Languages! Are! Weird!

Viel Glück!

"life is just a series of increasingly canon-eluding ao3 tags" ~ everydunsparce "Keep your hellfruit away from me, tempter" ~ also Every

Auch von mir "Viel Glück"!

Feel free to ask questions if something should be unclear.

I'm learning Swedish and something that I wish English did when talking about a relative if it had an easier way to say if they are your Paternal or Maternal relative.

In Swedish for Grandfather you have: Farfar or Morfar (Farfar is Paternal and Morfar is Maternal)

For Grandmother you have Farmor or Mormor (Farmor is Paternal and Mormor is Maternal)

Uncle is either Farbror, Morbror, or Onkel for Paternal, Maternal and I don't know when the last would be used; I haven't learned it yet.

Aunt is either Faster, Moster, or Tant for Paternal, Maternal and I don't know when the last would be used because I haven't learned it yet.

Batman Ninja more like Batman's Bizarre Adventure

With that system it's harder to speak of relatives in the abstract, though. Let's say you've got something like "because the concert took place in the middle of the day, most of the children came with their grandparents, as their parents were working". (A pretty far fetched example, but you get my point.) You wouldn't know which side of each kid's family the grandparents were from; or maybe some kids came with their maternal grandparents, while others came with paternal grandparents. Which term for "grandfather/mother" would you use? ("Pär, who is 6, came with his grandparents" would be a case where you're talking about just one set of grandparents and without asking you can't know which term you should use in this case, either.) I know a bit of Swedish but I actually don't know what they'd use as the neutral "default" in those cases.

Like English, Swedish has different third-person singulars for two genders, and AFAIK, no universally accepted "third gender" pronoun, or a neutral one. (English seems to have mostly accepted "they" as a third-person singular, but that's an ongoing process.) The pronouns in Swedish are "han" for male and "hon" for female.

My language doesn't have that: we've only got one third-person singular ("hän") and it's the same for males and females. (In non-formal settings we quite often use "se", which literally means "it" - whenever you stop to think about it, it sounds rude, but it's just sort of more convenient, and native speakers generally don't consider it rude or anything.)

If you're an English speaker, there are a couple of vowels in Swedish that you'll find a little bit difficult, and one or two consonants, as well. Å/å is pronounced as the long vowel in "door" or "bore", while O/o is usually pronounced as u (roughly the vowel sound from "push" or "move" or "through"). Ä/ä and Ö/ö are a bit harder to find. The former is quite a lot like the so-called schwa sound - think "about" or "an" or "and". The latter doesn't exist in English, but if you know a bit of German you'll have learned it. It's hard to describe a vowel sound, but it's sort of a long oo but sort of produced a bit lower in your throat (or that's how it feels to me at least). I think some accents of English would pronounce "burn" with this vowel, if that helps at all.

I don't like Swedish as a language - I was forced to learn it and would have preferred to learn something useful instead, etc - but one thing that I like about it, that exists in the Swedish spoken in Sweden, but not the Swedish spoken by Swedish-speaking Finns (and AFAIK, it doesn't exist in other Nordic languages, either), is a consonant sound that's sort of between h and k. Here's Wiktionary for "skit" (meaning "shit") in Swedish; listen to how it's pronounced. For some reason I rather like that sound. It's probably the only thing about the Swedish language that I like, and of course it doesn't exist in my country.

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

"chłit". That's how I'd write down in Polish what I heard there.

Also, remind me: how the hell the Irish pronounce "aoi", like in the word "taoiseach" and the names Aoife and Saoirse?

"what the complete, unabridged, 4k ultra HD fuck with bonus features" - Mark Von Lewis

I looked up those two names on Wikipedia, and both had the pronunciation given as a long i sound. Basically the long vowel from "meek" or "peek".

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

I'm curious as to why, when names for foreign foods get Anglicized, there are so many cases of the plural form in the original language becoming the singular form in English.

Like pieróg (sing.) and pierógi (plural) in Polish becoming pierogi (sing.) and pierogies (plural) in English

Or cannolo (sing.) and cannoli (plural) in Italian becoming cannoli and cannolis in English.

