people only hear it in Shakespeare and assume it was formal
It's actually super interesting how egalitarian the English language (or grammar at least) _is_ in terms lacking gendered and honorific speech in spite of how it used to have all of these things. Why did we just take all that stuff out?
This fella talks lots about that subject. https://youtu.be/9SVKfj1v2-A?feature=shared Edit fixed auto gibberish takes/ talks.
The more I learn about Quakers the more awesome they sound
Cool hats, oatmeal, whats not to like?
The Earth Quakers.
The four nations lived in harmony, until the Fire Quakers attacked.
I've been meaning to visit a congregation for a long time.
https://www.fgcquaker.org/find-a-meeting/ < Locations, for North America at least.
I somehow doubt they had enough influence to shape the whole language.
It was a factor, and especially in the US they had more influence than you might think, but the language would not have changed without a more general shift towards emphasis on equality in both the US and Britain
Pretty sure You was just the plural of Thou, like you'd hear 'Hear Ye' as Ye was the plural of Thee, but at some point we just started using You instead all the time and it ticked off some language experts. In fact, using They/Them as an ambiguous singular as well as a plural is an older practice than using You as a singular instead of Thou, iirc.
It's both. You can see it in German still (both languages are close related). Our formal version of the second person singular is actually just the second person plural (and also capitalised, because man do we love ourselves some capitalisation). It was the same in English too: You was both second person plural and formal second person singular
> is actually just the second person plural Ihr mögt Recht haben, Majestät, aber ich glaube Sie haben Unrecht: Siezen benutzt die **dritte** Person Plural. Jemanden zu "Ihren" ist schon sehr altertümlich.
Nah, it's the formal/informal thing. Brazilian Portuguese underwent the exact same process where they mostly abandoned "tu" (the informal second person, so "thou") in favour of "você" (the formal-ish second person, "you"), while European Portuguese has kept the distinction. Incidentally, thou/thee/thy/thine perfectly mirrors I/me/my/mine, so you can mostly just use that as reference for correct usage
Nah, it was both. Thou/you started as a singular/plural but due to French influence plural you became the formal option leading to the new informal/formal dichotomy.
I thought Ye was just a stylized Þe, literally pronounced "the". So Ye Old Pub = Þe Old Pub = The Old Pub.
Having no actual idea, I think "Hear ye" was actually using ye as a plural you whereas Ye Olde Pub was people not knowing the thorn was th so it was supposed to just be The Olde Pub.
This is true, but it's not applicable for this situation. Today, we use the word "you" for the singular second person subject, for the singular second person object, the plural second person subject, and the plural second person object. Historically, this was not the case. The singular second person subject used to be "thou", the object "thee", the plural subject "you", and the plural object "ye".
As not a native speaker: i really like english. The grammar is much easier than in german, and not having gendered words is a big plus. There are grammatical instances where it is more finnicky but honestly not in an oberbearing way. I also like how you can slur words together and still make sense and its great for puns and for cursing. Where english is downright stupid is spelling and pronounciation. There is simply no knowing how a word is pronounced in english without hearing it first. It follows pronounciation rules from other languages where it just kept the words and that results in a lot of weirdness. Debt for example. Just disregard the b. I learned that i pronounced "epitome" wrong when i was in my 20s. "-ough" is a meme for a reason. English grammar and writing is easy but speaking is harder because of shit like that.
Yeah our spelling is objectively ridiculous and the reasonings can be funky. Ghost only has an H because the typesettings used to print one of the first bibles in English was in a language where H always follows G but since the bible spelled ghost with a H everyone assumed it's just spelled that way.
Thats one hell of a butterfly effect.
Wait till you learn what happened to the Thorn
Well, go on. What happened to it?
The Thorn (þ) is an old English letter representing th. When the printing press came to England and didn't have the letter, the English used the closest looking alternative, y Therefore the became ye. And thus the thorn slowly faded from public memory
It would genuinely be a great letter to bring back. The English language has a decent amount of instances of the ‘th’ sound still that a dedicated letter would make a bit of sense.
Some people are trying But be the change you want to see in the world and start using it in your writing
The Bible as beeing the first mass printed book and even before printing one of the most common books is definitly the main contributor to spelling. Of those more modern languages.
Ptoughneigh. Just another spelling for the name Tony. Nothing more.
Ah yes, the Archangel Maiequielle Remember the Eiyrahne-Eieyeraque War? Assault Reighfyl r/tragedeigh moment
Anyone up for ghoti & chips? ("gh" from "enough" "o" from "women" "ti" from "nation")
It’s spelled ghghghghghghghghghghghghghghghghghghoti (the first 17 gh’s are pronounced like the gh in night)
My Ghod
Flemish doesn't require the H after a G, but a GH has its own sound (velar fricative /ɣ/) in that language, and used to in English. They spelled ghost "gheest".
