History UsefulNotes / GrammarInForeignLanguages

** Somewhat related as well is being finicky about whether definite articles or possessives should be used in describing a noun. For example, in Spanish, body parts are never referred to with possessives: you would never hear anybody worth their salt say "Me duele mi brazo." [[note]]"My arm hurts."[[/note]], but instead "Me duele el brazo." [[note]]also "My arm hurts."[[/note]]. The only real exception to this rule is when the body part being talked about is figurative: there's a sharp difference between "Me duele mi corazón." ("My heart hurts." like the speaker just broke up with their boyfriend) and "Me duele el corazón." (in which case you might want to call an ambulance).
** Place articles after the word modified instead of before (Romanian, Bulgarian, Macedonian and the Scandinavian languages have an [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclitic#Classification enclitic]] definite article, while the Romanian indefinite article follows rules closer to English).

** The ConLang [[http://mw.lojban.org Lojban]], which is built on logic, only has three main parts of speech: particles, pronouns and verbs. No nouns, adjectives or adverbs. A noun is built with a construction equivalent to "someone/something that [verb]s" (like the English suffix "-er"), and adjectives/adverbs with a construction like "do [main verb] in a [secondary verb]-like manner". Also, although they're mostly optional, Lojban has the so-called "vocalized parentheses": particles that mark where a clause/phrase/something starts and ends, thus preventing most kinds of AmbiguousSyntax.

* Are topic-prominent instead of subject-promotional (Japanese, Chinese). In English, the subject is understood to be the topic of the sentence (which the passive voice helps to facilitate). In Japanese, topic and subject do not have to be the same.

* Do not mark nouns for number (Japanese), or, alternatively, have ''more'' number markers than simply singular and plural. Many languages have separate dual or even trial ('three') numbers. There is even at least one language that has marks for zero (I have no cookies), fractional (I have half of a cookie), singular (I have one cookie), dual (I have two cookies), paucal (I have a few cookies), and large-scale plural (I have lots of cookies)! Most Indo-European languages have ''lost'' their duals; Sanskrit, Ancient Greek, and Old Church Slavonic had them, and there are still traces of them in some of the Balto-Slavic languages (usually in a unique declension for the number two, and different noun forms used with certain numbers). English's use of the word ''both'' (rather than *''all two'') may be a remnant of this as well. Latin also had one, which survived in the irregular declension of the word "duo", while Slovene still makes full use of it. Old English possessed the vestiges of a dual, but only in the pronouns. Come Middle English, this dual number was gone.

* Treat relative clauses like adjectives. For example, in Mandarin Chinese, using the attributive particle ''de'', one can just as easily say "red ''de'' car" as "drives down the street ''de'' car," using actual Chinese words of course. The former would simply be "red car," but the latter would have to be translated as "the car driving down the street."
* Are topic-prominent instead of subject-promotional (Japanese). In English, the subject is understood to be the topic of the sentence (which the passive voice helps to facilitate). In Japanese, topic and subject do not have to be the same.

* Have wildly different syntax (word order). English generally places the subject of a sentence first, the verb second, and the object last, a very common word order. However, in just as many languages, the subject is placed first, the object second, and the verb last. A minority of languages even do things like place the verb or the object first, the subject last, or any other possible combination. Some languages, usually those that are highly inflected, don't even have a hard and fast word order at all. Latin, for instance, generally prefers SOV outside of poetry, but is so inflected that the word order can be changed without changing the meaning of the sentence. The old forms of Semitic languages (like Classical Arabic and Biblical Hebrew) historically preferred VSO, but left SVO as an option because of their inflection--the latter of which became dominant in the contemporary colloquial forms. German can be a word order cluster fuck. On paper, it's SVO. That is true, but questions are VSO. The rest typically go SOV with a split predicate, part of the action, with the main verb turned into an infinitive and then crammed in at the end, with any auxiliary verbs being put into the first person singular form and placed after that. It's also considered a V2, language, which means that if a sentence begins with an adverbial (or even an object, for stylistic effect), the verb must go second, even when that means the subject comes after. And Japanese... Japanese word order has its own PAGE on TheOtherWiki.

* Have wildly different syntax (word order). English generally places the subject of a sentence first, the verb second, and the object last, a very common word order. However, in just as many languages, the subject is placed first, the object second, and the verb last. A minority of languages even do things like place the verb or the object first, the subject last, or any other possible combination. Some languages, usually those that are highly inflected, don't even have a hard and fast word order at all. Latin, for instance, generally prefers SOV outside of poetry, but is so inflected that the word order can be changed without changing the meaning of the sentence. The old forms of Semitic languages (like Classical Arabic and Biblical Hebrew) historically preferred VSO, but left SVO as an option because of their inflection--the latter of which became dominant in the contemporary colloquial forms. German can be a word order cluster fuck. On paper, it's SVO. That is true, but questions are VSO. The rest typically go SOV with a split predicate, part of the action, with the main verb turned into an infinitive and then crammed in at the end, with any auxiliary verbs being put into the first person singular form and placed after that. It's also considered a V2, language, which means that if a sentence begins with an adverbial, the verb must go second, even when that means the subject comes after. And Japanese... Japanese word order has its own PAGE on TheOtherWiki.

