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Interesting / rare grammar experiences

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clumsy
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Poland
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 Message 9 of 21
31 October 2011 at 3:27pm | IP Logged 
In some languages to make the conditional you conjugate the verb.

Moreover many Turkic, Korean, Japanese, languages, use totally backward word order to this of European languages.


Girl after eating a cookie, went to school -

girl cookie eat after school-at went.

In Yi-Burman languages, to say "this man", this hat", you say:

person this classifier


"water this glass"
etc

Chinese would use "this glass water".





In Hani you say

person this person

col xil col (if I am not wrong)
col being the word and the classifier.

Hani is a language close to Burmese, spoken in China.
In Yi you change verb's transitiveness, by changing the tone.

In Manchu you change vowels to denote the gender (not in all words).


haha = man

hehe = woman

From Polish I think the personal ending detachement is quite fun:





wypiłem piwo - i drank a beer
can be changed into


piwom wypił



-m the verb ending goes after then noun!


it's like Italian would say:


lo sportiamo guardi

instead of guardiamo lo sport.


In Japanese, and Kazakh (and maybe some other Turkic languages) you can use plural as denoting collectivennes



garfields eat fish = garfiend and his friends eat fish


In Japanese you don't use a word "can" instead you conjugate the verb =

nomu = to drink
nomeru = to be able to drink



Edited by clumsy on 31 October 2011 at 3:29pm

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Chung
Diglot
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 Message 10 of 21
31 October 2011 at 4:36pm | IP Logged 
Conjugation in Uralic languages ranks as one of the more interesting things that I've encountered. About a year ago I made a post about this subject.

Chung wrote:
Erzya, Moksha, Khanty, Mansi, Enets, Nenets, Nganasan, and Selkup also have something akin to the Hungarian distinction between indefinite (subjective) and definite (objective) conjugation. The difference lies in how elaborate the distinction is. [...]

The Hungarian setup ... is between whether the direct object is definite (i.e. direct object is preceded by a definite article / antecedant to a subordinate clause beginning with hogy ("that") / designating a direct object that as a subject is the 3rd person or a proper name) or indefinite (i.e. direct object lacking a definite article / preceded by numerals / designating a direct object that as a subject is the 2nd person). This is relatively plain compared to what's used in certain other Uralic languages. For example, Erzya conjugation extends this concept further than in Hungarian.

Erzya, present tense

indefinite conjugation:
- siń kand= they bring

definite conjugation:
- siń kandsamiź = they bring me; they bring us
- siń kandtadiź = they bring you (singular or plural)
- siń kandsiź = they bring him/her/it/them

The conjugational endings here in Erzya tell you which grammatical person the definite direct object is. These endings apply when the subject is the 3rd person plural (i.e. "they") and so the endings here are different for other personal subjects. In total, the present tense in Erzya has 6 endings for indefinite conjugation (i.e. one ending per personal pronoun: I, you, he/she/it, we, you, they) but 28 endings (including syncretized or merged endings) for definite conjugation depending not only on the "person" of the direct object but also on the "person" doing the action.

In contrast, these patterns in Erzya would be divided as follows in Hungarian:

indefinite conjugation
- hoznak = they bring

definite conjugation
- hozzák = they bring [it]

Hungarian just divides it into indefinite or definite and has 12 endings in total - 6 for indefinite, 6 for definite, with the 6 corresponding to the personal pronouns) rather than the 34 seen in Erzya as Hungarian doesn't make such fine distinctions on the "person" of the direct object.

Mansi, which is considered to be the most similar language to Hungarian, also has a very elaborate pattern for conjugation. Mansi conjugation not only accounts for the indefinite and definite concepts, but also the number and identity of the subject, as well as the number of the direct object in the definite object. Mansi also uses the dual, thus expanding the number of endings for both the subject and the definite object.

indefinite conjugation:

- teeγəm = I eat
- teeγmen = we (two) eat
- teeγuw = we (more than two) eat

definite conjugation:
- teeγləm = I eat [one definite object]
- teeγaγəm = I eat [two definite objects]
- teeγanəm = I eat [more than two definite objects]

- teeγlamen = we (two) eat [one definite object]
- teeγaγmen = we (two) eat [two definite objects]
- teeγanmen = we (two) eat [more than two definite objects]

- teeγluw = we (more than two) eat [one definite object]
- teeγaγuw = we (more than two) eat [two definite objects]
- teeγanuw = we (more than two) eat [more than two definite objects]

The Hungarian equivalents of these above forms would be

- eszem = I eat (indefinite and definite conjugations)
- eszünk = we eat (indefinite conjugation)
- esszük = we eat (definite conjugation)

Hungarian's lack of both the dual and fine distinction in the object's number means that Hungarian uses 3 forms to do what 12 forms do in Mansi.

