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Features of the TL that you can’t stand | ||
Tags: "Louche" Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7157 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes  20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 17 of 63 06 May 2014 at 9:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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What do you mean? That is a perfectly cromulent descriptor! :-P
5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5229 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 18 of 63 06 May 2014 at 9:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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Way to embiggen the level of discourse!
3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Hampie Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6660 days ago 625 posts - 1009 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Latin, German, Mandarin | Message 19 of 63 06 May 2014 at 9:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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I always feel very disappointed when morphological features of a language I'm learning are dying or obsolete.
German once had some really cool dative markers on certain masculine or neuter nouns (-e), which nowadays are only still left in the frozen word for home, "zu Hause". The strong words all had morphological subjunctives that are increasingly replaced with würde constructions. What is wrong with bük? And how do I mourn that the case system broke in Akkadian during the later old babylonian period! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 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 20 of 63 06 May 2014 at 9:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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In principle we have a polite adressing form in Danish, namely "De" ... and we have more or less dropped it because we collectively didn't like it.
In English I would like to have a smarter way to refer to males and females with just one word, but apparently this hasn't bothered the Anglophones (or the even more numerous second language speakers) so much that they have done something about it. And there are other cases where I find it irritating to need to express myself in a clumsy way, but typically this is not a question of more words or inflections contra less forms and inflections. For instance Indonesian hasn't got tempus marked in their verbs, and unless you count repetition as a kind of inflection they haven't got numerus anywhere in their language. But by and large you always be told whether there are more than one of something if you need to know it - and in that case you will be told the number specified as tails or fruits or persons or something else. And there are adverbs to specify temporal sequences, so you don't feel it as as hole in the language that it doesn't have inflections that indicate time or number. On the other hand you can't say that language with a lot of obligatory distinctions are impossible to use - they may force you to be specific about things you really don't care about, but somehow you adapt to the systems, and then it becomes second nature to be aware of things like direction, number, aspect and gender. If you want to speak Russian then you can't NOT care about aspect or ways of moving around, but it becomes second nature to be aware of those things, and I guess that Russians find it strange that you can talk about movement without specifying whether you are walking or riding or driving a car or going somewhere particular or just moving around in the landscape for fun. And part of the fun in learning languages is to learn mindsets where something you thought was absolutely irrelevant suddenly becomes necessary, or where something you thought everybody needed turns out to be an information you may chose to give or not. Edited by Iversen on 06 May 2014 at 10:28pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5229 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 21 of 63 06 May 2014 at 9:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've said it before and I'll say it again. Goddamn Babylonians.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Stolan Senior Member United States Joined 4033 days ago 274 posts - 368 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese | Message 22 of 63 06 May 2014 at 10:02pm | IP Logged | ||
Or as I said in the previous post, languages that have a near absence of having to mark anything where context is 90% of the conversation. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4254 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 23 of 63 06 May 2014 at 10:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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In principle, languages go on a sine-wave between periods of high and low redundancy, regularity and irregularity, neat and tidy paradigms and so on and so forth. It's a never ending loop between "this stuff makes sense but it's too bothersome to say" and "we've got way too many paradigms let's merge a few". Icelandic for example is entering a stage of regularization more or less, my teacher of Icelandic told us that newscasters have to have the paradigms for the irregular nouns "brother", "sister" etc. with a magnet on their fridge doors so that they remember how they're conjugated :D
Finnish is going to the opposite direction, merging syllables, word final "n" is vanishing (as it can in almost any case be substituted with a glottal stop) and thus going the way led by our language-neighbor Estonian :) English seems to be going the way of regularizing or losing paradigms; the nominative pronouns are vanishing, as happened with "you" and in the future it will be likely that only me, you, him, her, us and them will prevail. This is witnessed by totally idiomatical sentences like I saw on the internet the other day; "Us Americans are..." where the subject + predicate is "us are" instead of the traditional "we are" and this doesn't seem one bit odd to most people who use the language. Needless to say, the languages that are currently on the top of the irregularity/redundancy/whatever-wave are the highest mountains to climb for a learner. And I like it that way. But sometimes it irks me, and that's fine too. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5229 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 24 of 63 06 May 2014 at 10:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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A balanced language is one that doesn't include more information than necessary?
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