* Have wildly different syntax (word order). English generally places the subject of a sentence first, the verb second, and the object last, a very common word order. However, in just as many languages, the subject is placed first, the object second, and the verb last. A minority of languages even do things like place the verb or the object first, the subject last, or any other possible combination. Some languages, usually those that are highly inflected, don't even have a hard and fast word order at all. Latin, for instance, generally prefers SOV outside of poetry, but is so inflected that the word order can be changed without changing the meaning of the sentence. The old forms of Semitic languages (like Classical Arabic and Biblical Hebrew) historically preferred VSO, but left SVO as an option because of their inflection--the latter of which became dominant in the contemporary colloquial forms. German can be a word order cluster fuck. On paper, it's SVO. That is true, but questions are VSO. The rest typically go SOV with a split predicate, part of the action, with the main verb turned into an infinitive and then cramemd in at the end, with any auxiliary verbs being put into the first person singular form and placed after that. And Japanese... Japanese word order has its own PAGE on TheOtherWiki.

* Form compound nouns differently. Most languages put the base noun at the back, but there are languages which put it at the front. As an example, ''control CENTER'' would be translated as ''PUSAT kawalan'' in Malay language.

* Some languages have rare sounds and unusual phonotactics, which can make them sound like the TheUnpronouncable. Many world languages do not like big clusters of either consonants or vowels. A maximum of about three consonants per vowel, and no more than three vowels in a row is usual. Russian can be really dickish with odd sound consonants, especially with prepositions. Can you say kvrachu or vsmolensk or vtorom or vpragu or sdrugymi or vchera? And even Russians shake their heads at ''[[UpToEleven Armenians]]''.[[note]]A famous Soviet era actor had "Mkrtchian" as his surname. That's a six consonants strung together. And it's actually a pretty common Armenian surname and isn't remotely a longest consonant cluster in the language.[[/note]]

* Some languages have rare sounds and unusual phonotactics, which can make them sound like the TheUnpronouncable. Many world languages do not like big clusters of either consonants or vowels. A maximum of about three consonants per vowel, and no more than three vowels in a row is usual. Russian can be really dickish with odd sound consonants, especially with prepositions. Can you say kvrachu or vsmolensk or vtorom or vpragu or sdrugymi or vchera?

* There can also be grammatical gender for numbers. In Hebrew, there is a male and female form (the latter is the one commonly used for plain numbers - probably because the male form is often a syllable longer). Sometimes, it's worse, when there are further divisions due to the object type. There is a story about a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nivkh Nivkh]] child who had trouble subtracting five buttons from thirty and adding six trees to seven - because the shape of the buttons and the size of the trees weren't specified.

** Similarly, many non-English languages divide up ''colors'' [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate differently from the Western standard "ROY G. BIV"]], with some having as few as just ''two'' basic colors (black and white)[[note]]Or rather black/dark/cold and white/bright/warm[[/note]]. Quite a few make [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_in_language no distinction at all between blue and green]]. On the other hand, some Asian languages have dozens if not hundreds of distinct color names. An author writing a race with a different visual range from humans (such as demihumans from [[DungeonsAndDragons D&D]], who frequently possess vision in the infrared range) may forget to create terms for [[FictionalColour colors humans can't see at all]], not even "[[http://www.negativland.com/archives/015squant/story.html squant]]" or "[[Discworld/TheColourOfMagic octarine]]".

** Have many more articles than English. German articles change according to gender, number, and case of the noun, resulting in 24 possible combinations for the definitive article (although those are only expressed through 6 forms).

** Polish uses "to have" much like English, but adds an extra sense that literally translates as "it doesn't have X", meaning "X isn't here".
** Erm, not really. "To have" ("mieć") is never used as an auxilliary verb - Polish only has one past tense (with two aspects, if you want to be technical) and the vestigial plusquamperfectum uses "to be".

* Use noun cases to convey the same meaning as English prepositions. In Finnish, for instance, there are ''fifteen'' distinct noun cases (kind of makes the ''three'' in English look simple, doesn't it?) to express various different meanings, but the use of prepositions is severely limited. For example, "talo" means "house," but "talossa" means "in the house," "talolla" means "at the house," "taloksi" means "(transform) into a house," etc.
** Hungarian has at least eighteen cases, and that's without counting the rarely used ones. A fellow Uralic language, Komi, has over twenty as well.

