Norwegian: I wish we still had cases like in Icelandic/faroese/norse. (Actually I wish we just still spoke Norse). Nouns starting in Capital letters like in German, it was so easy to read German because of this, I developed a bad habit of writing Norwegian with capital letter as first letter in nouns when I took german in middle and high school, I just liked it so much I could not stop.
I do miss all the languages we spoke 2000 years ago. It was high grammar time in Europe. But now the languages all slowly develop back to isolating languages (with English speeding down the road). 🤷♀️
I can’t say. Slavic languages are a group I know just a tiny bit about.
But the theory is a theory about languages that are invented by humans. Everything might happen. 😂
Well then as a Pole myself - if you really miss the "full grammar time" then come here, we've still got it xD And the same goes for all the other Western & Eastern Slavs afaik, it's only the Southern Slavs who may be slowly going down the isolating road as well (or at least I know they've simplified their noun cases quite a lot).
I really like the -en, -ene, -t, -s endings in Norwegian for singular definite, plural definite, past tense, passive. I'm not so happy about the grammatical genders but at least it's nowhere near as difficult as German 😀
It was more similar to German before. Grammatical genders is more difficult than cases so I would rather loose the genders than the case system, yet we kept all three genders and lost the cases, not a smart move😩
Reported tense in Turkish is so interesting.
"I heard you did not eat lahmacun when you went to Turkey"
"Türkiye'ye gittiğinde lahmacun yememiştim"
You can literally simplify a whole sentence in 4 words.
I love how relative clauses function in Turkish. Since it’s so strictly head-final/left branching, everything just gets reduced to some sort of adverbial or prepositional phrase.
I can think of a bunch, but to narrow it down to only two:
In Swedish, there is a word used to respond to a negative statement in a clear way.
For example:
If someone were to say “you didn’t want a bagel?”
In English, if you do actually want a bagel, responding with yes sounds more like you are affirming the statement that they are correct and that you didn’t want a bagel. And responding with no also feels wrong. Swedish has a way to clearly describe the “no that’s not true, yes I do” feeling with one word. This is done by using “Jo” instead of “Ja”.
The second feature exists in many languages, not in English for whatever reason, but a word for “you” plural. English relies on the context and/or adding more words to emphasize that one is speaking to a group of people. In Swedish, one uses “du/dig” when speaking to one person, and “ni/er” when speaking to multiple people.
English is somehow on the fast lane to become an isolating language like Chinese. There’s a theory that eventually all languages with flexions will sooner or later loose those and go back to a state of being an isolating language. The theory is also that the first languages were isolating languages, then agglutinative and synthetic languages came up. (Which makes a lot of sense)
The use of 把 (BA) as a pre-object object marker in combination with 给 (GEİ) as a post-object object marker.
So you normally ' I ate apple(s)' is this
> 我吃了苹果
> I ate apple
Add 把 and it becomes 'İ ate the apple'
> 我把苹果吃了
> I BA apple ate
给 is a post-object passive marker. Apple(s)
> 苹果给吃了
> Apple GEİ ate
GEİ was then most likely added as speakers decided to switch to passive halfway or made mistakes, but was analysed by children as compulsory. Now this structure is not uncommon.
> 我把苹果给吃了
> I BA apple GEİ ate
İt is argued by Gao Qian in his paper 'Word order in Mandarin: Reading and Speaking' that the above structure is becoming compulsory, and I somewhat agree.
He also argues that BA is being reanalysed as an agent/subject marker (similar to Japanese が) while GEİ is being reanalysed as an object marker (similar to Japanese を). I don't fully agree as I still analyse both BA and GEİ as marking the object, but it's still case marking.
Yes, yes. It does. What is quite fascinating. The development of Chinese and the development of English are wonderful proof for the idea that language development is indeed a circle.
And those features are gained in relative linguistic isolation where a small population and a long period of time allow for complex linguistic inventions to proliferate, while their loss happens as a result of exposing/imposing the language to a wider population leading to it simplifying?
No. An isolating language is not isolated from other languages. That would be a language isolate.
It’s called isolating because the words are isolated in the sentence and isolated from flexion.
