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What makes your native language unique? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| MäcØSŸ Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5811 days ago 259 posts - 392 votes  Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2 Studies: German | Message 17 of 86 07 January 2009 at 6:56am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Nordic languages have three word passive infinitives (e.g. in Swedish "att vara + SUPINE), but the majority of Indo- european languages do not have a preposition in the infinitive form (e.g. in Italian you can say "di/a/da/per essere", but the bare infinitive is simply "essere") 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6667 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 18 of 86 07 January 2009 at 11:00am | IP Logged | ||||||||
The Wikipedia article on the Balkan Sprachbund provides some interesting information on this phenomenon. The postponed article has probably been borrowed from Albanian. In response to the original question: I think that German word order is pretty unique (verb in second position in main clauses and in final position in subordinate clauses). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| mick33 Senior Member United States Joined 5926 days ago 1335 posts - 1632 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish Studies: Thai, Polish, Afrikaans, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish | Message 19 of 86 07 January 2009 at 11:27am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Thanks to everyone who's commented so far. Hopefully, we will get some more comments on even more languages. I will comment on other responses later on. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Giordano Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 7176 days ago 213 posts - 218 votes 3 sounds Speaks: English*, Italian*, French Studies: Cantonese, Greek | Message 21 of 86 07 January 2009 at 4:28pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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What I like about English is the flexibility. There is no real linguistic "governing body". If you are looking for a reliable standard, the Oxford Dictionary can provide it, but it is very hard in English to say "that isn't a word".
They say that Shakespeare, for example, coined hundreds and hundreds of words. But these are things like turning the verb "to excel" into the adjective "excellent". Adding a suffix doesn't seem like "creating a new word" in English, it's just natural. In French, by contrast, it is impossible to create a new word without it being in some dictionary or approved by the "Immortals" of l'Académie. One time I remember wanting to say someone was looking at someone else "seductively". So I said "elle lui regardait séduisamment". Now, French has "séduire" (to seduce, verb), séduction (seduction, noun), séduisant (seductive, adjective), but no adverb for it. And, I was told, you can't make one. It's so frustrating, coming from English where you just slap -ly onto the end of anything and you have a word. You don't need to ask anyone's permission. French is an extremely rich language, and you need only read a passage of Balzac to see it. And, these kinds of language academies exist in most other major languages. But I greatly cherish the linguistic freedom of English, where I can choose to split an infinitive or begin a sentence with a conjunction if I so desire. These are never so much "mistakes" as "contraventions of contemporary popular usage". This freedom comes at a price. English is famous for an orthography stemming from various, often conflicted, traditions. You could say, though, that this is part of its charm. I think an Italian spelling bee would be pretty boring... EDIT: Then again... are English spelling bees "interesting"? :-P Edited by Giordano on 07 January 2009 at 4:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6599 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 22 of 86 07 January 2009 at 5:04pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I guess the most unique thing about Russian is that despite the great number of people who speak it, there are practically no dialects, especially in cities - I believe the language in rural areas is often influenced by the local minority languages, but e.g. half of my group at uni are not from Moscow and come from very different regions (from the one bordering with Japan to the one bordering with Norway, and quite a few in between), and I wouldn't have guessed where any of them is from if I didn't know - in fact it's only due to the extralinguistic component that I would have guessed with fair certaincy that two are not from Moscow.
As for the infinitives btw, I've seen somewhere a Russian phrase consisting only of infinitives (more than 10) meaning something like "to decide to try to get up and go to ask [smb who's supposedly in a better condition :D] to get ready to go [out] and find [some place] to buy [something] to drink". Note that the original phrase doesn't use any conjunctions, and in the colloquial language words with meanings like "something", "somewhere" etc can be omitted. I think it was a bit longer, but here's the translation of what I've been able to come up with: решить попытаться встать пойти попросить собраться пойти найти купить выпить :D 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| sajro Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5998 days ago 129 posts - 131 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 23 of 86 07 January 2009 at 5:18pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Not exactly as Sennin described though, at least in Swedish (and presumably the other Nordic languages). In Bulgarian, the article can attach to the adjective instead of the noun. In Swedish (and presumably the other Nordic languages) it doesn't attach to the adjective. But sometimes there's a double article when there's an adjective. hunden - the dog stor hunden - the big dog den stor hunden - the big dog I don't know the logic behind it but I've seen it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Sauna Triglot Newbie Sweden Joined 6073 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, German Studies: Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Italian, Mandarin, Greek, French | Message 24 of 86 07 January 2009 at 6:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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As you probably know swedish has two different pitch accents.
The funny thing though, is that the tone often changes if you put two or more words together to form a new word. E.g the word "låda" (box) has the grave accent but in the word "brevlåda" (mailbox) the "låda"-part of the word gets the acute accent. I don´t no if thats unique, but it sure makes it harder for foreign learners to really master the swedish pronunciation. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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