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Agglutinative languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| Legend Newbie Australia Joined 5529 days ago 38 posts - 41 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 9 of 27 05 September 2014 at 7:37am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Thank you very much, people. I really appreciate the time that went into your answers.
This question actually comes from a general interest in language and to a lesser extent a distant desire to learn Korean, which is why it's kinda general.
I do have an interest in syntax and morphology and so on, but that's less out of a desire to learn fluency in languages and more just a sweeping interest in language.
This is absolutely fascinating and I wasn't aware of it before reading. I remember reading some of the ways Turkish sentences can get completely out of hand and thinking that kind of agglutination must be a nightmare to grasp, so it's interesting to hear in the case of Hungarian that in fact the agglutination at least ain't so bad. Thank you very much. Your entire post was fantastic.
This is a wonderful help and a great example. Thank you. Can I ask, as a Finnish speaker how did you find English to learn? Do you think learning English with a Finnish mothertongue is comparable to learning agglutinative languages like Finnish with an analytical tongue like English?
That was probably the biggest impetus to this thread, actually. Turkish looked really bloody scary!
You pretty much got there on your own in the first part. I was interested in finding out if there was any extra groundwork for learning agglutinative languages because it seems like the biggest leap for an English speaker in terms of the bridging the morphology gap. Edited by Legend on 05 September 2014 at 7:39am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4253 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes  Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian | Message 10 of 27 05 September 2014 at 11:35am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Well syntax wise English and Swedish were kind of annoying for me to learn because of the mandatory order of elements (in Swedish even moreso) that we were made to memorize mnemonics like this: SPOTPA - subjekti, predikaatti, objekti, tapa, paikka, aika (subject, predicate, object, manner, place, time) even though in English the 'time' element can precede all others. An example: John ate ice cream ravenously in his home yesterday. Yesterday John ate ice cream ravenously in his home. basically in Finnish we don't use such rigid structures (although we have well-defined standards') because no matter which order you put the words of the sentence in, it will mean the same for all elements are 'colored' the appropriate color with the case-markers. Let's examine the translation: John söi jäätelöä ahnaasti kotonaan eilen. John ate ice cream-partitive ravenously home-locative-3rd-person-possessive yesterday. I can see this sounding perfectly normal in these forms: John söi eilen ahnaasti jäätelöä kotonaan. John ate yesterday ravenously ice cream in his home. Eilen John söi kotonaan ahnaasti jäätelöä. Yesterday John ate in his home ravenously ice cream. any and all other forms are possible as well but they sound odd unless meant to be poetic. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Legend Newbie Australia Joined 5529 days ago 38 posts - 41 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 11 of 27 05 September 2014 at 11:41am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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That's great. I'll quiz my Swedish friend on his experiences too.
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| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5059 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 12 of 27 06 September 2014 at 12:25am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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In some ways aggultinative languages can be easier. Because the grammatical morphemes retain their form when
agglutinated, such languages tend to have fewer irregular elements than do languages with fusional morphology, and also fewer conjugation/declension types. For example, to put a Latin noun in the accusative case, you modify it in different ways depending on its gender, number, which declension it follows, and whether it's irregular: aqua->aquam, aquae->aquas, puer->puerum, animal->animal. In contrast, in Korean you basically just add 을 (eul). Sort of independently of it being an agglutinative language, but because it came up: it can be tricky when a language uses a different word order. Even with English-like languages such as Dutch and German, I often make errors where I put the verb and its object in the English word order instead of SOV when necessary. However, Korean SOV word order is rather strict, more so than the SOV Germanic languages where it's complicated by the V2 phenomenon. As a result, most Korean sentences end in verb inflections. It seems like every other sentence ends in -yo or -mnida. These markers are ubiquitous and always occur at the end of sentences. It's unlikely that you would mix up the word order and say 'cho ieyo miguksaram' [I am American] for 'cho miguksaram-ieyo' [I American-am] because -ieyo always comes last and sounds weird anywhere else even to my novice Korean ears. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5166 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 13 of 27 06 September 2014 at 4:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Georgian has polypersonal verbs, but it helped to think of them as the direct/indirect
object attachments in Spanish and Portuguese (the latter even has mesoclisis): დამირეკე! Llámame! მი is indirect object, subject marking is zero ვუთხარი = [Eu] Disse-lho ვ is subject, უ is indirect object and direct object marking is zero As for getting used to the syntax, the word order posed more problems than the agglutinative aspect. I have been studying German, Georgian and Estonian, all of the three with an 'unusual' word order, and even if they don't match all the time, they're still much more similar among themselves than compared to English. It was evident that I became used to Estonian syntax much faster thanks to my previous experience with German and Georgian. Both Georgian and Estonian have postpositions, and I learned to get used to them fairly easily, they actually seem quite logical and it is what is fascinating about those languages. I prefer Georgian's system that is simpler and thus seems more logical. Case morphology is simple and you can think of postpositional clitics on their own, not worring about what goes with which case. Also, the actual endings are strikingly different, unlike in Estonian, where you get-l , -st, -t, -st, -le and it becomes a mess. In Georgian, it's -dan for coming from, -'ken for going towards, -shi for inside, -ze for over, -tvis for for, so there's no way to mix them up! I agree with Henkkles that you learn to hear or read the case ending and when the case ending also has a postposition glued to that you immediately think of the word as a "non-term" (not a subject or an object, just an adverbial adjunct of time, manner etc.). You just get used to directing your attention towards the end of the word, but I also do that in languages with high verbal inflection too, for instance. As for compound words, a feature of all three languages again, it helps to become aware of the language's phonology and thus realize when each part of the compound 'ends' and the next one is a new word. German is more consistent about that but in Georgian you can have a clue, too. Not enough experience with Estonian yet. As your vocabulary enlarges, you can spot where each part of the compound ends more easily. Georgian verbal morphology is even more complex than the nominal one in Georgian itself or in Estonian, but it helps when each 'slot' is explained for its role - you have pre-root attachments and post-root attachments, i.e. preffixes and suffixes. You learn which stands for what and when it's zero you assume it's the one with the zero ending and you go towards the end of the form for other info on person, number, tense etc. It becomes automatic with time at least to understand, especially when you do bilingual reading and thus quickly associate that form with the meaning it conveys; producing requires a lot of drilling. To sum it up, word order is the main issue; the postpositions and other clitics become intuitive because that's what they are indeed, they convey a whole idea with smaller particles and you sort of learn that 'idea' as a whole. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| zerothinking Senior Member Australia Joined 6372 days ago 528 posts - 772 votes Speaks: English* | Message 14 of 27 30 September 2014 at 10:34am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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It's not actually that bad. It's nothing spooky. It's not even that different.