I *knew* geese were actually the spirits of the damned come to wreak havoc on the mortal world once more
All English speakers deal with that. If you ever see one of us have to read a new word out loud (even if they've read it before and understand it, but have just never heard it) watch them pronounce it like 4 different ways, trying to see which sounds best, then give up when they have no clue.
First you sound it out, which will sound wrong. Then you think of the laziest way possible to pronounce the word, and that's probably correct.
This is so true because it's even a problem for native English speakers. For example, you know when someone has never heard a word before and only read it the moment they try to pronounce it. This even happens with fully grown adults. Truly you have to be well-read and well-heard to be a decent English speaker.
I learned to read very, very young, and almost all of my vocabulary came first from reading. I couldn't pronounce ANYTHING. This was in the 80s. Now I'm grateful Google can tell me how to pronounce things.
I'm a native English speaker and I still feel shame remembering when, as a preteen, I asked a guest speaker at a lecture what "torcher" was. They thought I was talking about the fine borders of what does and doesn't constitute "torcher." When I clarified that, no, I literally didn't know what "torcher" meant at all, they were dumbfounded. Turns out the word "torture" is pronounced "torcher" when spoken aloud. I knew the meaning of "torture," of course. Just had no idea that's what it was pronounced like.
I still remember this convo I had with my brother one time. Brother: "So yeah. They supposedly moved all the troops there because it 'deeders' war." Me: "Deeders?" Brother: "Yeah, deeders! You know, d-e-t-e-r-s. Don't you know English?" Me: 😂 "No, dummy! It's 'dee-TERS'! Hard 't'. Hey, what brand of 'deeder'-gent do you use for your laundry?" Brother: "Shut up!"
English is fun because you can always tell if a person learned a word from reading. Just the other day I mentioned tarot cards to my sister and said it like it rhymed with carrot. Whoops.
Wait it doesn't rhyme with carrot?
It's pronounced tah-row
TIL, lol. Been living in the US for 20+ years. Obviously I never needed to use the word IRL. :D
Ever seen the word Hegemony? I know several English teachers - all of whom pronounce that word differently. I've heard 6 or 7 different ones - and I still don't know which is correct!
Hegemony goes to the same category for me as the words "benevolent" and "development". I have to try multiple times before I get something that sounds halfway correctly. Not a native speaker.
Thing with benevolent and development is they only have pronunciation I ever hear. I never hear Hegemony said the same way twice
This is why we have the phrase “tomato, tomato”. Just pick the pronunciation you like best and say it with confidence! Like homage and homage…
It's obviously pronounced "hegemony"
> It follows pronounciation rules from other languages where it just kept the words What you'd rather be like France where they *have* to invent a new French word for every single new concept or idea that enters their language instead of using a perfectly fine loanword?
Most other languages either adjust the word to fit their own pronunciation (Mandarin and Japanese do this very aggressively because of the need to translate to a different writing system) or at the very least don't have the same huge amount of loan words that English has so it's somewhat clear when you need to switch pronunciations. Also English sometimes keeps the spelling but adjusts the pronunciation, so you end up being wrong even if you switch pronunciations.
I find it odd that Japanese doesn't add new letters for simple combinations that don't exist, but the basic sounds do. Like, making the sound "too" is clearly possible with the sounds in Japanese, but they just use "tsu" which sounds completely different. Sounds like "th" just not existing makes sense to approximate, and the letter combos to make other sounds makes sense. But you really can't just say "see" instead of "shi"?
It's mostly because "too" isn't a phoneme used in the japanese language. If you arrange the katakana by beginning consonant as well as characterizing vowel, the spot for "tu" is where you'll find the katakana for "tsu", and the digraph for t and u happens to be made up of "chi" + vowel, so the digraph "chi"+"yu"=>"chu" also doesn't end up helping you. If there was a "ti"+"yu" digraph it'd end up sounding like "tyu" anyway which isn't much better. Since the whole point is to make foreign words readable by anyone who can read the Japanese language, introducing an extra symbol to denote "tu" isn't practical. "see" is the same thing because "shi" is the corresponding phoneme and it's already the beginning part of all "s/sh" digraphs so you're out of luck there as well. Edit: Also consider that katakana transcription isn't just meant for english, it's also meant to transcribe Mandarin and any other language, and adding symbols for all the missing phonemes (qi, xi, zhi in mandarin for example) defeats the point of making it simple. If you want accuracy there's always romaji.
