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Favourite Aspect of a Language

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Sizen
Diglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 4149 days ago
165 posts - 347 votes 
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Catalan, Spanish, Japanese, Ukrainian, German

 
 Message 1 of 33
03 July 2013 at 6:11am | IP Logged 
What's your favourite part of your language? Is it the agglutination, the gemination,
the tones, the formation of adverbs, the writing, the diphthongs? Or is it something
completely different? What gets you excited? Gets you wanting to see, hear, experience
more? It doesn't have to be unique to your language.

For me, it's Japanese verbs. I feel very close to them. I know it sounds weird to put
it that way, but it's true. It's almost as if I could see them and grab them out of the
air when I hear them; they're so recognizable, so well defined, so easy, yet their
borders are always half blurring into the following conjunction, the preceding particle
or its neighbouring noun. They fit everywhere and anywhere, like a multipurpose puzzle
piece ready to modify, connect, subordinate or act alone.

The conjugations themselves are so simple and so beautiful. The familiar non-past "u"
(う,る,ぶ,む, く, etc) ending, sliding through all the other vowels like a rainbow of
sound. The hard ta (た) or da (だ) past tense, almost sounding like it's the verb itself
that ended the action. The conditionals ra (ら) and ba (ば), soft and purposeful, yet
never truly connecting with the rest. Potential eru and rareru (える/られる), passive
areru and rareru (あれる/られる) and causative aseru and saseru (あせる/させる): so similar
in sound, so different in meaning, and combined to form a flourish of sounds that just
rolls off the tongue. The ever present te-form, doing the dirty work that none of the
other conjugations want to do!

And, oh! The older forms! nu (ぬ), zaru (ざる), ji/shi (じ/し), n (む), rite (りて) and
more! They demand respect and emanate grandeur. Such a shame that they see such little
use these days...

Out of all the languages I've put even a little time into, I've never had such an
immediate and intense reaction to the verbs. I remember starting Japanese in grade 10
and a week later asking for a table of all the verb conjugations and rules: it didn't
matter if I couldn't understand any of it, I needed to see it all! And so simple! Three
truly irregular verbs (kuru 来る, suru する, aru ある [well, I guess this one doesn't
really count depending on how you see it...]), three partially irregular verb for
reasons of euphony (iku 行く, tou 問う, kou 請う) and the irregular copula.


So that's what gets me going. What about you guys and gals?
3 persons have voted this message useful



tarvos
Super Polyglot
Winner TAC 2012
Senior Member
China
likeapolyglot.wordpr
Joined 4517 days ago
5310 posts - 9399 votes 
Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans
Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish

 
 Message 2 of 33
03 July 2013 at 9:04am | IP Logged 
Hebrew roots. Very elegant system.
1 person has voted this message useful



Cavesa
Triglot
Senior Member
Czech Republic
Joined 4819 days ago
3277 posts - 6779 votes 
Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1
Studies: Spanish, German, Italian

 
 Message 4 of 33
03 July 2013 at 10:28am | IP Logged 
I like grammar in general. A new language and its grammar, that is like entering a new universe with new laws of physics. I love to see what works the way I already know and what is totally different. How it all fits together.

Another thing is natural flow of the language, the way things are said. That includes not only idioms (those are often quite annoying) but putting all the words and grammar and everything together so that it sounds natural and beautiful no matter whether colloquial or formal. I love to observe this no matter in which form- movies, books, natives, news, anything.
11 persons have voted this message useful



casamata
Senior Member
Joined 4072 days ago
237 posts - 377 votes 
Studies: Portuguese

 
 Message 5 of 33
03 July 2013 at 1:48pm | IP Logged 
Sizen wrote:
What's your favourite part of your language? Is it the agglutination, the gemination,
the tones, the formation of adverbs, the writing, the diphthongs? Or is it something
completely different? What gets you excited? Gets you wanting to see, hear, experience
more? It doesn't have to be unique to your language.

