sophie
Break My Heart
So we've established that your argument has no basis in reality beyond "it feels right to me". Good to know.
TIL: Today I Learned
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So we've established that your argument has no basis in reality beyond "it feels right to me". Good to know.
No, it's based on stuff that I've read as well as the opinions of Spanish/French speakers.
sophie
Break My Heart
You've read where? And as an English speaker who has learned both Spanish and French, I can speak with absolute confidence that English is no more or less bizarre than French or Spanish. Spend some time trying to learn Spanish subjunctive rules. Or French subjunctive rules. Or anything to do with Perfect and Imperfect time differentiation.
The things about English that make it particularly difficult to learn are: 1) consonant clusters/phonotactics, 2) strong verb conjugation in a couple of the past and perfect passive participial forms, 3) modal verbs and their usage. Things that are arbitrarily different exist in all languages. Notice how English has some verbs whose stem changes, or which employ an entirely different stem when it switches from present to past. However, once you learn the stem change, the conjugations are always regular:
Weak verb: I jump | you jump | he jumps | we jump | they jump; I jumped | you jumped | he jumped | we jumped | they jumped
Strong verb: I run | you run | he runs | we run | they run; I ran | you ran | he ran | we ran | they ran
Strong verb: I go | you go | he goes | we go | they go; I went | you went | he went | we went | they went
Weak (irregular) verb: I have | you have | he has | we have | they have; | I had | you had | he had | we had | they had
This is exactly the same in Spanish:
saltar | yo salto | tú saltas | él salta | nosotros saltamos | ellos saltan; yo salté | tú saltaste | él saltó | nosotros saltamos | ellos saltaron
correr | yo corro | tú corres | él corre | nosotros corremos | ellos corren; yo corrí | tú corriste | él corrió | nosotros corremos | ellos corrieron
ir | yo voy | tú vas | él va | nosotros vamos | ellos van; yo fui | tú fuiste | él fue | nosotros fuimos | ellos fueron
tener | yo tengo | tú tienes | él tiene | nosotros tenemos | ellos tienen; yo tuve | tú tuviste | él tuvo | nosotros tuvimos | ellos tuvieron
And in French:
sauter | je saute | tu sautes | il saute | nous sautons | vous sautez | ils sautent; j'ai sauté | tu as sauté | il a sauté | nous avons sauté | vous avez sauté | ils ont sauté
courir | je cours | tu cours | il court | nous courons | vous courez | ils courent; j'ai couru | tu as couru | il a couru | nous avons couru | vous avez couru | ils ont couru
aller | je vais | tu vas | il va | nous allons | vous allez | ils vont; je suis allé | tu es allé | il est allé | nous avons allés | vous avez allés | ils sont allés
tenir | je tiens | tu tiens | il tient | nous tenons | vous tenez | ils tennent; j'ai tenu | tu as tenu | il a tenu | nous avons tenu | vous avez tenu | ils ont tenu
Note some of the random variations in the two languages, particularly French. The paradigm for present tense for the first verb is -∅ | -s | -∅ | -ons | -ez | -ent; for the second it's -s | -s | -t | -ons | -ez | -ent; for the third it's a completely different word from the infinitive form, in which if you take va as the stem, it's -is | -s | -∅, then in the plural it's a totally different stem again for which it's -ons | -ez, then a stem switch again for the 3rd pers pl -ont. The 4th verb follows the same paradigm as courir, but has a stem change in the singular from ten- to tien-. The past tense is done through a compound tense using the past participial form, but look at the auxiliary verb, aller uses être instead of avoir, and also aller's participial form adds an -s in the plural for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd whereas the other three do not.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
English is basically a creole, so it had a lot of the complicate grammar shaved off a thousand years ago. If you're trying to find some rational explanation as to why English overtook Spanish and French as global languages- which is always misguided, when you're talking about historical change- that's going to be your best bet.
sophie
Break My Heart
Another delightfully irritating quirk of French: countries:
Some are feminine like La France, L'Allemagne, L'Italie or La Chine
Some are masculine like Le Brésil, Le Canada, Le Japon
Some are masculine plural like Les Etats-Unis and Les Pays-Bas
Some are feminine plural like Les Comores
Some don't require that you include the article like Cuba, Israël, or Taiwan
Some require that you use the preposition à and its variants like
au Japon, aux États-Unis,
Others require you to use en, like
en France, en Italie
The same random quirks apply to States and Cities, for which, naturally, exceptions apply.