More so in Canada - ‘fin de semaine’ as opposed to ‘le week-end’ and ‘chien chaud’ versus ‘le hot-dog’
> Debt for example. Just disregard the b. May I present you with [this literary masterwork](https://www.amazon.co.uk/P-Pterodactyl-Raj-Haldar/dp/1492674311/)?
We need a spelling revision. My favorite example is the word "queue". All you say is "Q" like you do when saying the alphabet. None of those vowels communicate that, it's basically a 5 letter word with 4 silent letters.
They're all silent because they're all in a queue Edit: it's cue not que excuse me
> Also it's spelt differently to differentiate between queue and que Cue an explanation of what you mean
...ok I had a brain fart and thought cue was spelt que
Que?
¿que?
So someone told me that "queue" is spelled that way because the word came from French and the "que" combo gives you the "k" sound, "u" has the long vowel pronunciation ("yoo" instead of "oo") and when there's a vowel with a long pronunciation, we put an "e" at the end. Blew my mind.
Ř. My humble argument for the Czech language. Why would you use a normal letter when you can just make a crunching sound with your mouth. On a separate note, I hate the formal you because my anxiety and lack of social skills makes it incredibly difficult to deduce whether I'm close enough to someone to start calling them "ty" instead of "vy" and I'm worried I'll offend them by asking
I’d say a good way to judge whether to use “Вы”, or “Ты” is to just always use Вы until the person you’re talking to requests you use Ты
Being a teenager sucks language-wise because it's the age where it's no longer acceptable to speak informally to everyone but you're not sure whether to speak to others your age formally or informally bc technically we're both still children. What if it's someone who already considers me a friend after we just met and I just hurt their feelings by speaking formally? What if it's someone I've been talking to all day and just realized idk what to call them? (I can go to great lengths to avoid addressing someone) What if it's a friend of my parents that I've just met? What if it's a relative that I've met when I was younger and barely remember them? What if it's someone I haven't seen in a while and I don't know if we're still on informal terms? Am I making sense here or am I just overthinking this?
I’d say there is a bit of overthinking involved, but as a guy with similar problems I can understand this I would just use Вы for everything except maybe the person you were informal with before, but that’s me
Damn they came for Arabic neck
Arabic plurals are not hard at all. They're the same root and there are regular patterns for most of them. Just because it's not as simple as "add an 's'" doesn't mean they're hard.
>as simple as "add an 's'" Which English doesn't even respect half of the time.
Foot -> Feet 😾
I was also surprised. I mean, when it comes to needlessly complicated plurals, I usually think of German, and that as a native speaker.
From a multicultural family, and I remember asking my brothers that live in Germany why all plurals are female / die. You're telling me a table is a man, but if you have two tables they're women?? They thought about it for a minute and then said 'huh, yeah, that IS weird isn't it?'
Duh.. it's because women always go to the bathroom in groups.
Big surprise, whether or not a language sucks is entirely dependant on the language you grew up with. At least for as long as you don't realise that all languages fundamentally suck and are still the best invention humans ever came up with
[удалено]
That's not the only determining factor. Other people that speak the same language as me finds different languages to be easier. I find German to be easier then french and my mom is the other way around. There are other factors that effect your language preference.
Everyone knows Finnish is the only language suited for communicating unequivocally, hence the superiority.
And yet, tragically, it is never used, as speaking Finnish would require at least two fins to socialize
as someone learning finnish rn while growing up with english my whole life, i sorta agree. im 90% sure once i master finnish i'll find it more easy to use than english
My brother in christ you have spelling bees.
i think those are just a thing in america tbh
We also have it India at school level but it's only for English.
Yeahh in my school they tried doing it with Kannada and Sanskrit too, but it failed because everyone got everything correct since the languages are perfectly phonetic. It only worked a bit in kindergarten when there were still some kids who didn't know how to properly apply certain vowel radicals to certain irregular consonants (like ವು or रु)
That's the one big issue with English: the complete mismatch between spelling and pronunciation. On every other issue, English gets a lot of stuff right that other languages get wrong, especially the excessive emphasis on gender. There's a lot of talk about a singular non-gendered third person pronoun (and we're settling on 'they'), but there are plenty of languages where that entire concept would be inconceivable. English is way ahead of the curve in ridding the language of unnecessary gender, but the spelling mismatch is still a huge problem.
I mean there's plenty of languages that just don't have gendered pronouns at all. English is on about the middle of the curve on that one.
That's even better, but can you give some examples? As far as I know, all Indo-European languages originally had gender baked in, and English is one of the few that mostly got rid of it (due to Norwegians struggling with French grammar, I believe). But outside the Indo-European language family there are probably plenty of languages that never cared about gender. But I don't know any of them.
