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clumsy Octoglot Senior Member Poland lang-8.com/6715Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5178 days ago 1116 posts - 1367 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Japanese, Korean, French, Mandarin, Italian, Vietnamese Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swedish Studies: Danish, Dari, Kirundi
| 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 Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish
| 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 kandiť= 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 Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6582 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German
| 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 Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4805 days ago 120 posts - 134 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English Studies: German, French
| 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 Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6665 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil
| 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 Senior Member United States Joined 5066 days ago 391 posts - 550 votes Speaks: English*, Bulgarian*, Spanish Studies: Danish
| 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.
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Bulgarian makes the same distinction.
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| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French 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.
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Bulgarian makes the same distinction. |
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Albanian, Estonian Macedonian too can express similarly under renarrative mood (or quotative mood in Estonian).
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| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4889 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish
| 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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