In total, the definite conjugation in present tense for Mansi has 27 endings (including syncretized or merged endings) while the indefinite conjugation in present has 8 endings (including syncretized or merged endings) for 35 endings in total.

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Ari
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Norway
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 Message 11 of 21
01 November 2011 at 7:04am | IP Logged 
Cantonese has these wonderful particles that I miss when I speak other languages. You tack them on at the end to change the feel of the sentence, almost like verbal emoticons! Mandarin has a couple, but Cantonese is positively swarming with them. I'm at work, so I can't write the characters, but here are some examples. Note that many of these have multiple uses and the meaning is hard to pin down, so don't take it too literally.

Hou2 sik6: Tasty

aa3: general intensifier
Hou2 sik6 aa3!: Wow, that's really tasty!

tim1: suggests something additional, more than you expected
Hou2 sik6 tim!: (Not only is it healthy,) It's tasty, too!

gaa3 laa3 / gaa3 laak3: Suggests it might not be as the other person thinks
Hou2 sik6 gaa3 laa3: It's actually quite tasty

ze1: Sort of like "only", there's no big deal, there's nothing else
Hou2 sik6 ze1: It's just tasty, that's all

bo3: Used when reminding someone
Hou2 sik6 bo3: It's tasty, don't you remember?

wo3: Can mean you're trying to convince someone, or that they ought to know the information you're giving them
Hou2 sik6 wo3: It's tasty, c'mon! Have a try.

laa3: Can mean a dozen different things, but amongst others it can make the sentence a suggestion
"Hou2 sik6" laa3: Let's say "tasty" (maybe discussing an advertising slogan)

me1: Makes it a question
Hou2 sik6 me1?: Is it tasty?

ne1: Makes it a question about something not already discussed
Hou2 sik6 ne1?: What about the taste? Is it tasty?

gwaa3: Suggests hesitation
Hou2 sik6 gwaa3: It's tasty ... I guess.

lou3 / lu3: Man, I can't explain this one. Sometimes I think it's used to denote a conclusion
Hou2 sik6 lou3: So it's tasty!
... but really, this meaning is just really hard to pin down. It's very common and I think sometimes it doesn't really mean anything.

Those are all I can come up with now. Remember, the meaning is a bit elusive on many of these, and they are often used in many ways. For example, the "wo3" is sometimes used to denote "Right, I had forgotten about that", as in "Hai6 wo3". But there you go. These particles are super useful and the natives (and me, too!) use them all the time. And Stephen Chow, the master of Hong Kong comedy, is extremely skilled at using these, and can pile up two or three of them in a row at the end of a sentence (yeah, you can combine them to get even more nuanced meanings)!
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Remster
Diglot
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Netherlands
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 Message 12 of 21
01 November 2011 at 9:45am | IP Logged 
For some reason, I'm always interested in how the noun agrees with the rest of the sentence through either case or word order.

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Marc Frisch
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Germany
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 Message 13 of 21
02 November 2011 at 10:09pm | IP Logged 
In Turkish there are two distinct past tenses: one for events you witnessed yourself and another for events you have been told about by someone else.

By the way, Tamil also has a distinction between exclusive and inclusive "we".
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Kartof
Bilingual Triglot
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United States
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 Message 14 of 21
03 November 2011 at 12:24am | IP Logged 
Marc Frisch wrote:
In Turkish there are two distinct past tenses: one for events you witnessed yourself and
another for events you have been told about by someone else.


Bulgarian makes the same distinction.
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Chung
Diglot
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Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish

 
 Message 15 of 21
03 November 2011 at 1:41am | IP Logged 
Kartof wrote:
Marc Frisch wrote:
In Turkish there are two distinct past tenses: one for events you witnessed yourself and
another for events you have been told about by someone else.


Bulgarian makes the same distinction.


Albanian, Estonian Macedonian too can express similarly under renarrative mood (or quotative mood in Estonian).
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kanewai
Triglot
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United States
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 Message 16 of 21
03 November 2011 at 3:39am | IP Logged 
I wonder if you can trace the birth and evolution of grammatical idea? It seems as if a
lot of the SE Asian and Pacific languages have the inclusive and exclusive "we." And
four of the languages mentioned that have the renarrative mood were once part of the
Ottoman Empire.

I always thought that grammar would become less complex over time, or as it spread to
multiple regions (look at Bahasa Indonesia). But maybe new grammatical concepts can also
spread through a population?


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