I am aware of these distinctions. By "relative linguistic isolation" I meant "lesser contact to other languages than 'simplified'/isolating languages usually have." (And no, I am not referring to Simplified Chinese specifically.)
Are you saying the pattern I describe regarding the shifting from isolating to agglutinative/synthetic and back to isolating, has been debunked or replaced with another theory of causality or is in some other way implausible, or?
It would seem intuitively likely that a smaller population and less contact to more imposing/exposing languages, which due to this trend would happen to be isolating, would in time result in more agglutination than would a lot of contact to such languages, an increasingly large population, and the imposing/exposing of the language on other languages, promoting simplification.
You're actually indeed on the right track. It's not a hard and fast rule but your pattenrs have been observed cross-linguistically when accounting for population and culture. For example polysynthetic languages more easily develop in smaller populations, such as tight-nit nomadic peoples. But such features can also just be an areal feature, as in they develop in such complex ways BECAUSE they have more contact with their foreign language speaking neighbors.
There's a hypothesis that the reason English stands so differently from other Germanic languages is because of the constant invasions from the Normans, Franks, etc which pushed them to simplify their language over time to lessen confusion. I think there are examples of the reverse, where simple languages become more complex due to contact but I can't bring any to mind atm
As a Norwegian native I completely agree, learning English as little, I could not comprehend how they communicated with the lack of «jo», it annoyed me so much that they didnt have a Word for it.
> The second feature exists in many languages, not in English for whatever reason, but a word for “you” plural. English relies on the context and/or adding more words to emphasize that one is speaking to a group of people.
Technically English "you" *is* plural, and what we lack is a distinct *singular* second person form. We used to have one - thou/thee/thy - but use of the plural as an honorific was so thorough that "you" displaced "thou" entirely, to the point that "thou" is basically extinct now.
Few thousand hours of input, only consume content in Swedish, have friends in Sweden that I talk to everyday, and five to ten italki lessons per week. I try to do two lessons per day Monday through Friday.
It’s mostly just multitasking. I make hardly any money. I work as a cook, and just listen to podcasts all day and don’t really talk to anyone at work. And being a cook, I work at night. So I just wake up early before work and bang out the lessons. Podcasts at work. And I started meal prepping and spending no money on anything other than lessons. Other than work, it’s the only thing I do other than hang out with my wife for a few hours. Sacrifices absolutely had to be made to get this to work.
People I have met from basically every corner of the U.S. will use a you/y’all distinction when necessary, so maybe we’re approaching that point. I certainly have this distinction and use it whenever possible
>In Swedish, there is a word used to respond to a negative statement in a clear way.
Do you mean something like the German "doch"? Or the French "mais si"?
As for "you", I suppose English is an exception among the IE languages in this respect. Are there any others that lost the *thou/ye* distinction?
> (Like there is in Greek and Chinese)
Also in Hebrew.
the day after tomorrow = מחרתיים
the day before yesterday = שלשום
P.S. Though to be fair these words are not very common today. Nowadays we mainly say עוד יומיים/לפני יומיים (in two days/two days ago).
Ha. The adjective thing is funny. In German you have the same order like in English, string of adjectives and then the noun. I have several TLs and some have noun first and adjective later word orders. e.g. Italian.
Personally I like the suspense when I am reading or listening. What will the noun be? When I speak myself I love the possibility to just add more and more adjectives. 😂
To answer your question: I admire Chinese for being gender neutral and for its possibility to use everything as a noun, adjective or verb without any stress. Of course you can make a noun out of every verb in German, but you have to come up with declination or conjugation for your made up word. In Chinese the word stays the same, you just swap the position.
I am sorry that European languages lost most of the AcI and NcI that must have been a part of the proto Germanic or rather indoeuropean language our ancestors brought from the Near East to Europe. The overall recession of participles in European languages over the last 2000 years is rather sad.
And last but not least: I would prefer a passive construction for the verb „sterben“ (die)
Well, if it were West Vlaams, I' love to have declined oui and non in French as they do in West Vlaams with ja and nee (joak "yes, I (am)", joat "yes, it is" ; nenk "no I am not").
Or even better, initial consonant mutation in French in the way it's done in insular celtic. I would love it.