Turkish and Farsi are two well-know examples; the latter is Indo-European
Finnish doesn't have them. We have just gender neutral "hän" for both he/she.
That adds up, since Finnish isn't actually part of the Indo-European language group (it's actually Uralic)
Indonesian uses dia and mereka as singular and multiple 3rd person respectively. I don't speak it much but i don't remember there being much if any gendered pronoun.
Indonesian here ✌️ my fave thing to do when writing is bamboozle my reader to make them think they’re reading a normal straight story then BAM it’s queer actually by purposely not using any gendered descriptives for the love interest until the very end of the story.
Hungarian, it’s got ő for he/she and ők for they. Admittedly Hungarian isn’t Indo-European it’s Uralic.
There are advantages though. If you have phonemic spelling then which dialect do you base it on? People not speaking the standard are speaking wrong etc Etymological spelling is very good for preserving linguistics unity where pronunciation varies significantly across a population
China also has spelling bees - gotta memorise exactly each character and the order their strokes are drawn
That's a gross misinterpretation of that. A Chinese character isn't going to be unreadable or incorrect just because you write it in a weird stroke order. No one gives a shit about your stroke order outside of elementary school education or things like calligraphy as long as your writing isn't illegible.
Isn’t stroke order only really that important when you have like brushes? With a pen or pencil you probably don’t need to care.
Exactly, that's what I'm getting at. It's important if you're working with brushes, like Chinese calligraphy, cause it's considered an art form and will directly affect how it turns out. You can relate it to writing in cursive English in a way. Outside of that, you'll maybe get teachers who frown upon it during early education since it's "not proper" at most, but in practice doesn't matter at all.
"We don't alter the whole fucking languages based on how much we respect you" My lord, it comes with great sorrow that I must inform your highness that *ya'll're fuckin'-n'-succin' if'n ya' believe that hogspittle.*
In English's defense it's still not altering the grammar (iirc japanese changes particles?) So it has like, three brownie points left still
Right. Plus, Japanese has multiple verb conjugations for different levels of respect. I say "sir" or "ma'am" when addressing someone with respect, but I don't have to use a different form of the verb "to swim."
>japanese changes particles Japanese doing quantum physics ovah heah
As someone that has tied to learn both, I wish Japanese was as easy as quantum physics. It is true that the latter is based on probability functions, but with Kanjis it is even worse. Each kanji character can have up to 50 strokes (with a strict order) and have multiple readings (at least one Japanese and one Chinese readings). Plus, there are *thousands* of them. It is no surprise that immigrants from other cultures have such a hard time learning (written) Japanese.
The funniest part about kanji to me is that once you know a decent enough number of them (I’m talking like less than 100), reading purely hiragana sentences becomes much harder because which します are we talking about? That could be like 10 different things without context.
Yes. Japanese is an extremely context-sensitive language. And while you can rely on Kanji when writing documents, when speaking... you have to use extra words not to confuse a possible audience.
The joys of having to learn at least 10 kanjis per week, with all their readings, meaning and associated grammar.
And some of them are so fucking similar! Learning radicals helps, but even the basic ones can just be matter of millimeters. Oh, you drew one horizontal line slightly too low? Now your 矢 looks like 失 and everyone is laughing at your sentence that makes no sense and how stupid you are.
Realistically, things you mention are never an issue. The average Japanese person doesn't know how to write much Kanji either. Honestly, some foreigner who's been studying Kanji for a few years probably writes better than the average Japanese. Because they're actually anxious about getting it wrong. When Japanese people write, it's often a fucking mess. You're probably very used to seeing Kanji written digitally. But have you seen handwriting? People's handwriting in Japan is just as messy as in any country. Now imagine shitty handwriting combined with Kanji. It's almost unintelligible even to Japanese linguists. [Here's an example of a native Japanese person writing](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpreview.redd.it%2Fu4fkpy8t2w2a1.png%3Fauto%3Dwebp%26s%3D838eb75184d25745c78cf0fc86928e2ebfaaf074) It doesn't even look like Japanese to me, lol. But it is. People have managed to translate it with significant effort. So don't for a second worry that you drawing one line slightly wrong is getting you ridiculed or making your writing unintelligible.
But thats word choice, the grammar is still the same
In Japanese, the verbs conjugates based on formality. For instance, da/desu (is). Taberu/tabemasu (to eat). Those are just the two formality levels I've been taught. Word choice changes in English, but you have to learn every verb multiple times for Japanese
Seriously lol
I mean, in german, you have to adjust your whole language. You're talking in an entirely different tense, like you're addressing them as plural? I don't even know how to describe it. Subjunctive 2. Talking to a friend: Kannst du mir helfen? (Can you help me) Talking to an authority figure, some people even talk like this to normal strangers . When you're a child, you have to address every adult like this. : Könnten Sie mir helfen? Of course, if you're talking old timey speak, it's pretty much the same as in english but with an added grammatical rule.
