Features of the TL that you can’t stand (General discussion) Language Learning Forum

Features of the TL that you can’t stand
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63 messages over 8 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 Next >>

Henkkles
Triglot
Senior Member
Finland
Joined 4251 days ago
544 posts - 1141 votes

Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish
Studies: Russian

Message 41 of 63

07 May 2014 at 7:47am | IP Logged

Stolan wrote:

To add to that supposedly if modern Icelandic speakers have to be reminded on how to decline certain words, why
didn't their ancestors have that trouble? I still feel confused as to why they maintained that unless prescriptivism
supposedly kept the language the way it was for centuries from proto Germanic, if they didn't, what changed for
modern native speakers?

When there are multiple paradigms, they tend to merge. The Icelandic language is merging the remains of an old paradigm and newscasters have to fight back it to use the standard language. This doesn't imply any difficulty, languages change with or without reason or rhyme.

Did English speakers have any trouble saying "throve" for the past tense of "thrive" because it's perfectly regular and has the same conjugation as "drive"? I'd still bet most people today would use "thrived", and this is due to a paradigm-merger. First the paradigms of a small set of (strong, for example) verbs merge at the peripheries (words like thrive that not everyone needs every day) and then it starts spreading inwards. I believe this has happened in Afrikaans, where the only strong verb remaining is the copula.

My point is, that to imply language change to be triggered or even motivated by difficulty it causes to native speakers (or sudden newfound difficulty) is not a very reasonable criterion to demand. Languages change just for the heck of it.
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eyðimörk
Triglot
Senior Member
France
goo.gl/aT4FY7
Joined 4097 days ago
490 posts - 1158 votes

Speaks: Swedish*, English, French
Studies: Breton, Italian

Message 42 of 63

07 May 2014 at 10:22am | IP Logged

There are no features of any of my target languages that I can't stand. I'm not sure there are even any that I strongly dislike. So far/as of lately I've just been able to accept the languages for what they are. I realise that makes me the odd one out sometimes. I think it's a funny "aside", for example, that frequently when you see a circumflex in French it's etymological — there used to be a silent S after that vowel (which had already started to become silent 1000 years ago), an S that may still be there in related words (e.g. bête - bestial). But when I tell other people that, they groan about what an idiotic language French clearly is. [ ETA: Of course, people like to complain to me about French in general. As an immigrant I guess I'm supposed to agree and we can all feel a connection of sorts? ]

Does it count that I'm a little annoyed when people make up their own inconsistent orthography for Breton (because the half-dozen already in use, they feel, aren't spelled phonetically in accordance with their own micro-dialect) and insist on using only that spelling, even in discussions with people who speak other dialects even if it means putting an explanatory parenthesis every few words? Or is that more of a feature of (certain) speakers than the language itself?

Edited by eyðimörk on 07 May 2014 at 10:25am
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Stolan
Senior Member
United States
Joined 4030 days ago
274 posts - 368 votes

Speaks: English*
Studies: Thai, Lowland Scots
Studies: Arabic (classical), Cantonese

Message 43 of 63

07 May 2014 at 3:54pm | IP Logged

Henkkles wrote:

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.

This phenomena seems mostly isolated to Europe and areas close to it. Native American languages and Asian
languages may change occasionally one bit at a time, but nothing ever comes close to the utter confusion and
sheer messiness that has occurred in the European continent. Most are content to just move along,
Proto Tai and Proto Algonquin are nowhere near as radically different as Proto Indo European was from its
descendants. Languages such as Finnish and Estonian were heavily influenced by Indo European languages to add,
but while Estonian is irregular in a way, it is nowhere near the conservative Indo European languages are in
overflowing irregularity. The Indo European irregularities did not originate the same way Estonian's did.