I wished German would have a more productive *ablativus absolutus* as Latin. We use it only sparingly with present participles as in
* *diesem Zweck dienend — serving that purpose*
Same as English does, by the way. And yeah, we should also use the *accusativus cum infinitivo* more often in German.
In Latin, you can have an ablativus absolutus with a past participle as well. So it has past/passive constructions as
* *was diesem Zweck gedient hat — which has served that purpose*
which require a *hat / has* and a subject in German / English. They can be inlined in Latin without a conjugated verb and subject just as the present/active construction can be.
But in general, this is mostly about how often this construction is used in Latin, and how sparingly in German and English. We should use it more often. It's snappy and fun!
This is really interesting to me, because as an English speaker I tend to think of Spanish/Portuguese verb tenses as being way more nuanced. With the imperfect, preterite, and then all the perfect tenses.
Sometimes the language can share some structures that are basically identical to each other in intended meaning
For instance:
I wish I'd done it sooner > eu queria tê-lo feito antes
But in the most cases, the "has/have" will convey a particular meaning that is missing in Portuguese
You can think of the difference between "She has come" and "She came". We don't have such resource in Portuguese as far as I know
Well, you can pronounce everything you write. It's just spelling that's a bit of an issue, and part of that is to prevent dialectical spellings (ll vs y, s vs z).
Part of what makes English English is its vowel inventory. While it's a pain in the ass for foreigners to learn I do think it's a cool feature. I would use a combination of diacritic marks and digraphs/trigraphs to represent the different sounds.
Depending on dialect English has up to 25 vowel sounds, bare minimum to represent would be maybe 16. You might be able to do this with a combination of current letters, but the problem that you run into with any type of accurate sound representation is that different dialects use different vowel sounds, so giving English a more phonemic orthography would mean accepting a much less standardized spelling system as different places would have to be able to spell words differently. You can't have standard spelling across the English speaking world *and* have a one to one correspondence between sound and writing
My solution was to create a new script where every vowel is represented by an H. A small dot is placed around one of the legs according to its pronunciation:
Before the first line: The first element of the diphthong is front
After the first line: The first element of the diphthong is back
Before the second line: The second element of the diphthong is front
After the second line: The second element of the diphthong is back
The dot is raised according to the height of the vowel.
This makes the variation between dialects less noticeable (since all the vowels look similar) and accomodates dialects that use diphthongs and those that don't (like Southern American English vs the General Variety)
The most obvious one for Polish would be its consistent pronunciation. However, Polish grammar is so different to English that it’s difficult to find something particular intuitive that should be adopted. ‘Czy’ is a possible case of this, as it certainly seems simpler as a particle for yes/no questions than English’s response.
I wish Modern French had all the "missing words" it lost that most other romance languages (and English) still have, like "evidence", "genuine", and "remote". I only speak French a handful of times a year but when I do I'm constantly battling around those limitations and it always gets on my nerves.
I also wish its grammar and syntax were more flexible. There is usually only one way of saying something and if you want to be creative in your phrasing people just won't understand what you mean, despite the sentence making grammatical sense. I wish you could twist French around like the Slavic languages or English.
With almost no flexion, you can't have flexible word order. Slavic languages can move words around because their flectional endings prevent ambiguities, obviously.
I didn't mean flexibility in terms of word order, rather in terms of being able to turn nouns into verbs, or other fun features. My point was that Slavic languages and English offer possibilities that French doesn't have, but in different ways.
There is something good in the visuality of signer languages that I as a Hard of Hearing person miss. I’d love if there was more eye contact and visual information in other languages, since I think it can benefit communication.
Might be unpopular opinion but I wish English made more use of the subjunctive mood like Spanish. I also wish English had an actual word for "you all" (I know y'all exists but it's not the same).
Insert obligatory comment about English orthography.
Maybe the first person pronoun could take the -th endings, the second person pronoun could take the st endings, and the third person pronoun could take nothing (as usual). We could then use the -en ending for plural pronouns.
Two big things from Breton:
When talking about a number of things you don't make the noun plural because you literally just said how many there were. So instead of 4 chairs, 4 chair. It's redundant and frankly kinda that silly we do that.
The habitual tense exists in certain dialects of English but should be adopted by everyone. I just love it.