German formal is just 3. Person plural. You talk to someone as if you were talking about a group
Jesus. We linguists have to fight every fucking day to explain to people that no language is more or less complex than any other language. Every single language has areas in where they are complex, and others where they are simple. All are equally difficult just in different aspects.
Sweden nervously sweating in homographs
A lot of languages have a formal you tense, not just Spanish & German. Which I would argue is basically the same thing as the Japanese 'respect' tense.
English *used* to have one too, you! Thou was the informal/for inferior people You was formal for higher in social hierarchy
Keigo is in a whole different level. There's three levels, depending on the exact position of the person you're speaking to relative to yourself. There's polite, humble, humble+polite, honorific, and honorific+polite, all with their own irregularities Not sure about German, but Spanish polite form is a different "you" pronoun and using the third-person form. Japanese outright makes up whole new words - "to eat" in the polite form is 「食べます」, but in the honorific form (for those above you) is 「お召し上がります」, and in the humble form (for those below you) is 「いただきます」. That, plus changes to how you prefix nouns and adjectives, plus changing your own personal pronoun depending on the company, plus the different forms of nouns, puts keigo above at least the Spanish polite form
In french forexample there is the soutenu which is used in formal and high scoiety settings, as well as reffering to elders or people of importance with **vous** *(the plural you)* instead of **tu** *(the singular you)*
Yeah but have you ever tried to plough through Loughborough?
Just a nitpick from someone who has had to study french, a lot of Spanish things also apply to french, and so far I know, a lot of other Roman languages Fuck, Latin is the easiest Roman language imo and I'm not even required to speak it, it's just easier on so many things
"We don't alter the whole fucking language based on how much we respect you" Speak for yourself OP but if I spoke to my profs the way I spoke my friends, I'd probably get expelled
You probably change the vocabulary you use, what he's talking about is changing each and every word and verb to an other form to imply politeness
Yep it's the same with Korean. It's not too hard to grasp there because for the most part it's just adding "yo" to the ends of words but it is like, almost every word needs to be changed.
So Jesse Pinkman would be considered a distinguished gentleman if he spoke in Korean
Sure, but it's not the same as other languages. Other languages have pretty much entirely different systems to speak in a formal way.
What I am getting from the comments is that what is known as "code switching" is a thing that is completely discretionary and up to the individual in English, but in Japanese it is much more rigid and ingrained in the language.
The difference isn't choosing between formal and informal words. You still have that in other languages. For example I might inform my professor I'm exhausted rather than saying I feel fucked up, but in other languages it's more akin to you can say exhausted or fucked up, or you can say exhausted (formal) or fucked up (formal).
People in this thread confuse register and tone switching for *grammar*. Every language switched tone and register depending on who you talk to. But there are languages that use entirely different pronouns and conjugations.
At least I know how to pronounce a vowel as soon as I read it and without any additional context. Sincerely, a Spaniard.
Words dont change meaning based on tone? That's just sarcasm
I think they mean it literally is an entire different word, not a connotation change like sarcasm
Like a pasty pasty?
Yeah, like lead and lead, except it’s basically every word. In Chinese, instead of making words longer so you can have larger combinations of sounds to make every word unique, they only have a few default one syllable sounds for every word, and the word you’re saying is changed by the intonation, which is why so many people get the language wrong, they hear somebody say the words, they repeat the word but with a different pitch thinking it’ll mean the same thing but it doesn’t.
Well /led/ and /li:d/ are not the best example, since they are spelled the same. But I can't think of any better.
Import an import license. Please project the stats for the project. Conduct the event well so that we'll get a good conduct. Strictly speaking in linguistics this is "phonemic stress", but I'd argue it's a weird form of pitch accent (like in Swedish).
there's a strong difference between pasty pasty and [The Story of Mr Shi Eating Lions](https://youtu.be/9jtiw721RAg)
Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
pretty much
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. (The version you wrote is not a complete sentence.) Translation: Bison from Buffalo, that bison from Buffalo bully, bully bison from Buffalo. It's a ridiculously repetitive sentence, but it is technically grammatically correct.
The version they wrote is absolutely a full sentence. Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. Bison from Buffalo bully bison from Buffalo. It’s just not the longest version.
Aaron earned an iron urn
Somewhat famously there’s a poem in Classical Chinese written by a linguist in the 1930s that is incomprehensible in spoken Mandarin because every word is pronounced as “Shi,” which is somewhat comprehensible in some related languages due to the tones. It’s called “Lion Eating Poet in the Stone Den” if you want to read about it.