* Lack relative constructions ("the one that does X" etc.), and have to substitute adjective phrases ("the X-doing one"), or have correlatives: "This is the man who my wife has been sleeping with him!"
** In Romance languages, the opposite is true; there is no adjective phrase with verbs. To say "The talking dog" in French, one must say "The dog that talks." (''Le chien qui parle.'')
*** Actually, even in Romance languages adjective phrases exist: in French for example, one could as well say "Le chien parlant" ("The talking dog"). It's true that English has way more occurrences of those, though, as many of them can only be translated with relative constructions.

* Possess writing directionalities different from the most common left-to-right and top-to-bottom, such as right-to-left and top-to-bottom (Arabic, Hebrew), left-to-right in vertical lines that run from top to bottom first (Mongolian, Uyghur), or even right-to-left in vertical lines (Chinese, Japanese). Beyond that would be ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon boustrophedon]]'' (Ancient Greek, Archaic Latin), changing direction with each line, which while common in antiquity is used by no (natural) modern language. Then there are languages that can be written in multiple ways, or are leaning more towards left-to-right and top-to-bottom as a result of western influence.

* Conversely, many languages have fewer sounds than English. English has a relatively average number of consonants, but like most Germanic languages, it also has an usually large number of vowels; [[http://wals.info/chapter/2 most languages have significantly fewer]]. Many foreigners often cannot differentiate between vowel pairs like cold and called, worm and warm, bold and bald, say and see, ball and bowl, mint and meant. (Even ''native speakers'' don't always differentiate some of these.) Similarly, even though English has an average number of consonants, that doesn't mean that its particular consonants are commonly found in other languages. For example, languages with the English "th" sounds /θ ð/ are very uncommon, and the English "R" sound /ɹ/ is also rather unique to the language. (Most other languages have a tap or a trill.)

* Have nouns with grammatical gender. French has two (masculine and feminine), German has three (masculine, feminine, neuter), and some languages assign "gender" according to whether the topic of the subject is visible, known to be near, or far away. Some languages have a simple animate vs. inanimate. Some confusingly ''combine'' these (e.g. Arabic, which arbitrarily divides non-human objects into masculine and feminine, and proceeds to ignore that division by making all inanimate plurals "singular feminine"; UnfortunateImplications aside, it's really confusing). Other languages differentiates gender by properties of the noun, Swahili has a different gender for people, animals, tools, liquids and so on. Or alternatively, are more gender-neutral than English, like the Uralic Languages. Imagine having "he" and "she" be the same word, as well as "him" and "her."
** It's also possible for languages not to distinguish gender or animacy in their pronouns. Basically, everything is "it", whether it's a man, a woman, a dog or a bit of navel lint.

* Possess writing directionalities different from the most common left-to-right and top-to-bottom, such as right-to-left and top-to-bottom (Arabic, Hebrew), left-to-right in vertical lines that run from top to bottom first (Mongolian, Uyghur), or even right-to-left in vertical lines (Chinese, Japanese). Beyond that would be ''[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boustrophedon boustrophedon]]'' (changing direction with each line), which while common in antiquity is used by no (natural) modern language. Then there are languages that can be written in multiple ways, or are leaning more towards left-to-right and top-to-bottom as a result of western influence.

** Have many more articles than English. German articles change according to gender, number, and case of the noun, resulting in 16 possible combinations for the definitive article (although those are only expressed through 6 forms).

* Conversely, many languages have fewer sounds than English. English has a relatively average number of consonants, but like most Germanic languages, it also has an usually large number of vowels; [[http://wals.info/chapter/2 most languages have ''significantly'' fewer]]. Many foreigners often cannot differentiate between vowel pairs like cold and called, worm and warm, bold and bald, say and see, ball and bowl, mint and meant. (Even ''native speakers'' don't always differentiate some of these.) Similarly, even though English has an average number of consonants, that doesn't mean that its particular consonants are commonly found in other languages. For example, languages with the English "th" sounds /θ ð/ are very uncommon, and the English "R" sound /ɹ/ is also rather unique to the language. (Most other languages have a tap or a trill.)

* Alternatively, have there be fewer sounds than are found in English. English has an average number of consonants but an usually large number of vowels; [[http://wals.info/chapter/2 most languages have significantly fewer]]. Many foreigners often cannot differentiate between pairs like cold and called, worm and warm, bold and bald, say and see, ball and bowl, mint and meant. There are also many languages that don't have some of English's consonant sounds. For example, languages with the English "th" sounds /θ ð/ are very uncommon.