For example, coming from most cities, you use de + city name:
de Paris, de Londres
sometimes you don't though:
du Caire, de la Nouvelle Orléans
Some are feminine like La France, L'Allemagne, L'Italie or La Chine
Some are masculine like Le Brésil, Le Canada, Le Japon
Some are masculine plural like Les Etats-Unis and Les Pays-Bas
Some are feminine plural like Les Comores
Some don't require that you include the article like Cuba, Israël, or Taiwan
Some require that you use the preposition à and its variants like
au Japon, aux États-Unis,
Others require you to use en, like
en France, en Italie
The same random quirks apply to States and Cities, for which, naturally, exceptions apply.
For example, coming from most cities, you use de + city name:
de Paris, de Londres
sometimes you don't though:
du Caire, de la Nouvelle Orléans
Yil (while finishing the translation of Poe) that at his time one could still occasionally see, on some death certificate/document stating cause of death, the phrase "Death by the visitation of God" (or the analogue in latin, Ex visitatione Dei -? is this the true latin form?).
Used in cases where cause of death seemed to be random, or very obscure.
Used in cases where cause of death seemed to be random, or very obscure.
*aspect
The phrase ‘Act of God’ is still used.
Not having verb conjugation or noun declension isn't exactly the same as not having grammar rules.
sophie
Break My Heart
Yes this is the correct form.
Chinese has a grammar. All languages have a grammar, and moreover a grammar which is internally consistent. It would not be a language were it not.
sophie
Break My Heart
Thank you.
GoodSarmatian
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Mandarin has plenty of grammar, it's just all sentence structure and particles (characters or one syllable "words" that modify the meaning of the sentence).
For example, 吗 (pronounced ma) at the end of a sentence turns it into a quesion.
You are German 吗 = are you German ?
It only looks very simple and very logical in the beginning because there's no conjugation, and by extension no irregular verbs.
Once you dive deeper, it becomes considerably more complicated.
了 (pronounced le) can be an intensifier if it comes after an adjective (btw, adjectives are also verbs; cold=being cold), or it can indicate past tense if comes directly after a verb. Or at the end of the sentence. Simple enough, as long as the sentence is simple enough. With longer sentences with different verbs and tenses, it get can pretty confusing pretty quickly.
And then there's the different tones...
And the characters which are always written with no spaces between them, so you have to figure out if those five characters are five one syllable words or one five syllable word or anything in between...
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
Chinese doesn't need grammar, because it has God-tier puns.
To the extent it does have grammar, it's an act of charity, to make the rest of us feel better.
To the extent it does have grammar, it's an act of charity, to make the rest of us feel better.
Whoa, dude, I'm just going on hearsay here, not submitting a paper.
Out of curiosity, do any of the languages you speak have declensions? In Hebrew, every verb is said differently based on what it is referring to (e.g. "okhel," which means eat - the word changes depending on whether the subject is by masculine or feminine, whether you are addressing the subject directly or talking about it, whether the subject is singular or plural, and whether the action is taking place in the past, present or future - plus the infinitive). I haven't even started learning future tense yet, so I know only a mere thirteen (EDIT: forgot one, so fourteen) permutations of every single verb. I believe there are about twenty in total.
Is that what declensions are or am I thinking of something else?
Spoiler :
No, I'll stick to pseudoscientific metahistorical theories rather than pseudoscientific linguistic theories to explain that.