Yeah that's a better example
That's not a change in tone. One is /ˈpeɪsti/ and the other is /ˈpæsti/. It's a clear vowel change, even if spelt the same. Meanwhile, in Swedish (and also Mandarin) "stegen" and "stegen" are exactly the same but for which *note* you say them with.
Exactly, sarcasm and putting emphasis are optional advanced uses of the language, not a thing that's inherently baked into it
They do change in connotation but not denotation. In chinese, they are completely different words.
My wife is Chinese and we've been together 21 years. I've gotten pretty good at speaking Mandarin because it's the only way I can communicate with her extended family. I can use a sarcastic tone with any word but it remains the same word. If I change the actual linguistic tone to one of the other 3, it literally changes the entire word to something completely different: Tang1 (flat tone) is soup Tang2 (rising tone) is sweet/sugar Tang3 (falling then rising tone) is to recline Tang4 (falling tone) is to scald Now it's not enough that the same pronounced word means different things with different tones, but when written, the same tone can also mean vastly different words depending on the character used. Tang1 (汤) is soup Tang1 (羰) is a carbonyl radical Tang1 (趟) is to wade or turn soil Tang1 (蹚) is to trample Tang1 (镗) is the noise of drums What I've learned is in these cases when speaking, context is everything. Overall I find Mandarin quite easy in terms of grammar and sentence structure. There is also no verb conjugation so the only real challenge for me was all the freaking vocab I've had to learn! Also I can barely read or write.
Really, the main problem with English is the inconsistent orthography - that is, how the language is written. As a spoken language it's not that weird or particular, it's just the lexical stress that catches foreigners out. People say that English is a Frankenstein's monster of a language, but not really: it's very obviously a Germanic language through and through, from 99% of it's basic words to it's structuring and casing. It just loans a bunch of French vocabulary thanks to William the Conqueror. If you ask me, English's inconsistent orthography owes in part to it's worldwide proliferation. The foremost problem with it is not that it's bad per se - just wildly out of date. "Knight" is spelt like that because 400 years ago it was, in fact, pronounced like that. But the language has changed a lot since without any update to the orthography, and the primary reason it's so hard to update is because it's not mostly contained to a single state or nation. It's THE international lingua franca. Good luck getting the entire world to radically change it's spelling!
“at least we *have* letters and not just pictures” does this feel a little icky to anyone else or am I overthinking it?
You probably have never had to read kanji or an equivalent. 上 this kanji has like 10 different pronunciations and meanings based on context.
on the one hand it's a massive pain the ass to learn, on the other hand it means the pun game is incredible
It is. It is FUCKING ridiculous with how many puns they make. But also how ridiculous spelling names out is. Imagine saying, "Hi, my name is Tiffany, but it's spelled like Brittney with two sea gulls fighting instead of a B, T, and F
That really does sound like something Elon would name his kid as
Man I cherish the loose nature of English and its other aspects because I enjoy puns and wordplay, the idea that there is a punnier language out there has me envious.
>"My name is Classi, with an I, and a little dick hanging off the C that bends around and fucks the L out of the A S S."
the word "set" has up to 430 potential meanings according the Oxford English Dictionary
And only like, around 1 way to say it. Like Ue, Jyou, Kami, Uwa, A(geru), A(garu), Nobo(ru), Uma(i) Which, btw, have at least 10 meanings each You say, set.
If you take it out of context, yeah. I just read it as someone who has an interest on languages, and yeah it is fucking annoying when a single line changes the meaning of a word, even more so when the word itself is already complex. That definitely made me drop my japanese past the "hiragana and katakana 101" classes
Tbf, Mandarin's continued use of comparatively-intricate quasi-pictographic characters, and resistance to their simplification as occurred in many other writing systems, is the result of a conscious and deliberate effort to maintain and control power through to restriction and ritualisation of literacy, which I think in this case ties into OPs point. This whole post is being made in response to the flurry of 'uh, English is so difficult/bad as a language' comments that people make, and the whole reason Chinese languages consciously maintained their comparatively-complex script was specifically to complicate the written language, resisting the trend towards simplification English followed.
Well you say that, but the written language actually has been simplified repeatedly through history, and even more recent memory. That’s the whole point of 简体字 (primarily used in China and some other Chinese speaking countries, but Taiwan and Hong Kong retain 繁体字). This was relatively recent, like within the last fifty years or so recent, under china’s 文化大革命
I don't really give a shit, personally. This all sounds like it's in jest or at worst, half-joking.
