History UsefulNotes / GrammarInForeignLanguages

* 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"; questionable implications aside, it's really confusing). Other languages differentiates gender by properties of the noun, at which point linguists generally stop calling it "gender" and instead use the term "noun class"; Swahili has a different "gender" (noun class) for people, animals, tools, liquids and so on.[[note]]This is a characteristic of the Bantu language family more generally--Swahili's distant relatives like [=isiZulu=] in South Africa and Lingala in the Congo Basin also have it.[[/note]] 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.

* 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 puts the verb in the second position of declarative statements, at the beginning of questions (just like English), and at the end of subordinate clauses. And Japanese... Japanese word order has its own PAGE on Wiki/TheOtherWiki.

* 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 sdrugimi or vchera?[[note]]It's actually simpler than you might think – because of consonant assimilation, it actually sounds like "fsmolensk", "fpragu", "zdrugimi" – only "k vrachu" actually sounds like "kvrachu".[[/note]] 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]]

* Is written using logograms (Chinese)[[note]]Each symbol stands for a word or a morpheme, as in mean-ing-ful[[/note]], abjads (Arabic, Hebrew)[[note]]Vowels are not written[[/note]], syllabaries (Inuktitut)[[note]]Each symbol represents a syllable[[/note]], abugida (the languages of India and Ethiopia)[[note]]Vowels are written as attachments to consonants[[/note]], or a hodgepodge of everything (ancient Egyptian and modern Japanese), instead of an alphabetic writing system. And not all writing systems include the concepts of upper and lower case[[note]]Most languages.[[/note]], cursive writing[[note]]For instance, all Arabic writing is cursive, while in Hebrew the "cursive" script is non-connecting[[/note]] and/or punctuation, and if they have them, they may not use them the same way.

* Have words that don't directly and perfectly translate into English. Sure, there can be some of the whole "[[LanguageEqualsThought showing culture through vocabulary]]" thing, but also more mundane instances -- for example, English divides temperature into ''cold, cool, warm'' and ''hot'', but other languages may have only two or three of those, or maybe more.

** Hungarian in present tense does not use existential verbs when expressing that <subject> is <adjective>. The adjective is not conjugated like in Japanese though, it only gets a plural marker if the subject is plural. E.g.: "The ball is red" becomes "A labda piros", but "The balls are red" will be "A labdák pirosak".

** Languages with noun cases also avoid AmbiguousSyntax of the "flying purple people eater" sort. The main noun in a group like this will be in nominative case, along with its adjectives, while all the other nouns (and their adjectives) will be in other cases, clearing the syntax up. For example, in Polish, a creature that eats flying purple people would be ''pożeracz fruwających fioletowych ludzi'', while a purple flying creature that east people would be ''fioletowy fruwający pożeracz ludzi''. And a purple creature that eats flying people will be ''fioletowy pożeracz fruwających ludzi''.

** In Polish, it's ''jeden śliczny kotek'' (one cute kitty, nominative singular) and ''dwadzieścia jeden ślicznych kotków'' (twenty one of the same). Numbers ending with two, three or four follow the pattern ''dwa/trzy/cztery kotki'' (two/three/four kitties, with the noun in nominative plural) and numbers with any other ending follow the other pattern (''dwadzieścia pięć ślicznych kotków'' - the noun in genitive plural).

** Spanish, in particular (Sorry, this troper isn't well versed in other Romance languages) also has an auxiliary verb in ''haber'', which is sort of a mixture of "to be", "to have", and "to exist". It's used in almost all 'perfect' verb forms (indicating an action happened right before another action) by conjugating it to whatever tense and placing the past participle of the action afterwards, taking the 'to have' meaning ("Ella había comido antes de ir al cine." ("She had eaten before going to the movies.")). However, it's not usable as "to be" as in "I am from Texas.", but only as qualifying existence ("Hay una granja en la colina." ("There is a farm on the hill.")) Basically, it's a weirdo verb.

* Do not mark nouns for number (Japanese, Chinese), 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.

** The latter is actually a very important object of study in linguistics: verb-framing versus satellite-framing. Spanish (like all Romance languages) is a heavily verb-framing language: this means that the path of motion, but not the manner is usually expressed by the verb. You don't "run in" or "run out" in Spanish, but "enter" or "exit" (if needed, you can specify the manner: "enter running" (''entrar corriendo''). English, by comparison, is typically satellite-framing (like all Germanic languages). Russian and other Slavic languages are even more satellite-framing than English, hence the lack of the direct counterpart to "bring". Notice how this differs wildly between related languages (Romance, Germanic and Slavic are all Indo-European).

** Portuguese, Spanish and other Romance Languages have a variation on this: they can mark some numbers in both gender and ''[[DepartmentofRedundancyDepartment number]]'', but not all of them and not always. For Portuguese, the rule is you can one, two and numbers ending in them (such as one hundred and two) in gender[[note]]''Um'' and ''Uma'' (One), ''Dois'' and ''Duas'' (Two) and likewise ''Cento e dois'' and ''Cento e duas'' (One hundred and two)[[/note]], but not eleven or twelve, nor their derivatives, and only when denoting quantities of specific things, otherwise the male is standard). In number you can mark any number that doesn't end with "S" or "Z", but this is only for denoting quantities of numbers[[note]]''Quatro'' (Four) and ''Quatros'' (Fours) but only "Três" (Three[s])[[/note]].