It's like words have become stuck on other words. All languages have sounds which cary meaning. That's it. You can think of all the endings as being 'words' in a way. If I say 'As for me, the cup-as-an-object-of-the-action table-on did put.' I'm saying, the topic is me, I. The object is the cup. It was on the table in terms of whatever I did. And what I did was the verb at the end. I put the cup on the table. That's all that's really happening. The endings hold meaning like words. Unlike words, their actual pronunciation can change, but not always in every language. Why is it harder to understand 'on the table' than 'table-on'. The meaning of 'on' just comes after instead of before. Stand back! It's getting crazy in here. In English, when you say 'I' your mind instantly knows that's the subject we are talking about. In Japanese, the same thing, only you say 'ga' afterwards which basically means 'the thing that came before is the subject of this sentence'. If you parse it out like that, it's real easy to understand. Just focus on what the endings, or suffixes or whatever actually mean. Why is that extremely hard to get? Edited by zerothinking on 30 September 2014 at 10:39am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| jtdotto Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5229 days ago 73 posts - 172 votes Speaks: English*, Korean Studies: Spanish, Portuguese, German | Message 15 of 27 08 October 2014 at 6:33am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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From a Korean language learner's experience here...
I used to get hung up on the word order of Korean, probably when I was A2 and creeping into B1. I was bummed that my Japanese American friend could pick up Korean so much faster because his brain already had SOV with suffix particles wired in. But I just kept at it. I liked the color metaphor someone used here. With Korean, when I hear 이/가 it almost is like just seeing a giant primary color. Blue for the subject. Whenever you see blue, you know that's the "doer" of the sentence. When I hear 을/를 it's like yellow, and I know that's has something being done to it. 은/는 has more of a green, in the sense that it's a bit more complex, and is either indicating the speaker is going on about a known topic, or is trying to point and compare something with another something. The great thing is, once you can train yourself to hear these, they really act as guide rails for listening to anything and everything. Even if you're not picking up all the vocab, you're hearing the 이/가s, the 을/를s and you know the verb is coming at the end, so you can at least follow the syntax of the speaker and hopefully make heads or tails of the context. Even Koreans have a saying that you can kind of nod off when listening to somebody talk, as long as you pick up the end, because that's the important stuff. That's where the verb is. There are tons of particles for nouns, the ones above plus 한테/에게/으로/으로/까지/부터/에/에서/조차 etc.. probably somewhere in the hundreds to be honest. A good grammar book will teach them logically and with a thoroughly, but I would say a good 20-25 of them are just absolutely necessary to know to really begin conversing beyond introductions. As far as verbs/adjectives go, there are like some 600 endings you can attach, that range from standard logical connectors to shades of emotion and nuance of expression. Again, there's probably 75-100 that are a must to know, and everything after only helps with expression, but will be less common in speech and more common in literature. I have to say, after 6 years of studying Korean, I no longer feel envy for my Japanese American friend. I can say I've successfully rewired my brain to think with particles and in SOV, to the point that it's almost like breathing - I don't realize I'm doing it until I think about the fact that I'm doing it. That being said, if I switch into thinking in English and then try to express in Korean what I'm thinking in English, things slow down. So my biggest advice is practice thinking in your agglutinative language. This will speed up the processing time and get you more comfortable with speaking. I agree though, I still find it fascinating how the thought process is so different from an English speaker's thought process. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| alang Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7221 days ago 563 posts - 757 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 16 of 27 21 March 2015 at 9:00am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I thought the same when it was about this specific feature. This is why I am curious if there are other members, who speak more than one agglutinative language, but from a different language family. If it was easier for them. I thought Esperanto would help with this, and I still do for the process not to feel so foreign. I did write to another member Fasulye about Esperanto and Turkish being agglutinative, but her reply was something like, she did not really notice Esperanto making Turkish easier. She thought Latin actually helped her more, than Esperanto in learning Turkish. One thing I have encountered are some Filipinos who thought Japanese was not that difficult. I am speculating, about both languages being agglutinative, and that is why it was not overly difficult, but I think exposure had more to do with it, than anything else. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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