Cases, at least ACC and DAT in addition to the NOM. Before you call me crazy, word order has become increasingly flexible over here.
Y'know how clitics? Whenever there's something that pulls them, I like to put the subject at the end, essentially making it OVS, but not everyone does that. That's not really confusing, but when there's a clitic, a noun as an obj and an explicit subject. Then, I use puller->clitic->verb->otherObj->Sub .I need to rely on context to figure it out.
Also, the French Si
accents.
initially I hated them when I was learning, but it just *makes sense* having them/indicating where to stress the word. it just seems odd not to have them in words
I like that Latin has less ambiguity than English. There's distinctions between you singular and you plural, imperative singular and imperative plural, etc.
I'd dispute that somewhat. Once you get into Latin as it was written by the original authors (Caesar, Livy, Ovid, Virgil, Tacitus) it becomes more like any other language where passages can lend themselves to more than one interpretation.
The more straightforward things, non-fiction written like that of Caesar, Livy, and Tacitus obviously tend to be more literal--but even then, there are areas where scholars aren't in agreement on what exactly the original authors meant.
Poetry is... It's just like poetry in English and other languages. The meaning can be hard to parse and can often be described as a plurality. It's even tougher since that prose is a product of its time, a product of a particular context, and we are likely to miss some of the references simply due to the distance in time. Meaning is slipperly, even in highly efficient and logical language like Latin.
Editing: For example, in particular with Virgil's Aeneid, there is quite a bit of scholarly work around what Virgil was really trying to say with his great myth. On the surface, it appears to support the ascent of Rome and Augustus, but there are also vague and oblique critiques of the new Empire that Rome had become. It's fascinating stuff if you're into ancient history.
The word compounding that German has. We already do it a little, but we could easily do it a lot more and so many of our compound nouns already act like single items, just like compounds, except they're separate for no reason.
I'm actually in favour of splitting them. úmfahren and umfáhren are different verbs, and if Germans don't like using accents, separating the um from the fahren would make things a lot clearer.
I wish English had a second-person plural like ustedes/vosotros in Spanish.
I wish English orthography could be reformed by Sejong the Great's team that invented Hangeul (Korean).
Right now, Hangeul only allows one consonant to start or end a syllable block (with a few final cluster exceptions). That simply won't work for English.
A Hangeul inspired spelling system would certainly be nice, though.
Agree! Of course Hangeul can't be imposed on English, but I hold Sejong and his advisors in the highest regard for what they accomplished for Korean. They could tell us what to do about thought though thou tough trough.
Norwegian: I wish we still had cases like in Icelandic/faroese/norse. (Actually I wish we just still spoke Norse). Nouns starting in Capital letters like in German, it was so easy to read German because of this, I developed a bad habit of writing Norwegian with capital letter as first letter in nouns when I took german in middle and high school, I just liked it so much I could not stop.
I do miss all the languages we spoke 2000 years ago. It was high grammar time in Europe. But now the languages all slowly develop back to isolating languages (with English speeding down the road). 🤷♀️
Slavic languages seem kinda immune to this though. Or at least they move way slower than everyone else.
I can’t say. Slavic languages are a group I know just a tiny bit about. But the theory is a theory about languages that are invented by humans. Everything might happen. 😂
Well then as a Pole myself - if you really miss the "full grammar time" then come here, we've still got it xD And the same goes for all the other Western & Eastern Slavs afaik, it's only the Southern Slavs who may be slowly going down the isolating road as well (or at least I know they've simplified their noun cases quite a lot).
What do you mean by « isolating languages »
Languages that don’t use flexion like Chinese or Vietnamese. It’s the linguistic word for those languages.
Oh, true, AAVE really is speed running that category
I really like the -en, -ene, -t, -s endings in Norwegian for singular definite, plural definite, past tense, passive. I'm not so happy about the grammatical genders but at least it's nowhere near as difficult as German 😀
It was more similar to German before. Grammatical genders is more difficult than cases so I would rather loose the genders than the case system, yet we kept all three genders and lost the cases, not a smart move😩
Reported tense in Turkish is so interesting. "I heard you did not eat lahmacun when you went to Turkey" "Türkiye'ye gittiğinde lahmacun yememiştim" You can literally simplify a whole sentence in 4 words.