Like I understand adding the "s" to plural is an English thing, but why not add the s to the singular form?

edited 16th Jul '17 2:50:05 PM by Cailleach

Some of the few Irish words I know how to pronounce, approximately!

Taoiseach: TEE-shack
Aoife: EE-fa
Saoirse: SEER-sha

Avatar from here.

Hmm, another question. I was looking at language family maps, and eventually got to the Uralic family map. The Uralic family includes Finnish, Estonian, a few Scandinavian and Russian minority languages...and Hungarian. How in the world did an Uralic language end up in a place nowhere near where the rest of them are spoken, separated by this huge wall of Indo-European languages? Even stranger, the languages classified as most similar to Hungarian are some of the furthest away.◊

How did Hungarian even happen?

Easy: Migration. The ancient Hungarians were Mongol/Hun-like nomads when they arrived in what is now known as Hungary.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

How similar are Icelandic and Old English?

I like to keep my audience riveted.

They're both Germanic languages, but belong to different branches. Old English is closer to Frisian and other West Germanic languages, and Icelandic is closer to Swedish and other North Germanic Languages, and neither are closer to Gothic

edited 21st Jul '17 8:38:47 PM by TotallyNotAnAlien

No more Mr. Nice Guy / No more Mr. Clean / No more Mr. Nice Guy / They say, "he's sick, he's obscene!"

It should be noted, though, that Old English had extensive contact with Old Norse and acquired a large number of loanwords. Also, they were more similar back then grammatically speaking.

ok boomer

I am proud of the Woolseyism I made.

In my Fortnite gameplay, I used a wordplay on "czaić się" (to wait in ambush) and "czajnik" (teakettle), saying something along the lines of (literally) "She waits in ambush... Fuckin' teakettle. Put her on the stove, she'll start whistlin'!" So, when making the subtitles, I turned it into "Sneaky sneaky... Fuckin' sneaker. Strap those velcros!"

"what the complete, unabridged, 4k ultra HD fuck with bonus features" - Mark Von Lewis

In English and any other language that follows its example on the matter, how come the common names of biological species don't count as proper names (and thus are typically not capitalized), despite the fact that proper names do include "groups of entities considered as unique", such as nationalities, ethnicities and tribes/clans/families?

edited 10th Oct '17 8:19:16 AM by MarqFJA

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Humanist bias? Combined with species' proper names being too wide a term to personalize, perhaps?

And the capitalization varies from language to language (in those which writing system allows capitalization, obviously). In Russian, Turkish and Kazakh, as far as I know, nationalities and ethnicities are not capitalized. Clans, families and tribes are.

P.S. That was an answer to the unedited question, but it still stands.

edited 10th Oct '17 8:24:12 AM by Millership

Spiral out, keep going.

Nationalities, languages, ethnicities, etc are derived from the proper name of a country, and because the country's name is capitalised, so are its derivatives (such as the demonym).

This is something that Finnish people also have trouble with when they're learning English.

would be

("Henkilö" means person and I've put in it brackets because you can simply say "ranskalainen" to refer to a French person, but "ranskalainen" is also an adjective that refers to anything French, including objects. Similarly, "ranska" (without the capital R) always refers to the French language, so you don't need to call it "ranskan kieli" (literally "the language of France"), but it's more specific to say "ranskan kieli".)

I studied German for a bit - I remember very little of it these days - but I found it sort of fun that every noun is spelled with a capital letter. It feels like a very unique feature of that language, especially contrasted with Finnish, where demonyms and languages don't get capital letters, so giving them to common objects would seem even stranger than it would to an English speaker.

We don't use capital letters for days of the weeks or months, either, even though some of them are derived from proper names. Incidentally, the Finnish names for the months are a bit harder to understand, in terms of etymology from a native speaker's point of view, than the English ones. (To be fair, though, the English names are still a bit tricky: for instance, "October" is so named because it's the eight month of the year - or was, until other months were added to the calendar.)