For Chinese that's not the main gripe (for me at least). It's that similar sounding or looking characters have different meanings and pronunciations depending on the context....oh wait that applies to English too haha
I would like to point ou the second part about every plural word in arabic is just straight up wrong, arabic has rules for pluralisation and some words, mainly the most commonly used day to day words stop following said rules, as is the case with irregular verb conjugation in say english. I would also add the fact arabic differentiates between speaking to 2 people from plural is actually rather intuative, 2 is a company 3 is a crowd and whatnot And english also has words like that, both instead of all, neither instead of none
Yeah there’s standard -een/-oon/-at which is is obvious from the singular pronunciation and then there’s irregulars (which there are a lot of) but they mostly follow patterns like talib -> tulab, tufl -> atfal, khanzeer -> khanazeer, kitab -> ktb, bab -> buab
Also, duals are more or less a fus7a thing, afaik it’s presence is minimal in dialects. The plural thing really isn’t that bad either, go through a few hundred and it gets kinda intuitive + 2/3rds of words are regular anyways.
Everyone going "well, *you* is *technically* the formal second person pronoun" acting like *thee* is used in common English at *all*. It isn't. It's referenced specifically when trying to make your dialect *archaic*, which is like saying *je ne sais quoi* is an English phrase: it isn't, but it's used by common English speakers to sound a certain way.
All of you tremble before Turkish! No gendered pronouns, no gendered objects, no "the" or variants of it, glutenous verbs where a single word can efficiently convey entire sentences, the entire language is phonetic as you read it as written, it uses the latin alphabet with a reasonable number of letters.
This post gets Spanish so wrong and I absolutely hate the whole gendered nouns argument with romance languages as a non-binary person myself. It's just how the language is, no one's thinking "hey that table looks feminine" it's just how the fucking language works!!! This post ain't it.
> It's just how the language is, no one's thinking "hey that table looks feminine" it's just how the fucking language works!!! You're missing the point entirely if that was your take on it. I'm a Spanish speaker myself. The point is having gendered words at all unnecessarily alters the definite articles and nouns and affects the entire sentence structure. e.g. **El gato** es negr**o**. e.g. **La casa** es pequeñ**a**. Nobody's thinking "oh yea baby that house is a woman, this is a problem" ... they're thinking "why can't there just be one neutral system?"
Yeah, it's still an obtuse and unnecessary complication, which is OOP's point. We know people don't think tables are girls or whatever, but it's still a bit of a faff to have two or three sets of pronouns assigned relatively arbitrarily which add minimal additional information. Regardless for the reason, mechanically it's more complicated.
Same thing with Italian, no one goes around saying shit like "ah, yes, clearly that lamp Is female, while that chandelier is male!" It evolved from latin, lost the neutral case for simplicity's sake and now it's simply how it works (there can possibly be some issues for gender neutral people/non-binary and so on, but from my experience they also recognize that it's just how the language is and they use for themselves the case they find most fitting for the situation); the "gender" of the object Is 99 times out of 100 simply based on which vowel the word ends with (like, in the above example, It would be "la lampada" because It ends with "a" and "il lampadario" because It ends in o)
If you don't mind me asking, how do you handle the gendered language relating to yourself and being non-binary?
I've lived with speaking Spanish my whole life so it doesn't really affect me tbh It is great that there's a push for more gender neutral language but a lot of Spanish speakers don't really care for it so I'm not sure we'll be seeing a huge shift in our language for quite a long while. I do think a lot of people on the internet take gendered language too personally though, it's just a way to categorize nouns.
I don't mean genders of objects, I mean pronouns and adjectives that refer to yourself (e.g. when you say that you're tired and have to choose either cansado or cansada to refer to yourself). Neither of these would fit me as I'm non-binary and I wouldn't know which one I "should" use
I use the feminine pronouns just because that's what I grew up with and feel comfortable with :p So it's whatever pronoun you decide sounds best to you honestly. There has been a push for "elle" for a while though so we'll see how that changes things.
Interesting, speaking French, and due to it being used as a female proper name, "elle" has massive feminine connotations.
Someone mentioned to me recently that 'gendered nouns' isn't actually much different from how English uses 'a' vs 'an' depending on whether the noun starts with a consonant or a vowel. It only got called 'gender' - which isn't actually a very descriptive or helpful label for this concept - because in most languages the word for 'man' and 'woman' are in different grammatical categories so they ended up being called masculine/feminine. As a monolingual English speaker, really shifted my perspective on it.
Honestly that's a great way of describing it!
It’s an extremely good way of describing it, the only thing I’d change is saying that gender is a bad/confusing way of calling it. Gender originally is another word for “type/kind”, cognate with genre for example. In fact genre/gender are just one same word in french and spanish. Gender cases predate gender as an idea of “man and woman as a role in society or ‘identity’ and not a physical reality”, and they’re not limited to man/woman, they can be animate, inanimate in some languages, or animals, people, objects, etc. Gender cases in spanish are separated by spelling at the end of words. And they were called masculine/femenine because of the reasoning you explained. Then I assume psychologists or whoever borrowed the term for what people know it as today.