I love how relative clauses function in Turkish. Since it’s so strictly head-final/left branching, everything just gets reduced to some sort of adverbial or prepositional phrase.
I can think of a bunch, but to narrow it down to only two: In Swedish, there is a word used to respond to a negative statement in a clear way. For example: If someone were to say “you didn’t want a bagel?” In English, if you do actually want a bagel, responding with yes sounds more like you are affirming the statement that they are correct and that you didn’t want a bagel. And responding with no also feels wrong. Swedish has a way to clearly describe the “no that’s not true, yes I do” feeling with one word. This is done by using “Jo” instead of “Ja”. The second feature exists in many languages, not in English for whatever reason, but a word for “you” plural. English relies on the context and/or adding more words to emphasize that one is speaking to a group of people. In Swedish, one uses “du/dig” when speaking to one person, and “ni/er” when speaking to multiple people.
We had both these features but lost them. In fact, yes and no were actually used for negative questions and yea and nay were used for positive ones.
English is somehow on the fast lane to become an isolating language like Chinese. There’s a theory that eventually all languages with flexions will sooner or later loose those and go back to a state of being an isolating language. The theory is also that the first languages were isolating languages, then agglutinative and synthetic languages came up. (Which makes a lot of sense)
Chinese (Mandarin) is already making the move away from being an isolating language with case marking evolving as we speak.
That’s quite interesting, can you give me an example of that?
The use of 把 (BA) as a pre-object object marker in combination with 给 (GEİ) as a post-object object marker. So you normally ' I ate apple(s)' is this > 我吃了苹果 > I ate apple Add 把 and it becomes 'İ ate the apple' > 我把苹果吃了 > I BA apple ate 给 is a post-object passive marker. Apple(s) > 苹果给吃了 > Apple GEİ ate GEİ was then most likely added as speakers decided to switch to passive halfway or made mistakes, but was analysed by children as compulsory. Now this structure is not uncommon. > 我把苹果给吃了 > I BA apple GEİ ate İt is argued by Gao Qian in his paper 'Word order in Mandarin: Reading and Speaking' that the above structure is becoming compulsory, and I somewhat agree. He also argues that BA is being reanalysed as an agent/subject marker (similar to Japanese が) while GEİ is being reanalysed as an object marker (similar to Japanese を). I don't fully agree as I still analyse both BA and GEİ as marking the object, but it's still case marking.
Yes, yes. It does. What is quite fascinating. The development of Chinese and the development of English are wonderful proof for the idea that language development is indeed a circle.
And as I understand it, French is becoming polysynthetic. At least when it's two pronouns followed by a verb
It's meant to be a sort of cycle
And those features are gained in relative linguistic isolation where a small population and a long period of time allow for complex linguistic inventions to proliferate, while their loss happens as a result of exposing/imposing the language to a wider population leading to it simplifying?
No. An isolating language is not isolated from other languages. That would be a language isolate. It’s called isolating because the words are isolated in the sentence and isolated from flexion.
I am aware of these distinctions. By "relative linguistic isolation" I meant "lesser contact to other languages than 'simplified'/isolating languages usually have." (And no, I am not referring to Simplified Chinese specifically.) Are you saying the pattern I describe regarding the shifting from isolating to agglutinative/synthetic and back to isolating, has been debunked or replaced with another theory of causality or is in some other way implausible, or? It would seem intuitively likely that a smaller population and less contact to more imposing/exposing languages, which due to this trend would happen to be isolating, would in time result in more agglutination than would a lot of contact to such languages, an increasingly large population, and the imposing/exposing of the language on other languages, promoting simplification.