In Finnish, all of the names of the months end with "kuu", which just means "moon". The Finnish word for "month" is "kuukausi" - "moon season" or "moon period". The Finnish names of the months are:

tammikuu ("oak moon"),
helmikuu ("pearl moon"),
maaliskuu (probably from "maallinen" - "earthly", basically, so "earth moon"),
huhtikuu (apparently from "huhta", meaning a cleared field, so sort of "clearance moon"),
toukokuu ("sowing moon"),
kesäkuu ("summer moon"),
heinäkuu ("hay moon"),
elokuu ("crop/harvest moon"),
syyskuu ("autumn moon"),
lokakuu ("mud moon"),
marraskuu ("death moon"), and
joulukuu ("Christmas moon").

...I've written all that and now I wonder how I managed to derail myself here. Well, I'm not deleting that, so have some absolutely useless trivia about my silly language.

edited 10th Oct '17 8:45:04 AM by BestOf

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

What's considered a proper noun varies wildly from language to language. English gives the classification to days of the week and months, other languages like French don't. (Though that might just be English showing off how Germanic it is ) There are even some species names that are capitalized in English. This covers some of the exceptions, though it doesn't explain why for every case (and even admits to it being complicated enough that you're better off just checking a dictionary for the individual case instead of trying to memorize all the rules)

Elaborating the thought in 816:

It's all about putting an emphasis on something important, to distinguish a single thing from a set of similar things. You can do that by attaching an adjective to a noun. For example, many personal names are, or contain, an adjective of some sort. To put an emphasis on the importance of a word even further, some languages use capitalization in writing.

Yes, what words are capitalized varies from language to language, but I think there is a pattern:

The word "French" is derived from Old English for "javelin", since the Franks' (a tribe name) use of spears and javelins was their distinguishing feature to the speaker of Old English. The Russian word for a German (person) is "nemets" (немец) that is derived from the word "mute", since the Germanic people's distinguishing feature to the Slavs was that they didn't speak their language. These are all examples of people living in a relative proximity to each other, so to have a word that would distinguish them from "us" was important.

The names of days of week and months are adjective-ized and capitalized because it's important to maintain a schedule. Germanic languages even have a bonus of having days of week named after gods.

The names of geographic locations are capitalized because of its navigational qualities and because knowing your homeland and distinguishing it is important.

Why the proper names of animals, like, say, cats are not capitalized? Because the catkind in general is not that important to an average person. When a person starts owning a cat, then it becomes important to them (in English there's even third-person pronoun distinction for a stray animal and a pet of the same species: for the former you use "it", for the latter you can use "he" or "she". There is a personalization of a pet. Russian language, for example, uses "he" or "she" for animals, regardless of whether you own them. Turkic languages even don't have personalized third-person pronouns). Most people even don't give serious thought to the fate of mankind in general, our brains are simply not built for thinking on such scale, so a man, a human stayed in its non-capitalized form.

So, the general idea is that if a word is not capitalized, it's either too common and global a thing to wrap your head around it, or it is not important enough to give a fuck about, hence the humanist bias.

@Marq FJA, the Arabic script does not have capitalization, if I'm not mistaken, and people understand the writing just fine. Although I'm curious if there are techniques of putting extra emphasis on words specific to Arabic languages.

Spiral out, keep going.

Not all of those have their names derived from the proper name of a country; some derive their names from specific people, such as the Jews (at least, that's one suggested possible etymology for "Jew").

Then there's the Romani people, who are not named after a country or an individual. All discussed etymologies for the endonym "Romani" trace back directly to common nouns or adjectives. The same goes for the Saxons, whose name predated the existence of the countries named "Saxony", "Wessex", "Essex", or some other derivative of "Saxon"; "Saxon" is theorized to derive from common nouns "seax" (a kind of knife the Saxons were known for) or "saxa" (Latin for "stone").

Then where does the commonplace capitalization of names of fictional species fall in all of this? And before anyone says it, sapience doesn't seem to be an important factor, judging by all the many examples of non-sapient species in, say, fantasy settings that have capitalized species names.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

In fiction? Entirely arbitrary. See Capital Letters Are Magic. To give an air of mystique to those species, to overblow their importance. Same general idea, really, only confined to a specific author(s).

P.S. Also, those so-called "species" (sapient, that is) more often than not don't have enough cultural variety within them to be called a proper species. They are, basically, national stereotypes, and nations are capitalized. They technically are a bigger and more global entity, but act as a smaller one.

There's also the Dwarfs thing: to make a distiction between the race and, well, the people suffering from dwarfism. Now I wonder how Dwarfs suffering from dwarfism should be written...