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sophie
Break My Heart
Proto-Indo European had declensions so all IE Languages exhibit declension in some form or another, even English. An IE language's words are, traditionally, composed of three parts: a root word - usually a verb existing in a verbal form - plus a particle suffix indicating how the verb's action is being expressed. These two pieces join to form the stem. The Latin term doctor is an example of a stem - the verb doceo ("I teach, educate, bring up") is joined with the masculine agent particle -tor ("He who") to get the word doctor "one who teaches". To this stem is attached inflectional endings which follow a prescribed pattern according to the shape of the word. Syntax is divided into a number of cases, each tasked with indicating an individual word's role in the wider context of the clause or utterance. Declension is the process by which a word's inflectional ending falls (declines) from a base form (nominative in IE) to an inflected form.
English has this in its pronouns, which decline from a base nominative form to either a genitive (possessive) form or an objective (accusative, indirect, or prepositional) form:
obj | him
gen | his
French and Spanish also have this in their pronouns, both possessing a nominative, genitive, accusative (direct object), and dative (indirect object) form. French also possesses a disjunctive form which it uses for emphasis and prepositional objects:
gen | el suyo | le sien
acc | lo | le
dat | le | lui
disj | - | lui
Latin and Greek have this for all nouns and adjectives, both for Singular and Plural in Latin, and additionally for a dual form (e.g. My [two] hands built...; I saw it with my [two] eyes) in some variants of Ancient Greek (most prominently in Attic and Homeric). Latin has 7 cases - nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative (movement away or separation from a goal, instrument/cause, other random assorted uses), a vocative (for addressing a noun directly as in "et tu Brute"), and occasionally a Locative (static location) in the case of the house, cities, and some small islands (e.g. Lesbos -> Lesbi "On Lesbos"). Greek has 5 cases - nominative, genitive, accusative, dative, and vocative.
Latin has 5 declensional paradigms, determined by how they are inflected in their genitive form:
nom | femina | populus | homō | motus | diēs
gen | feminae | populī | hominis | motūs | diēī
dat | feminae | populō | hominī | motū | diēī
acc | feminam | populum | hominem | motum | diem
abl | feminā | populō | homine | motū | diē
voc | femina | populē | homō | motus | diēs
nom pl | feminae | populī | hominēs | motūs | diēs
gen pl | feminārum | populōrum | hominum | motuum | diērum
dat pl | feminīs | populīs | hominibus | motibus | diēbus
acc pl | feminas | populōs | hominēs | motūs | diēs
abl pl | feminīs | populīs | hominibus | motibus | diēbus
voc pl | feminae | populī | hominēs | motūs | diēs
Because all syntax is indicated via inflections, you can arrange a sentence in any order you want in Latin, moving words around as you want to emphasize the parts of the sentence that are most important. Everything is inferred through the form alone:
Nominative | Genitive | Dative | Accusative | Ablative | Adverb
Hi omnes lingua, institutis, legibus inter se differunt. Gallos ab Aquitanis Garumna flumen, a Belgis Matrona et Sequana diuidit.
All these people differ among themselves in respect to language, institutions, and laws. The river Garumna [Garonne] divides the Gauls from the Aquitanians, and the rivers Matrona [Marne] and Sequana [Seine] divides them (the Gauls) from the Belgae.
Horum omnium fortissimi sunt Belgae, propterea quod a cultu atque humanitate provinciae longissime absunt, minimeque ad eos mercatores saepe commeant atque ea quae ad effeminandos animos pertinent important proximique sunt Germanis, qui trans Rhenum incolunt, quibuscum continenter bellum gerunt.
Of all these peoples, the bravest are the Belgae, owing to [the fact] that [they] are furthest distant from the culture and refinement of [our] province (Provence), and that merchants least frequently visit them and [they] import those things which tend to effeminate the mind; They also neighbor the Germani, who reside across the Rhenus (Rhine), with whom [they] continuously are waging war.
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Cassius Critzer
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Owen, this is pretty highbrow linguistics and philosophy is peppered all throughout your posts. So what language is the best for communicating ideas ...clearly. It seems to me that real diplomacy and conflict resolution in general cannot exist without a common language.
English cannot accomplish this due to the colonization by the British Empire and the outrageous warmongering by America.
To communicate ideas, should we return to a symbolic written language like Chinese?
