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Language features you wanted in your.... | ||
Tags: Grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| QiuJP Triglot Senior Member Singapore Joined 5857 days ago 428 posts - 597 votes  Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Czech, GermanB1, Russian, Japanese | Message 1 of 52 12 January 2010 at 6:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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language?
I am sure that many of us here, especially learners who have learned more than 2 or 3 foreign languages, have thought of some constuctions that did not exist in any language but maybe fun or scary. Let me share with you one of such feature( or construction) which is in my head for some time. Declension of Han Zi（汉字） It is difficult to explain (especially with jarcons) this concept here. So I am going to illustrate my concept here with the aid of an example: this is the character '大' which means big in Chinese/Japanese and is an adjective this is the Russian word for big: большой As you know, Russian ajectives undergo declension when they are subjected to different gender and cases. What would happen if Han zi undergo the same process? Nominative masculin singular большой '大' (Original character) Nominative feminine singular большая ‘夭’(a slanted stroke on top of the original character gives the Nominative feminine singular) Nominative neuter singular большое '太' (a dot at the bottom of the original character gives the Nominative neuter singular) Nominative plural большие '天' （a flat horizontal stroke on top of the original character gives the Nominative Plural) From here, you can see a declension in the nominative case, and you can image that the system extends to accusative, gentive, dative etc cases and the character changes. There is a major problem here: the female, neuter and plural 'forms' of this character are already nominative singular masculin form of other characters! So there is a need to write execption for this character. I have presented my crazy feature of declension of Han Zi here. Feel free to comment on my idea here, or you can post your own language feature in this thread! Edited by QiuJP on 06 April 2010 at 9:05am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| minus273 Triglot Senior Member France Joined 5767 days ago 288 posts - 346 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Ancient Greek, Tibetan | Message 2 of 52 12 January 2010 at 7:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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Vide the Tangut conjugation for an irregular system relating two stems of Tangut verbs.
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| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6584 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 3 of 52 12 January 2010 at 7:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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Okay, I'm game.
I'd love to see a language where the grammatical function of a word is expressed through tone. So, giving the high tone the number '1' and low tone the number '2', '1' would mark the subject and '2' the object. Thus "I1 love you2" would mean the same as "You2 love I1". Probably, one tone per grammatical function would be difficult, but I'm sure a systematic method could be developed. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 52 12 January 2010 at 11:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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I once saw a list of some Chomskyan universals, and they looked fairly contrived. The reality is that there are so many extremely weird grammars in the world that it probably just is accident al if a certain features isn't fopund in any living language. Or maybe the last speaker just didn't speak to a linguist yet. The world is just a thoroughly weird place, and it is difficult to imagine a feature that couldn't possibly exist in any human language - except maybe through sheer bulk or physiological limitations (sounds above 40.000 Hz, a complicated header lasting 5 hours before any spoken message or things like that)
Edited by Iversen on 13 January 2010 at 2:28pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| John Smith Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6044 days ago 396 posts - 542 votes Speaks: English*, Czech*, Spanish Studies: German | Message 5 of 52 13 January 2010 at 9:52am | IP Logged | ||
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Interesting thread. A language that doesn't involve any sounds that require you to open your mouth. When "talking" with someone you would keep your mouth closed the entire time.
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| Captain Haddock Diglot Senior Member Japan kanjicabinet.tumblr. Joined 6770 days ago 2282 posts - 2814 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: French, Korean, Ancient Greek | Message 6 of 52 13 January 2010 at 1:36pm | IP Logged | ||
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English has at least one word that is pronounced without opening your mouth: "Mm-hm"
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| Gusutafu Senior Member Sweden Joined 5523 days ago 655 posts - 1039 votes Speaks: Swedish* | Message 7 of 52 13 January 2010 at 2:00pm | IP Logged | ||
Actually, lexical tone does exist. I happened to read about it when looking up Swahili, which is one of the few Bantu languages without it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tone_%28linguistics%29 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| parasitius Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6000 days ago 220 posts - 323 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Cantonese, Polish, Spanish, French | Message 8 of 52 14 January 2010 at 12:49am | IP Logged | ||
Personally I'd just like to see a big publisher (any language is fine, but I guess English so I could 'experience it' myself) publish a 'coloured' edition of several of its top titles. An editor would go through by hand and make words with a different color according to their role: noun, proper noun, verb, adjective. I think after one read a few books like that he wouldn't want to go back because it would make processing the data quickly and comfortably that much more enjoyable. I think it's something we missed when we went from having technology only to practically print in black and white to color being a trivial request with the advent of computer typesetting and color laser printers and such. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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