P.P.S. And one more thing. In fiction, the rules of a language (any language) generally are looser, in order to provide more opportunities for expressiveness. Writers often deliberately break the established conventions to make a point, or as a stylistic choice.

edited 10th Oct '17 9:25:27 PM by Millership

Spiral out, keep going.

... What does "cultural variety" have to do with being a "proper" species?

And this still doesn't answer the question I raised about common species names somehow not qualifying for the "groups of entities considered as unique" criterion of being proper names.

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

Planet of Hats. Very large entity not having enough diversity in it to be called such.

In fiction, alien species and fantasy races are substitutes for human nationalities.

Marq, language, in general, is not a solid structure with objective and consistent rules. It's a perpetually changing construct resulted from the consensus of several millions of people from various backgrounds trying to understand each other. Its rules are, from the objective point of view, arbitrary. Hence the existence of this thread. The only answer to why the rules of a given language are such, that is close enough to objective truth is "people do that". Just roll with it.

And capitalization of words serves the purpose of putting emphasis on some words. People just didn't decide on what words are worth emphasising.

edited 5th Nov '17 8:32:36 AM by Millership

Spiral out, keep going.

That makes absolutely no sense; I've never seen anyone before define "species" in terms other than the biological definition, or require culture-based criteria to be part of any modified version of the definition. Hell, you don't need actual expertise in biology to tell that humans and turians are nowhere near being in the same taxonomic family, let alone the same genus/species.

... Of course, if you go by evolutionary descent-based taxonomy, all extraterrestrial life should be placed in their own "trees of life" unless incontrovertible proof is discovered that they all share a common origin.

... <puts head in hands and groans> So you're seriously telling me that nobody knows why English does it this way? That's... That's just stupid!

Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.

In academic works, or in works of fiction that try to convey the feel of academic works or academic pretenses, it may be used. But the way they are presented in the context of the story, makes these species no more than just human nations with weird looks, because works of fiction are written by the people, for the people and, hopefully about the people. And alien species are often substitutes for real-world peoples, or the readers could not emphasize and understand such a global concept of "living beings with various cultures that are alien to us". Things are being dumbed down.

Yes! It is! It is stupid! Whenever there are big masses of people involved, things inevitably are being dumbed down. In order for a mass of people to understand each other, and language is a tool for such understanding, you need to find a Lowest Common Denominator.

Recent example:

Right now, as of this very moment, my very own mother language, Kazakh, is undergoing a transition from the use of Cyrillic to Latin script. The reasons for that are:

1. For the better integration of Kazakhstan into the global society, since from the fall of the Soviet Union the countries that constituted it are being rather marginalized.
2. The current alphabet consists of 42 letters. That was okay before the rise of computerization, but now Kazakh keyboard layout is rather unwieldly.

The initiative was started at the beginning of this year, and so far we went through three versions of the script:

1. Similar to Turkish one or German with umlauts and such,
2. Classic Latin script with digraphs that stand for Kazakh-specific sounds,
3. And the version that is used right now, with apostrophes next to specific sounds.

Why we went through three versions in one year? First is obvious, because it conflicts with goal 2. The other one? Because what script we should use is literally decided by a public opinion survey. People didn't accept the second version, it got negative feedback, because it's weird for a native Kazakh speaker who is used to that in old alphabet a single letter stood for a single sound to see digraphs. It was rejected. And now people are having trouble getting used for the third version. We even got rid of letter "w" (that's supposed to be standing for "u" sound) in the process! Why? Because it's weird for English-speaking Kazakhs to see a consonant letter stand for a vowel sound. We are hoping to transit to a new writing system by 2025, but with the way this is going on it's safe to add 25 years to this deadline. Hell, the Uzbeks still are partially using Cyrillic script! An they've started the transition in the 90s!

Are there options more effective and objectively solid for such a transition? Yes. Is there a version of script that can convey all the nuances of Kazakh language? Probably. Will we going to find and use them? No. Because we need a consensus. Because language is a tool for communication. And people need a Lowest Common Denominator to understand each other. And it is always stupid.

edited 5th Nov '17 10:42:26 AM by Millership

Spiral out, keep going.