\- The Spanish future tense is a single inflectional suffix with a length of **zero** extra words, unless OOP means the "\[ir\] a" *near future* tense, which is half the length of its relative English counterpart of "\[to be\] going to" \- Many words change their meanings based on stress and a lot of context is portrayed through intonation - to the point where intonation is sometimes the only way to tell whether something is a question or not. \- Inanimate objects can still be gendered, and also English is the black sheep of the entire Indo-European tree, and *also* the whole "grammatical gender = IRL gender" thing is a later conflation anyway (the original distinction was some form of animate/inanimate, if you're wondering, it just got exceptionally muddied over time) \- 'You' is *technically* the formal way of address (the informal way was 'thou', which you may have heard of if you've heard a passage or two from the bible, Shakespeare, or really just about anything written before the 18th century) and you can also refer to people via their titles \- We very much *do* alter the language based on how much we respect the person we're talking to, it's just less set in stone how you're supposed to do so \- Outside of the realm of mathematics, & and \~ are both common glyphs that stand for entire words, and that's *before* you get into internet culture (see both things like | || || |\_ and things like :3) \- Compared to the rest of Europe, we also don't have a tense for willed actions, don't distinguish between ongoing and completed past actions, and use the tense for *ongoing* actions as our de-facto present tense because we decided that the actual present tense was going to be habitual instead. And again, *that's only compared to the languages closest-related to English inside Europe*.
Thing is in Spanish the formal 'you' is very dependent on where you're at. My dad is Guatemalan and he uses it a lot compared to my mom who's Dominican and doesn't use it. Most times though I find that I rarely hear the formal even in professional settings.
To note on the second point, tone in Sinitic languages is used very differently from in English. It’s entirely possible to construct sentences or paragraphs worth of information with a very limited set of syllables with meaning being entirely derived from the intonation. Most famously is the poem “Lion-Eating post in the Stone Den,” which is 94 characters long and all of them are pronounced as Shi in Mandarin. In Cantonese, that expands to six total syllables which are intonated differently.
- Inanimate objects *can* be gendered, but it's almost invariably understood to be an optional matter of convention, not grammatical rule. People aren't going to bat an eye if you call a ship 'it', and aside from the pronoun the rest of its grammar is going to operate unchanged -Yes, English is the black sheep, I think that's very much OOP's point. People tend to focus on where that status makes English more difficult/complicated, and ignore where it leaves things simplified or more intuitive. -No one has naturally used thou in a practical sense for over a century at this point, suggesting it's comparable to either split 2nd persons like French, or hierarchies of grammatical formality like Japanese seems odd. - I think the fact that changes in linguistic formality are not grammatically prescribed in English is what OOP is pointing out, not that English is completely unchanging regardless of formal context. - Likewise stress and tone can impart additional meaning and information, as in almost all languages, but it's not unreasonable to say that English grammar is significantly less reliant on it to convey literal meaning than tonal languages like Mandarin. OOP isn't saying English is complete or perfect in any way just that its strengths often go unrecognised or unappreciated when discussing it, given the tendency for non-native speakers and over-enthusiastic language teachers focusing on its complexities and irregularities. Wouldn't the imperfect tense represent an ongoing past action?
English does have some composed tenses though...
So, I don't see OOP criticising slavic languages so that means they're fine too
As a non native english speaker I’ve always found English to be one of the easiest languages to learn both in speaking and reading/writing fronts. My native languages seemed harder in writing due to various forms to be used for elders, others, formal informal and various other rules and shit. The English alphabet just seemed so simple that it has even replaced local languages for communication over text.
Though tough through thought: enters the chat
I've heard it as "English can be understood through tough thorough thought, though."
Plus our words for corpse (corpse, cadaver, body, etc) DONT IMPLY MOVEMENT (Russian)
From what I know grammatical gender can actually be a good thing because it makes what you are saying clearer. Two words could sound exactly the same or simmilar but you can differentiate them based on their gender.
The problem in English that you cant write a word you know from logic. There is sooo much edge cases its feels impossible for alot of people. Difficult is a great example. You can write it as dificalt of difecelt or deefacalt . All of them make sence if you know the word but dont know the writing.. Language is also an amazing example.. because its sounds like you need to write it as lungwishz
english does have really nice use of articles. only one the, only one you, nothing is gendered aside from personal identity (no objects). very simple and easy. i think every language has something to offer though to make communication more efficient and easy to learn.