The really strange thing about Indo European is this:
The irregularity/complexity did not result just from pronunciation shifts, but from the fact that tenses, participles,
adjective comparative forms, etc originated as separate lexical words that were pushed together overnight. It would
take paragraphs to explain, but to me, it's as if a hurricane went through a scrapyard and put together the most
fantastic vehicle one could image (as in fantasy, not a good thing); some sort of flying submarine spaceship tank
with too many guns to properly stand, as if a 5 year old designed a fictional language with far too many features.
Except this vehicle was actually real...

Edited by Stolan on 07 May 2014 at 5:18pm
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Medulin
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Croatia
Joined 4666 days ago
1199 posts - 2192 votes

Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese
Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali

Message 44 of 63

07 May 2014 at 8:24pm | IP Logged

Hampie wrote:

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"

In some varieties of German, ''daheim'' is preferred to ''zu Hause'' ;)
''Ich bin daheim''.

Swedish had a female gender, just like modern Nynorsk and radical Bokmaal,
yet Swedish and Dano-Norwegian lack it altogether. Should(n't) we be crying over it?

ei bok - boka - boker - bokene (f)
en gut - guten - gutar - gutane (m)

Swedish still cannot decide where to put ''imported'' male nouns into,
into the old masculine pattern (-ar) or the old feminine/new utrum pattern (-er),
that's why one can see spellings like Smurfarna and Smurferna all at random.

Edited by Medulin on 07 May 2014 at 8:33pm
1 person has voted this message useful

Medulin
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Croatia
Joined 4666 days ago
1199 posts - 2192 votes

Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese
Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali

Message 45 of 63

07 May 2014 at 8:40pm | IP Logged

Serpent wrote:

Henkkles wrote:

Stolan wrote:

Henkkles wrote:

In principle, languages ....

The average person with no knowledge of linguistics would probably believe all languages were equally complex in
the past but some devolve into more simplicity as time goes on, but alas, that is not the case.

An average person with no knowledge would probably have no clue that languages evolve at all, let alone that there are many typological classifications for different sorts of languages :p

An average person with no knowledge of linguistics thinks their native language is one of the hardest in the world, no matter which one it is.

Not really. I think Croatian is the easiest language on Earth.
That's why we didn't learn Croatian grammar at school at all,
we had only literature classes (20% Croatian literature, 80% world/international literature),
we had to read one classic a week, and discuss it, right essays on it etc.

It's always weird to read on forums that in other countries
pupils are explicitly taught grammar of their own language.

2 persons have voted this message useful

Medulin
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Croatia
Joined 4666 days ago
1199 posts - 2192 votes

Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese
Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali

Message 46 of 63

07 May 2014 at 8:45pm | IP Logged

Stolan wrote:

There's Cambodian, it has no tone, otherwise, it's pretty much the same as all the other languages in that area.
.

Cambodian has no tone, but it does sound tonal.
I've been trying to get some information on supra-segmental phonetics of Cambodian,
and apparently Cambodian of P.Penh is becoming tonal:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khmer_language#Suprasegmental_f eatures

Edited by Medulin on 07 May 2014 at 8:45pm
1 person has voted this message useful

Doitsujin
Diglot
Senior Member
Germany
Joined 5318 days ago
1256 posts - 2363 votes

Speaks: German*, English

Message 47 of 63

07 May 2014 at 9:03pm | IP Logged

Medulin wrote:

In some varieties of German, ''daheim'' is preferred to ''zu Hause'' ;)
''Ich bin daheim''.

And what varieties of German would that be?
1 person has voted this message useful

Henkkles
Triglot
Senior Member
Finland
Joined 4251 days ago
544 posts - 1141 votes

Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish
Studies: Russian

Message 48 of 63

07 May 2014 at 9:09pm | IP Logged

Medulin wrote:

It's always weird to read on forums that in other countries
pupils are explicitly taught grammar of their own language.

Finnish class was learning to read and write for the first three years, the next six years were conjugation and syntax almost exclusively with some culture and other stuff mixed in. We never for example took a look at languages related to Finnish.

In elementary school we had an exam in Finnish noun declension (remember all cases with according names) and I think I scored like half or below.

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