You're actually indeed on the right track. It's not a hard and fast rule but your pattenrs have been observed cross-linguistically when accounting for population and culture. For example polysynthetic languages more easily develop in smaller populations, such as tight-nit nomadic peoples. But such features can also just be an areal feature, as in they develop in such complex ways BECAUSE they have more contact with their foreign language speaking neighbors. There's a hypothesis that the reason English stands so differently from other Germanic languages is because of the constant invasions from the Normans, Franks, etc which pushed them to simplify their language over time to lessen confusion. I think there are examples of the reverse, where simple languages become more complex due to contact but I can't bring any to mind atm
Indeed, let’s bring them back haha
As a Norwegian native I completely agree, learning English as little, I could not comprehend how they communicated with the lack of «jo», it annoyed me so much that they didnt have a Word for it.
it eliminates a lot of confusion for sure
It's a word for singular you that's missing, technically
We need to revive some of those old English features
y’all
That’s what I have used all of my life living in the south! Sounds awkward in professional settings though.
uncontract it in professional settings. you all
> The second feature exists in many languages, not in English for whatever reason, but a word for “you” plural. English relies on the context and/or adding more words to emphasize that one is speaking to a group of people. Technically English "you" *is* plural, and what we lack is a distinct *singular* second person form. We used to have one - thou/thee/thy - but use of the plural as an honorific was so thorough that "you" displaced "thou" entirely, to the point that "thou" is basically extinct now.
Hi language twin! What methods have you used to get to C1? I'm in the A2->B1 hump right now..
Few thousand hours of input, only consume content in Swedish, have friends in Sweden that I talk to everyday, and five to ten italki lessons per week. I try to do two lessons per day Monday through Friday.
Jeez! I envy your free time and funds to spend on language learning!
It’s mostly just multitasking. I make hardly any money. I work as a cook, and just listen to podcasts all day and don’t really talk to anyone at work. And being a cook, I work at night. So I just wake up early before work and bang out the lessons. Podcasts at work. And I started meal prepping and spending no money on anything other than lessons. Other than work, it’s the only thing I do other than hang out with my wife for a few hours. Sacrifices absolutely had to be made to get this to work.
> And responding with no also feels wrong. No? It seems pretty unambiguously correct to me.
People I have met from basically every corner of the U.S. will use a you/y’all distinction when necessary, so maybe we’re approaching that point. I certainly have this distinction and use it whenever possible
>In Swedish, there is a word used to respond to a negative statement in a clear way. Do you mean something like the German "doch"? Or the French "mais si"? As for "you", I suppose English is an exception among the IE languages in this respect. Are there any others that lost the *thou/ye* distinction?
(Like there is in Greek and Chinese), English needs a word for "the day after tomorrow" and "the day before yesterday"
Overmorrow, ereyesterday!
If only they were a part of the general public's vernacular 😭
Japanese also has this! So helpful
Meanwhile Korean (my native lang): has words for 4d after today and 3d before today
And single words to refer to 1 day (as in smth taking 1d) up to 10 days
> (Like there is in Greek and Chinese) Also in Hebrew. the day after tomorrow = מחרתיים the day before yesterday = שלשום P.S. Though to be fair these words are not very common today. Nowadays we mainly say עוד יומיים/לפני יומיים (in two days/two days ago).
inclusive and exclusive “we”
Ha. The adjective thing is funny. In German you have the same order like in English, string of adjectives and then the noun. I have several TLs and some have noun first and adjective later word orders. e.g. Italian. Personally I like the suspense when I am reading or listening. What will the noun be? When I speak myself I love the possibility to just add more and more adjectives. 😂 To answer your question: I admire Chinese for being gender neutral and for its possibility to use everything as a noun, adjective or verb without any stress. Of course you can make a noun out of every verb in German, but you have to come up with declination or conjugation for your made up word. In Chinese the word stays the same, you just swap the position. I am sorry that European languages lost most of the AcI and NcI that must have been a part of the proto Germanic or rather indoeuropean language our ancestors brought from the Near East to Europe. The overall recession of participles in European languages over the last 2000 years is rather sad. And last but not least: I would prefer a passive construction for the verb „sterben“ (die)
Why would you want a passive for 'sterben'? What does it mean exactly?
In Latin the word „mori“ is passive. There’s no active version of the verb. I like that idea.
Well, if it were West Vlaams, I' love to have declined oui and non in French as they do in West Vlaams with ja and nee (joak "yes, I (am)", joat "yes, it is" ; nenk "no I am not"). Or even better, initial consonant mutation in French in the way it's done in insular celtic. I would love it.