For me, it's Japanese verbs. I feel very close to them. I know it sounds weird to put
it that way, but it's true. It's almost as if I could see them and grab them out of the
air when I hear them; they're so recognizable, so well defined, so easy, yet their
borders are always half blurring into the following conjunction, the preceding particle
or its neighbouring noun. They fit everywhere and anywhere, like a multipurpose puzzle
piece ready to modify, connect, subordinate or act alone.

The conjugations themselves are so simple and so beautiful. The familiar non-past "u"
(う,る,ぶ,む, く, etc) ending, sliding through all the other vowels like a rainbow of
sound. The hard ta (た) or da (だ) past tense, almost sounding like it's the verb itself
that ended the action. The conditionals ra (ら) and ba (ば), soft and purposeful, yet
never truly connecting with the rest. Potential eru and rareru (える/られる), passive
areru and rareru (あれる/られる) and causative aseru and saseru (あせる/させる): so similar
in sound, so different in meaning, and combined to form a flourish of sounds that just
rolls off the tongue. The ever present te-form, doing the dirty work that none of the
other conjugations want to do!

And, oh! The older forms! nu (ぬ), zaru (ざる), ji/shi (じ/し), n (む), rite (りて) and
more! They demand respect and emanate grandeur. Such a shame that they see such little
use these days...

Out of all the languages I've put even a little time into, I've never had such an
immediate and intense reaction to the verbs. I remember starting Japanese in grade 10
and a week later asking for a table of all the verb conjugations and rules: it didn't
matter if I couldn't understand any of it, I needed to see it all! And so simple! Three
truly irregular verbs (kuru 来る, suru する, aru ある [well, I guess this one doesn't
really count depending on how you see it...]), three partially irregular verb for
reasons of euphony (iku 行く, tou 問う, kou 請う) and the irregular copula.


So that's what gets me going. What about you guys and gals?


Personal loves: the fact that Spanish is very phonetic and the concordance between nouns and adjectives. When correctly spoken, it seems to rhyme and is music to my ears. Any phonetic and rationally constructed language would be personally attractive too.

Edit: the subjunctive too, especially the adverbial clauses.

Edited by casamata on 03 July 2013 at 1:49pm
1 person has voted this message useful



Serpent
Octoglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
Joined 6407 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 6 of 33
03 July 2013 at 4:45pm | IP Logged 
Cavesa wrote:
Another thing is natural flow of the language, the way things are said. That includes not only idioms (those are often quite annoying) but putting all the words and grammar and everything together so that it sounds natural and beautiful no matter whether colloquial or formal. I love to observe this no matter in which form- movies, books, natives, news, anything.
Absolutely agree!
(also about idioms being a bit annoying/overrated :P)
2 persons have voted this message useful



DaraghM
Diglot
Senior Member
Ireland
Joined 5961 days ago
1947 posts - 2923 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian

 
 Message 7 of 33
03 July 2013 at 5:07pm | IP Logged 
I love it when, what was a random series of sounds before, becomes a coherent sentence. That feeling of the veil lifting. I also got that feeling from learning some Mandarin characters recently.

4 persons have voted this message useful



Zimena
Tetraglot
Groupie
Norway
Joined 4402 days ago
75 posts - 146 votes 
Speaks: Norwegian*, English, German, Spanish
Studies: Czech, Mandarin

 
 Message 8 of 33
03 July 2013 at 5:19pm | IP Logged 
Everything Cavesa said above. Everything.

Other than that, I also admit that I have a weak spot for diacritics. For example, Czech looks fascinating to me because it has an endless amount of accented letters and things like č, š, ž and especially ř. Also, one strange thing is that I tend to connect the sound of something with how it's written, rather than with how it actually sounds - and for that reason the Czech "ž" sounds good to me, whereas the French "j" sounds rather awful... which obviously doesn't make a lot of sense :D

Edited by Zimena on 03 July 2013 at 5:21pm


3 persons have voted this message useful



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