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List of things you cannot do with English | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5048 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 25 of 60 26 March 2012 at 9:52pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I agree. One thing that comes to mind is casting aspersions on someone or something by using the subjunctive verb tenses in Spanish and Portuguese. It can not be done as easily in English. A mere change of a verb ending and all of a sudden everything is in doubt or unreal to you! Edited by iguanamon on 26 March 2012 at 11:17pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 6942 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 26 of 60 26 March 2012 at 11:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
If one were to remain a monoglot of English and unexposed to any other language, then off the top of my head: - One could not fathom that conjugation patterns can differ not only to mark tense, mood or grammatical person, but also the gender of that person (e.g. Czech), the definiteness of the direct object (when present) (e.g. Hungarian), the number of that direct object (when present) (e.g. Mansi), or any of the preceding categories and more (e.g. Inuktitut). - One could not understand that unstressed syllables do not need to be reduced as often as they are in English (e.g. Slovak) - One could not see how varying tone (including pitch-accent) can be lexically or morphologically relevant (e.g. Cantonese) - One could not realize that phonological inventory may include clicks (e.g. Xhosa) - One could not realize that non-alphabetic systems can be viable for most visual linguistic expression (e.g. Chinese characters) - One could not understand that grammatical relations can be expressed meaningfully with little use of analytic typology. (e.g. Georgian) - One could not see the extent to which ablaut/gradation can make grammatical distinctions (e.g. Northern Saami) - One could not see a counting system in action other than the decimal, duodecimal or sexagesimal (N.B. there is an element of vigesimal in English with mention of "score" meaning 20) (e.g. vigesimal for Dzongkha, biquinary for Khmer) - One could not fathom the dominance of alignment other than nominative-accusative (e.g. ergative-absolutive in Basque, active-stative in Guaraní) - One could not fathom extensive pro-dropping (e.g. Turkish) - One could not fathom grammatical number other than singular and plural (e.g. dual in Arabic, distributive plural in Navajo) - One could not fathom declension of the direct object depending on telicity or affirmativeness (e.g. Finnish) All of this aside, I could have come up with the same list above (as far as I can tell) by substituting English with Afrikaans. I get the original point of the thread because of the current dominance of English, but it quietly overlooks the fact that by remaining an unexposed monoglot of ANY language, one would forgo awareness of the features of the roughly 6000 other languages that we know of. Edited by Chung on 27 March 2012 at 12:22am 10 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Gallo1801 Diglot Senior Member Spain Joined 4688 days ago 164 posts - 248 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), Croatian, German, French | Message 27 of 60 27 March 2012 at 4:16am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
What about Croatian? haha I dont know Italian or German (yet). Trying to get through TY Croatian, plus the Serbo-Croatian FSI course before I come for a long visit. (2 weeks) Will I be at a high enough level to get by with most Croatians? Sorry for the tangent, I just love Balkan language issues and languages as they relate to tourism. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6223 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 28 of 60 27 March 2012 at 8:05am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
English does a little bit of that. CONstruct (noun) vs. conSTRUCT (verb) There are a few more examples but I'm tired and can't think of them now.
English has clicks in expressions but not in words. I don't know how to transcribe clicks. For example, there's a click sound that you make, which sometimes precedes a nasalized/whispered "uh," when you just realized you've been treated unfairly or found out something that disappoints you. For example: "Hey, you know that TV show we've been watching that we both love?" "Yeah" "Well I just heard they're taking a 4 week break before they show anymore new episodes!" "*click* uh! That sucks!" I can upload a vocal sample if necessary. There's also a double click in English in a "told you so" type of situation, and then there's the clicking often accompanied by shaking your head back and forth that means "ah ah, you shouldn't have done that (look what happened now!)."
I don't even know what that means :) You could make a list like that for any language, though: SPEAKERS OF German: - would never realize that noun genders aren't necessary SPEAKERS OF JAPANESE: - could never fathom of a language with only one set of numbers SPEAKERS OF RUSSIAN: - could never conceive of a world where everything doesn't need to decline (I don't know anything about Russian, this is just based on being told that in Russian, everything has to match, noun, gender, number, adjective, with ridiculous complexity that makes German look simple by comparison) etc. Edited by IronFist on 27 March 2012 at 8:11am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6223 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 29 of 60 27 March 2012 at 8:08am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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English needs more specificity in pronouns.
For example, if two people of the same sex have already been mentioned, you can no longer refer to either of them as "he" because it won't be clear who you're talking about, unless you mention one of them by name again. There needs to be like a he (first person mentioned) and another he (second person mentioned). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4558 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 30 of 60 27 March 2012 at 9:51am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
There is a tonal difference between these two words, but it is not perceived as crucial to their differentiation. The difference is mainly perceived through volume, vowel duration and reduction (or lack thereof). There are no cases in English where tone alone distinguishes one word from another. For example when one says "But it's MY car!" the word "my" would have a descending tone, differentiating the sentence from the simple stative "it's my car", but not the word itself. In a language like Vietnamese the tonal difference between the two my's would probably make them different words altogether.
These clicks in English are more like interjections than fully-fledged consonants capable of forming syllables and words.
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6489 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 31 of 60 27 March 2012 at 9:53am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I spent some time yesterday writing down how sentences in Irish sounded to me. I could have done this using IPA, but because I haven't bothered to learn IOA its sign don't spell out sound to me, they are just symbols. Instead I used a homemade system with signs from several alphabets and a few from IPA (like the sign for open o).
Now look at a typical language guide to any language. There will be a list of the sounds of that language at the start, and they will be illustrated using references to the base language of the book, occasionally supplemented with a few references to other languages when a certain sound isn't extant in the base language. The further the phonetics and phonology of a language are from that of a target language the more misleading the comparisons are - and English is just about the least suitable language for the purpose because of its chaotic orthography and the preponderance of diphtongs. I remember in particular my experiences with a guide to Bahasa Indonesia, which has maybe the most regular and trustworthy orthography in the world. For some reason the book presented an English 'pronunciation help' in a screaming green color in the center of each page, and you automatically thought that this language had a completely raving mad pronunciation which it would take years to master. Then you looked to the right and saw the correct pronunciation in the form of the official spelling of the language itself - at half the length of the English rendering. I had to stop using that book - it was like getting a punch in the face each time you looked something up. Now Bahasa is special in this respect by having such a straightforward orthography, but with the possible exception of Irish I can't imagine a language which would be less suited for 'pronunciation help' than English. And yet it is by far the most used for the purpose. Edited by Iversen on 27 March 2012 at 10:46am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Mad Max Tetraglot Groupie Spain Joined 4837 days ago 79 posts - 146 votes Speaks: Spanish*, French, English, Russian Studies: Arabic (classical) | Message 32 of 60 27 March 2012 at 10:09am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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You can not travel from Los Angeles (USA) to Santiago (Chile).
In the Americas there are 900 million people, from Alaska to Argentina. The lingua franca of this area is Spanish, and also the most spoken. Spanish is spoken by some 420 million people from the United States to Argentina. Besides, it is also understood more or less, by some 190 million more (Brazil). It is the first of second language of all countries in the Americas, but Canada, where it is third. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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