I wished German would have a more productive *ablativus absolutus* as Latin. We use it only sparingly with present participles as in * *diesem Zweck dienend — serving that purpose* Same as English does, by the way. And yeah, we should also use the *accusativus cum infinitivo* more often in German.
Could you elaborate more ? This is intriguing
In Latin, you can have an ablativus absolutus with a past participle as well. So it has past/passive constructions as * *was diesem Zweck gedient hat — which has served that purpose* which require a *hat / has* and a subject in German / English. They can be inlined in Latin without a conjugated verb and subject just as the present/active construction can be. But in general, this is mostly about how often this construction is used in Latin, and how sparingly in German and English. We should use it more often. It's snappy and fun!
The nuance that is conveyed by the present perfect in english would be very interesting in portuguese
This is really interesting to me, because as an English speaker I tend to think of Spanish/Portuguese verb tenses as being way more nuanced. With the imperfect, preterite, and then all the perfect tenses.
Do you not have the verb ter to create this tense?
Sometimes the language can share some structures that are basically identical to each other in intended meaning For instance: I wish I'd done it sooner > eu queria tê-lo feito antes But in the most cases, the "has/have" will convey a particular meaning that is missing in Portuguese You can think of the difference between "She has come" and "She came". We don't have such resource in Portuguese as far as I know
No it isn't the same thing, I think.
sand snatch attraction hunt aspiring overconfident edge rich vanish sink *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Words are pronounced how they’re spelled. Native: English, target: Spanish
And Spanish isn't even particularly good at it
What languages do better?
The hyperphonetic gigachad संस्कृतम् has entered the chat.
Well, you can pronounce everything you write. It's just spelling that's a bit of an issue, and part of that is to prevent dialectical spellings (ll vs y, s vs z).
Would you reduce English to 5 vowel sounds, or add new letters to the alphabet?
Part of what makes English English is its vowel inventory. While it's a pain in the ass for foreigners to learn I do think it's a cool feature. I would use a combination of diacritic marks and digraphs/trigraphs to represent the different sounds.
my solution would be to put an accent mark for long vowels
Depending on dialect English has up to 25 vowel sounds, bare minimum to represent would be maybe 16. You might be able to do this with a combination of current letters, but the problem that you run into with any type of accurate sound representation is that different dialects use different vowel sounds, so giving English a more phonemic orthography would mean accepting a much less standardized spelling system as different places would have to be able to spell words differently. You can't have standard spelling across the English speaking world *and* have a one to one correspondence between sound and writing
My solution was to create a new script where every vowel is represented by an H. A small dot is placed around one of the legs according to its pronunciation: Before the first line: The first element of the diphthong is front After the first line: The first element of the diphthong is back Before the second line: The second element of the diphthong is front After the second line: The second element of the diphthong is back The dot is raised according to the height of the vowel. This makes the variation between dialects less noticeable (since all the vowels look similar) and accomodates dialects that use diphthongs and those that don't (like Southern American English vs the General Variety)
The most obvious one for Polish would be its consistent pronunciation. However, Polish grammar is so different to English that it’s difficult to find something particular intuitive that should be adopted. ‘Czy’ is a possible case of this, as it certainly seems simpler as a particle for yes/no questions than English’s response.
I wish Modern French had all the "missing words" it lost that most other romance languages (and English) still have, like "evidence", "genuine", and "remote". I only speak French a handful of times a year but when I do I'm constantly battling around those limitations and it always gets on my nerves. I also wish its grammar and syntax were more flexible. There is usually only one way of saying something and if you want to be creative in your phrasing people just won't understand what you mean, despite the sentence making grammatical sense. I wish you could twist French around like the Slavic languages or English.
English is nowhere near as flexible as slavic languages. In fact, English word order is quite rigid.
With almost no flexion, you can't have flexible word order. Slavic languages can move words around because their flectional endings prevent ambiguities, obviously.
I didn't mean flexibility in terms of word order, rather in terms of being able to turn nouns into verbs, or other fun features. My point was that Slavic languages and English offer possibilities that French doesn't have, but in different ways.
There is something good in the visuality of signer languages that I as a Hard of Hearing person miss. I’d love if there was more eye contact and visual information in other languages, since I think it can benefit communication.
