Register  Login  Active Topics  Maps  

What makes your native language unique?

  Tags: Native Language
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
86 messages over 11 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 ... 4 ... 10 11 Next >>
Juan M.
Senior Member
Colombia
Joined 5901 days ago
460 posts - 597 votes 

 
 Message 25 of 86
07 January 2009 at 8:39pm | IP Logged 
SlickAs wrote:
I find colloquial Spanish a warm, friendly, open, colourful language full of laughter and sharing.


Yes, I agree with this. And despite what I said earlier, I wouldn't trade Spanish for any other language. :-)
1 person has voted this message useful



Juan M.
Senior Member
Colombia
Joined 5901 days ago
460 posts - 597 votes 

 
 Message 26 of 86
07 January 2009 at 8:41pm | IP Logged 
Giordano wrote:
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


Excellent post. English is indeed probably the most supple language in existence today, making it perfectly fit to be the lingua franca of a world in accelerated transformation.
1 person has voted this message useful



RisaXKoizumiX
Diglot
Newbie
United States
last.fm/user/rei_hii
Joined 5967 days ago
35 posts - 34 votes
Studies: Italian, Spanish*, English
Studies: French, Japanese, Modern Hebrew

 
 Message 27 of 86
07 January 2009 at 8:56pm | IP Logged 
English is ever changing...its hard for me to keep up on the slang nowadays...but when me & my cousins start rappin in the middle of a restaurant (like I did last Friday) the looks we get are all worth it...& yes we were sober...

Edited by RisaXKoizumiX on 07 January 2009 at 9:20pm
1 person has voted this message useful



Volte
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 6441 days ago
4474 posts - 6726 votes 
Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian
Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese

 
 Message 28 of 86
07 January 2009 at 8:58pm | IP Logged 
JuanM wrote:
Giordano wrote:
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


Excellent post. English is indeed probably the most supple language in existence today, making it perfectly fit to be the lingua franca of a world in accelerated transformation.


I personally find Esperanto much more supple than English, to the extent that I occasionally find it necessary to use Esperanto words to convey exactly what I mean when speaking English to people who also speak Esperanto. The -em and -ec suffixes, in particular, are amazing ('-em' suggests someone who likes/has a tendency to whatever came before, and '-ec' suggests having the property of).

In English, -em is not easy to convey. There are a few alternatives (clumsily expressing the idea using a lot of words, or ad-hoc, unguessable forms like 'tree-hugger' and 'book worm'), but they lack the same feeling; the regularity and flexibility of the Esperanto suffix adds a shade of meaning that really strikes me as untranslatable.

Between compound words and multiple suffixes, near-ideal regularity, plus the idea that word creation is not only allowed, but actively encouraged, I can't think of any language as supple as Esperanto. Some languages are extremely expressive (the affix systems in Slavic languages are striking, though I haven't fully internalized them); others are usable but a bit clumsy (such as my beloved English -- the freedom to shift words between grammatical categories helps, but the affix system isn't that rich, and irregularities involving switching root and even the language the root is from abound, deeply restricting coinages native speakers don't balk at; the freedom to coin entirely new words, whether from thin air or roots from several languages at once, helps a lot, but doesn't entirely counter this). I'm yet to see a language that can't be used beautifully, or to express something (sometimes clumsily), but I would definitely say languages vary in their 'suppleness' despite this.

1 person has voted this message useful



MäcØSŸ
Diglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 5811 days ago
259 posts - 392 votes 
Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2
Studies: German

 
 Message 29 of 86
08 January 2009 at 1:30am | IP Logged 
sajro wrote:
[...]

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.


In swedish the article changes according to the "definitivess" of the noun it refers to.
When the noun is definite, the adjective ends in -a and takes the double article.
So the second and third sentence you wrote are wrong, because they both should be "den stora hunden"
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 30 of 86
08 January 2009 at 3:41am | IP Logged 
Is it a triple article then? 0_o
1 person has voted this message useful



brozman
Bilingual Tetraglot
Groupie
Spain
Joined 6058 days ago
87 posts - 106 votes 
Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan*, English, Japanese
Studies: Russian, Indonesian

 
 Message 31 of 86
08 January 2009 at 10:43am | IP Logged 
As Iversen once made me realize, in Catalan we have a quite strange way of turning verbs into past tense. We use the verb to go in present and then add the infinitive of the verb. For example, "I ate" would be "[jo] vaig menjar", "you ate" would be "[tu] vas menjar", etc.
1 person has voted this message useful



cordelia0507
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 5840 days ago
1473 posts - 2176 votes 
Speaks: Swedish*
Studies: German, Russian

 
 Message 32 of 86
08 January 2009 at 4:24pm | IP Logged 
Sennin wrote:
In Bulgarian the definite article 'the' is attached to the end of nouns (or to the first adjective that modifies a noun if there are any). For example:

( cat -> the cat )
котка -> котката



Swedish is the same and isn't that much better?!

( cat -> the cat )
( katt -> katten )


But more importantly, Swedish is the language spoken by the glorious Vikings :-) in the beautiful (currently snow-covered) land of great forests and mysterious aurora borealis....


OH, I AM SO HOMESICK!!!


1 person has voted this message useful



This discussion contains 86 messages over 11 pages: << Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11  Next >>


Post ReplyPost New Topic Printable version Printable version

You cannot post new topics in this forum - You cannot reply to topics in this forum - You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum - You cannot create polls in this forum - You cannot vote in polls in this forum


This page was generated in 0.4531 seconds.


DHTML Menu By Milonic JavaScript
Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved
No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization.