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Thai or Vietnamese ? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| zohan Triglot Groupie Romania Joined 5255 days ago 45 posts - 45 votes Speaks: Romanian*, English, Swedish | Message 33 of 41 08 June 2011 at 9:53am | IP Logged | ||||||||
How do the Swedish people glue the determiner onto the word? Please provide some concrete examples on this one. I can't imagine it happening in Swedish even though I've been studying it for the last year. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| audiophile Groupie United States Joined 5117 days ago 44 posts - 81 votes  Studies: French | Message 34 of 41 08 June 2011 at 4:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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In Pinyin Chinese, we spell the words together, but as each word has its own meaning, so
you still need to learn each individual word. For example, the Vietnamese call Sunday as chu nhat. The Chinese equivalent is ZhuRi (主日). Zhu is our Lord. Ri is Day. We also call Sunday as 礼拜天(day of worship). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| kyssäkaali Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5554 days ago 203 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English*, Finnish | Message 35 of 41 08 June 2011 at 9:45pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Is it not Swedish but Norwegian, maybe? One of the Scandinavian languages I know has a feature where the determiner changes meaning from "the" to "a" depending on if it is placed before or after the word, and as far as I remember, when it comes after the word it is attached to it. Could be wrong though, feel free to correct. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 36 of 41 08 June 2011 at 10:48pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I've never studied either, but after listening to this, I think Thai might sound a bit cleaner or even prettier, but Vietnamese sounds like it would be cool to speak, what with all the tense vowels. Writing would indeed be simpler at first in Vietnamese. This is not very meaningful in the long run, but it is at the beginning. I'd actually go with whichever of the two languages has the larger population of recent or current immigrants -- it is these people who would be most interested in a language exchange. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 37 of 41 08 June 2011 at 10:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
English "one car" has stress on both words. They are 2 units. They can be separated by an adjective: "one big car". A Norwegian word like bilen (bil plus -en) has one stress, and it's never on -en, and the whole word becomes one phonological unit. The two morphemes cannot be split, unlike "one big car", and unlike "en stor bil" (a big car). That's the justification. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| zohan Triglot Groupie Romania Joined 5255 days ago 45 posts - 45 votes Speaks: Romanian*, English, Swedish | Message 38 of 41 09 June 2011 at 7:35am | IP Logged | ||||||||
How about in the case of the Swedish word hus? Is the determiner ett the same as -et? As in ett hus and huset? I always made a distinction between ett and -et since they have different grammatical functions. I don't know if this applies to Norwegian, but your car example was perfect for Swedish. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 39 of 41 09 June 2011 at 9:43am | IP Logged | ||||||||
That's really an etymological question. They're pronounced the same and always correspond to the gender of the word. The reason the determinate article is written together with the word is because it changes the word in some cases, like "ett snöre" -> "snöret". There is no logical reason I can see why one wouldn't be able to spell it with two 't' (according to Swedish spelling rules, one would actually expect it to be so) and write it separately, treating the missing vowel as a liason (or is that elision? I can never remember). So "ett hus" -> "hus ett", "ett snöre" -> "snör'ett". But that's just not the way it's written, and as a result, I don't think most people think of them as the same. Whether or not they are the same, etymologically, I haven't the faintest. 1 person has 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 40 of 41 09 June 2011 at 1:46pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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No, the indefinite article "et" in Nordic languages isn't the same as the postclitic definite article "-et". The indefinite article is a special use of the number 1, while the article originally was a demonstrative pronoun. In Swedish you can say "det röda huset" ('the red houseThe'). "Det" and "-et" are both definitive articles. Now, how could "d-" just disappear? Well it didn't -the pronoun in question started with a h-. in Icelandic (where indefinite articles aren't used) you still use "hinn" and "-inn".
In a broader perspective this pinpoints the problem of defining word borders. It seems to be a trivial matter in writing, but looking at the pronunciation things aren't that clear. And this would seeem also to be a problem in the Oriental languages - otherwise we wouldn't see both "Hong Kong" and "Hongkong". Maybe the isolating languages aren't as isolating as we are told? Edited by Iversen on 09 June 2011 at 1:50pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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