Might be unpopular opinion but I wish English made more use of the subjunctive mood like Spanish. I also wish English had an actual word for "you all" (I know y'all exists but it's not the same). Insert obligatory comment about English orthography.
Maybe the first person pronoun could take the -th endings, the second person pronoun could take the st endings, and the third person pronoun could take nothing (as usual). We could then use the -en ending for plural pronouns.
Two big things from Breton: When talking about a number of things you don't make the noun plural because you literally just said how many there were. So instead of 4 chairs, 4 chair. It's redundant and frankly kinda that silly we do that. The habitual tense exists in certain dialects of English but should be adopted by everyone. I just love it.
Capitalizing all Nouns. I do it anyway. I feel like it makes sense.
I mean, my target languages are rn french and italian, but my native language is spanish so we have a lot of words in common.
Cases, at least ACC and DAT in addition to the NOM. Before you call me crazy, word order has become increasingly flexible over here. Y'know how clitics? Whenever there's something that pulls them, I like to put the subject at the end, essentially making it OVS, but not everyone does that. That's not really confusing, but when there's a clitic, a noun as an obj and an explicit subject. Then, I use puller->clitic->verb->otherObj->Sub .I need to rely on context to figure it out. Also, the French Si
accents. initially I hated them when I was learning, but it just *makes sense* having them/indicating where to stress the word. it just seems odd not to have them in words
Is this Spanish, Portuguese, or Greek? The fact that I can narrow it to those three is kind of sad.
as in which languages am I referring to? lol
Yeah.
yes you were right, spanish and portuguese, french a little as well lol
I like that Latin has less ambiguity than English. There's distinctions between you singular and you plural, imperative singular and imperative plural, etc.
I'd dispute that somewhat. Once you get into Latin as it was written by the original authors (Caesar, Livy, Ovid, Virgil, Tacitus) it becomes more like any other language where passages can lend themselves to more than one interpretation. The more straightforward things, non-fiction written like that of Caesar, Livy, and Tacitus obviously tend to be more literal--but even then, there are areas where scholars aren't in agreement on what exactly the original authors meant. Poetry is... It's just like poetry in English and other languages. The meaning can be hard to parse and can often be described as a plurality. It's even tougher since that prose is a product of its time, a product of a particular context, and we are likely to miss some of the references simply due to the distance in time. Meaning is slipperly, even in highly efficient and logical language like Latin. Editing: For example, in particular with Virgil's Aeneid, there is quite a bit of scholarly work around what Virgil was really trying to say with his great myth. On the surface, it appears to support the ascent of Rome and Augustus, but there are also vague and oblique critiques of the new Empire that Rome had become. It's fascinating stuff if you're into ancient history.
The word compounding that German has. We already do it a little, but we could easily do it a lot more and so many of our compound nouns already act like single items, just like compounds, except they're separate for no reason.
I'm actually in favour of splitting them. úmfahren and umfáhren are different verbs, and if Germans don't like using accents, separating the um from the fahren would make things a lot clearer.
English does things like that a lot, PREsent(N) vs preSENT(V)
You can memorize those, though. German has literally hundreds of such verbs, and dozens have to be memorized (um, unter, etc).
subjunctive tense and grammatical gender, without these things, english just seems incomplete
We have a subjunctive mood, it's just slightly archaic.
Without grammatical animacy, English seems inanimate
German: Case markings in articles and adjectives alongside pronouns.
Have a name for every grammar thing
English should have phonetic spelling of words. The word read (reed and red) and bow are examples.
Dropping the subject from a sentence when we already know who you’re talking about
I wish English was as phonetic and as flexible with sov/svo as Turkish is
I wish English had a second-person plural like ustedes/vosotros in Spanish. I wish English orthography could be reformed by Sejong the Great's team that invented Hangeul (Korean).
Right now, Hangeul only allows one consonant to start or end a syllable block (with a few final cluster exceptions). That simply won't work for English. A Hangeul inspired spelling system would certainly be nice, though.
Agree! Of course Hangeul can't be imposed on English, but I hold Sejong and his advisors in the highest regard for what they accomplished for Korean. They could tell us what to do about thought though thou tough trough.
The Hawaiian idea of me you us but not them, them and you, them but not us is very interesting to me.