English cannot accomplish this due to the colonization by the British Empire and the outrageous warmongering by America.
To communicate ideas, should we return to a symbolic written language like Chinese?
Gori the Grey
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Oh, that question was settled long ago by the Grand Academy of Lagado.
sophie
Break My Heart
Couple things:
1) From a linguistics standpoint your first question is not one that is answerable, nor indeed one which a linguist feels even needs to be answered. All languages are equally good at communicating ideas because all languages exist to communicate ideas. Different grammars are just different ways of tackling the same day-to-day challenges. Things that are inefficient are altered or removed. Elements that aren't addressed by existing elements of the grammar are added to the grammar gradually via innovation.
Linguistics is a discipline which seeks to make no prescriptions about language or how a language "ought" to work. Rather the focus is simply to describe language as it is actually expressed by those speaking it.
2) As said in the post that actually kicked off this discussion: language =/= writing system. A character system like that of Chinese works well for Chinese because of the analytic nature of the language, and because of the difficulties a tonal language like Chinese presents to a phonetic representation via an alphabet or syllabary: any perusal over Latin-alphabet representations of the Chinese language very rapidly make that apparent. Additionally, the fact that Chinese is an analytic language with virtually no inflections makes it very amenable to a pictographically-rooted writing system. Compare this to a heavily inflected language like Latin or English: how to you represent ago ("I do") vs agas ("you do") vs actus ("that which was done") vs agenda ("those things which ought to be done") vs actor ("he who does") vs actrix ("she who does"). It makes far more sense for a language like this to be represented phonetically, and, because of the large amount of vowels (a, e, i, o, u, aa, ee, ii, oo, uu, ae, au, oe) and the large amount of consonant clusters, a syllabary doesn't make a lot of sense. Compare this to, say, Korean or Cherokee, both of which are languages which lend themselves very well to having syllabaries.
Hangul, the Korean writing system is probably the simplest in the world to read, learn, and understand, but it's also a system that was tailor-made for Korean, and really only works because of how Korean works as a language. Latin/Greek/Cyrillic alphabets work extremely well for the Indo-European languages. When your language is built around phoneme-level variations in a word's arrangement of sounds, it follows then that the best way to express your language in writing is through a system in which each symbol corresponds to a phoneme.
Personally I don't think there's anything wrong with English. We're long overdue for some spelling reforms, and the antiquarian in me would love to see þ, æ, etc. brought back, but beyond that there's nothing inherently bad about English that makes it any more or less difficult to learn (in isolation) than any other language. Except for the American r: that is an objectively difficult and obscure sound.
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Gori the Grey
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For all that, I'd make the case for English. Its verbal stock coming so evenly from two separate language traditions means that it has two words for purt near everything (timorous, fearful, e.g.)*, and that allows for greater nuance in communication, fine shades of meaning.
Some of my favorite reference works are the old Webster's New Dictionary of Synonyms and Hayakawa's Use the Right Word. Not because the shades of meaning they lay out are still current (because they often aren't) but because they show the range of words that might apply to any given topic, and show you what fine shades of meaning result from having a range like that available.
I think even a linguistic case can be made on these grounds. Think of that opening of Saussure's Course in General Linguistics, where he illustrates the co-dependence of word and thought by placing words and ideas on opposite sides of a strip, with the differential aspect of words (cat = not-cap) cutting that strip into segments of word-thought. Well, the more cuts in the strip, the more word-thoughts available to a speaker of that language. The whole Eskimos-have-twelve-words-for-snow principle, but distributed across the entire language, not just one specialized subject.
Here's an example that fell in my path the other day. I was walking my dog after a windy day and I saw part of a tree blown down before me. It was about three feet long and about half an inch in diameter at its thickest part. It felt too big to call it a twig. But it also felt too small to call it a branch, since the main branches on the tree it fell off of were maybe 8 inches in diameter at the place where they met the tree. Of course, one can name it in English; one can call it a small branch or a large twig. But a language that had a word for that intermediate stretch would be able to think this thing that I saw in front of me a little more precisely than English can.
*and not infrequently, three (phobic)
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