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What makes your native language unique? | ||
Tags: Native Language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Deecab Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5963 days ago 106 posts - 108 votes  Speaks: English, Korean* Studies: Mandarin | Message 57 of 86 26 February 2009 at 7:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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Unique? I know that Hangeul resembles the mouth shape of its pronunciation at times.
And the fact that Koreans often ask their year of birth to see if they should use the honorific is not unseen but unique imo. Honestly, I don't know many languages that use honorific(oppa, unni, noona, and hyung) as often as Koreans do to call the older people even not of your family in daily life speech. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| QiuJP Triglot Senior Member Singapore Joined 5857 days ago 428 posts - 597 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, EnglishC2, French Studies: Czech, GermanB1, Russian, Japanese | Message 58 of 86 27 February 2009 at 12:54am | IP Logged | ||
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Chinese is unique because it has more than 10 000 characters. These characters are evolved from pictograms which existed more than 3500 years ago. This shows the longevity of the language and of course the civilsation in China.
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| Olekander Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5885 days ago 122 posts - 136 votes Speaks: English*, French, Russian | Message 59 of 86 27 February 2009 at 2:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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In English I think something unique is the fact that a word can be written exactly the same, but giving it a different stress can give it a new meaning. There are many but I just can't think of one right now. Russian has something like this too, but often if you get the stress wrong its just not a word, not a word said wrongly.
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| Yinon Diglot Newbie Israel Joined 5855 days ago 24 posts - 22 votes Speaks: English, Modern Hebrew* Studies: German | Message 60 of 86 27 February 2009 at 8:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think Hebrew has a unique, but also quite bothersome, I must admit, verb inflection
system. Hebrew verbs are inflected by three factors: the time of the action, the body of the action, i.e. who is doing it, and the "Binyan", which implies who is doing the action to whom. For instance, if I want to say "I ate a chicken" or "The chicken ate me", I wouldn't change the verb in English. But in Hebrew, if I say I got eaten by chicken, I would have to inflect the verb to the female form, then to the past tense, to the non- present body, and then use the correct Binyan system. The outcome of all this procedure is one word verb ("achla" or "ne'echalti". The latter means that I got eaten, but doesn't tell the gender of the object that ate me) Sounds complicated, eh? The advantage of this characteristic, and other similar concepts in Hebrew, is that there is no one way of composing a sentence, insomuch that practically every word order in Hebrew will retain the sentence's meaning, and only shift the emphasise. Edited by Yinon on 27 February 2009 at 8:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| taKen Tetraglot Senior Member Norway mindofthelinguist.woRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6119 days ago 176 posts - 210 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Dutch, French Studies: German, Icelandic | Message 61 of 86 28 February 2009 at 9:48pm | IP Logged | ||
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I speak a dialect of Norwegian called "Trøndersk" which retains some features of Old Norse that are now lost in standard Bokmål Norwegian. It might be a coincidence, especially since they are related languages and had significant similarities even before the Vikings emigrated to the UK, but there are several things that are the same in my dialect and English which one doesn't find in Bokmål. Such as:
EN: I say TRØ: Æ sei (prounounced A, as in antilope, & "say" just as in English) Apart from this I don't think there is anything that sticks out in my dialect compared to the other languages of Europe. It's more Norwegian in a sense than Bokmål since the latter is a product of considerable Danish influence. Whereas Bokmål has a regular -er ending in practically all verbs, Trøndersk for the most part doesn't. I like to think of my region as a group of descendants of the original Vikings who settled on the British isles, the Faroe islands and Iceland. Especially Faroese seems to be much closer to western and northern dialects of Norwegian than Bokmål. But certainly, people from the South of Norway did settle these places as well. However I have no idea if the exact same distinctions that exist in my dialect also once were to be found in Bokmål. PS. By Bokmål I mean the Norwegian dialect that ressembles this written standard the most (i.e. the general Oslo area). Edited by taKen on 28 February 2009 at 9:50pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Raчraч Ŋuɲa Triglot Senior Member New Zealand Joined 5820 days ago 154 posts - 233 votes Speaks: Bikol languages*, Tagalog, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, Russian, Japanese | Message 62 of 86 08 March 2009 at 3:24am | IP Logged | ||
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My native language is Bikol, and I speak Tagalog as well. What makes these 2 languages unique, like other Philippine languages, are:
1. Alignment system called Austronesian-type voice system and the related symmetrical voice system. This is not found in languages other than Austronesian, specifically Philippine-Bornean and Formosan languages. 2. There is no distributional nor morphological criteria for distinguishing between nouns and verbs, in other words, "content words are not subcategorized with regards to which function words they may co-occur with", as explained here and here. Isn't that cool? Edited by Raчraч Ŋuɲa on 08 March 2009 at 3:42am 2 persons have 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 63 of 86 08 March 2009 at 5:13am | IP Logged | ||
Edited by mick33 on 21 July 2009 at 11:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| bighoracio2 Diglot Newbie Colombia Joined 5756 days ago 3 posts - 3 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English | Message 64 of 86 14 March 2009 at 3:34pm | IP Logged | ||
Spanish has ando endo, for the ing form... German has lich Edited by bighoracio2 on 14 March 2009 at 3:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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