* Are topic promotional instead of subject promotional (Japanese). In English, the subject is understood to be the topic of the sentence (which the passive voice facilitates). In Japanese, topic and subject do not have to be the same.
* Have no element in a sentence that corresponds straightforwardly to what Europeans would call the "subject." The topic-promotional Japanese ''-wa'' is a good example, as are dozens of academic papers in Linguistics debating whether sentences in Tagalog (the most common language of the Philippines) can be properly said to have subjects or not. (Short version: the properties that a subject has in English can often be split up between two noun phrases, the "topic" and the "agent", in other languages.)

* Alternatively, have there be fewer sounds than are found in English. English has an average number of consonants. Most languages have significantly fewer vowels. However, there are many langauges who do not have English's sounds. Almost no other language has the th sounds. Many foreigners often cannot differentiate between cold and called, worm and warm, bold and bald, say and see, ball and bowl, mint and meant.

* Many languages have sounds which English can closely approximate, but does not replicate, and some of these words can form minimal pairs, the only difference between them being one sound difference. The most infamous of these is are the German nackt (naked) and Nacht (night). Also somewhat infamous are the Russian syn and syr (son and cheese), mat and mat' (checkmate and mother), bit' and byt' (be and beat), semya and sem'ya (seed and family), brat and brat' (brother and take), pil and pyl (saw and fervor), mil and myl (mill and soap), den and den' (den and day).

* And above all, do not have only and all of the sounds that are found in English. The pronunciation of even closely related languages, like Dutch and German, can only be approximated by English sounds, let alone more distant languages, and vice versa: this is of course where foreign accents come from. Even a lot of conlangs still use English's horribly complicated tense/lax vowel system (yet many claim to have five vowels, while English generally has 12 or more), and some of the worse-done [[ReLex relexes]] and such employ English orthographic conventions as well -- writing ''reed'' or ''rede'' when the speaker says [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA /r\i:d/]]. And few if any conlangs employ ''more'' consonants than English possesses (which do exist -- [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language Xhosa]] and related African languages, for instance, have three entire groups of click-based consonants which have no counterparts in Indo-European tongues, and the glottal stop -- which while present in English is generally not even noticed as a separate "sound" -- is a common element in many others). Many languages have sounds which English can closely approximate, but does not replicate, and some of these words can form minimal pairs, the only difference between them being one sound difference. The most infamous of these is are the German nackt (naked) and Nacht (night). Also somewhat infamous are the Russian syn and syr (son and cheese), mat and mat' (checkmate and mother), bit' and byt' (be and beat), semya and sem'ya (seed and family), brat and brat' (brother and take), pil and pyl (saw and fervor), mil and myl (mill and soap), den and den' (den and day).

* Have wildly different syntax (word order). English generally places the subject of a sentence first, the verb second, and the object last, a very common word order. However, in just as many languages, the subject is placed first, the object second, and the verb last. A minority of languages even do things like place the verb or the object first, the subject last, or any other possible combination. Some languages, usually those that are highly inflected, don't even have a hard and fast word order at all. Latin, for instance, generally prefers SOV outside of poetry, but is so inflected that the word order can be changed without changing the meaning of the sentence. The old forms of Semitic languages (like Classical Arabic and Biblical Hebrew) historically preferred VSO, but left SVO as an option because of their inflection--the latter of which became dominant in the contemporary colloquial forms.

* And above all, do not have only and all of the sounds that are found in English. The pronunciation of even closely related languages like French and German can only be approximated by English sounds, let alone more distant languages, and vice versa: this is of course where foreign accents come from. Even a lot of conlangs still use English's horribly complicated tense/lax vowel system (yet many claim to have five vowels, while English generally has 12 or more), and some of the worse-done [[ReLex relexes]] and such employ English orthographic conventions as well -- writing ''reed'' or ''rede'' when the speaker says [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-SAMPA /r\i:d/]]. And few if any conlangs employ ''more'' consonants than English possesses (which do exist -- [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xhosa_language Xhosa]] and related African languages, for instance, have three entire groups of click-based consonants which have no counterparts in Indo-European tongues, and the glottal stop -- which while present in English is generally not even noticed as a separate "sound" -- is a common element in many others).

Unlike what you would see in many [[AliensSpeakingEnglish works]] [[ReLex of]] [[IndoEuropeanAlienLanguage fiction]], languages of the real world can work in wildly different ways, enough to make them sound like StarfishLanguage to a non-native. In fact, for ''every property'' that has ever been proposed as a "universal" characteristic of human language, there is at least one known non-artificial human language that doesn't have it, or has its exact opposite.

* Mark verbs for categories that English doesn't, such as [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_(grammar) voice]], [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_aspect aspect]], [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_mood mood]], and so on. Or don't mark verbs for categories that English does; Mandarin Chinese has no tense, and conveys temporal information through aspect, instead.