General Language Thread

My point is that they don't imagine it as saying it the grammatically correct way in English with the word order reversed, which is what you were doing, they really do say "the ball kicks the boy", without the grammatical construction that could make it work in English.

I think German uses "doch" as a counternegation (affirmative used to contradict a negative statement - because we changed pages).

Irish is Verb-Subject-Object, so "John went to the shop" would be "Chuaigh Seán go dtí an siopa"

• Chuaigh: Went
• Seán: John
• go dtí: to [a place]
• an: the (singular)
• siopa: shop

Very few Irish people actually know this. We learn the language as soon as we start primary school (though most don't learn it well), so the word order never really registers; when we want to write or speak in Irish, it just comes out naturally that way because it feels right. So, for example, "Seán chuaigh go dtí an siopa" sounds wrong (because it is), but few of us would be able to say why. I once pointed this out to my sister; her first instinct was to object, but then she actually thought about it and realised I was right.

(The Irish word for kick is cic, pronounced exactly the same. However, it's exclusively a noun, so "The boy kicked the ball" is "Thug an buachaill cic don liathróid" - Very literally, "The boy gave a kick to the ball").

It used to. Once upon a time you was specifically the plural form, and the singular was thou. But for some reason thou fell out of use, just leaving you. We do distinguish between the two in Ireland; while you can be used for either singular or plural, we also say ye when we specifically mean plural.

For me, it's that English doesn't have diacritics when it really should. Diareses were somewhat common until recently in words like coöperate, but nowadays you only really see it in naïve. At the very least, English would be a lot easier for everyone if it adopted the háček and reädopted the diäresis.

On the opposite end, ¿why is it only Spanish that has question and exclamation marks at the start of a question/exclamation as well as the end? ¡I feel like it makes reading easier!

Irish is quite the opposite; it doesn't have any specific words for yes or no. Instead, you have to say the entire verb, possibly with a negative particle.

"An ndeachaidh tú go dtí an siopa?" ("Did you go to the shop?")
"Chuaigh mé" ("I went") "Ní dheachaidh mé" ("I didn't go?")

Concatenating words in Dutch, which I really miss in English sometimes. It's a really natural word to create new words for new concepts.

That's a thing in Spanish, too! 'El niño le dio una patada a la pelota.'

(...Unless I've messed that sentence up somewhere.)

It's a valid sentence, though someone would say it seems redundant in this case when you could say instead "El niño pateó la pelota" (the boy kicked the ball).

That structure makes more sense though when something else happens too like "El niño le dio una patada a la pelota, mandándola al centro del arco" which roughly becomes "the boy gave a kick to the ball, sending it to the centre of the goal".

Right, right.

On more thought, I was also thinking more of something like 'Me encanta esa rosa'; which normally would be translated 'I love that rose' but is literally something like 'that rose is enchanting to me'. Which is more of an obligatory phrasing. And, importantly, is also not exactly the type of phrasing that was being discussed, so... yeah.

"The boy gave a kick to the ball"

That's fascinating. I wonder why the difference.

As a user of flective language, where role of subject and object are identified by form of words, I can change word order for emphasis.

"Chlapec (boy) nakopl (kicked) míč (ball)." This is basic order.

"Míč nakopl chlapec." is same sentence ("Ball kicked boy" is "Míč nakopl chlapce." or "Chlapce nakopl míč.")but emphasis is on "boy" (kicker was boy, not girl or adult person).

"Chlapec míč nakopl." give emphasis to verb. He kicked it, not rolled or hit or something, but kicked.

Honestly, I dont know, how make this work with emphasis in English, if I need it, I make sentences like Person, who kicked ball, was boy. But maybe English has some trick for it, and I just dont know it, because it isnt my native tongue.

Edited by Logaritmus on Apr 20th 2023 at 2:37:32 AM

What is your language?

Czech.

So, what language do you all find the hardest to learn?

For me, is Japanese, because of all the Kanji you have to memorize.

For Western languages, I will say French, because of all the silent letters, so words are not spelled exactly as pronounced like in Spanish.

Edited by jawal on Apr 20th 2023 at 3:25:29 PM

@ De Marquis

In Spanish, the difference is in the precision of action: saying "the boy gave a kick to the ball" or its variants indicates that the kid did the action a number of times whereas "the boy kicked the ball" only indicates a past action.

Of course, this precision implies importance too so using the first sentence is better if the specific action is linked to something relevant while the second is better to use in a chain of events.

OH! "A" kick, as opposed to many kicks. Cool.

As for showing emphasis in English—

• emphasis is on "boy" (kicker was boy, not girl or adult person).

"It was a boy that kicked the ball." (or "kicking the ball" for present tense);

• emphasis to verb. He kicked it, not rolled or hit or something, but kicked.

"What the boy did was kick the ball."

You can also demonstrate this with verbal emphasis, reflected in text by using special fonts:

"The boy kicked the ball." "The boy kicked the ball."

Obviously, this is pretty clunky, compared to the way your language does it. Perhaps someone else in the thread can think of a better way to express this.

Everything Vampire Buddha said about Irish applies to Welsh as well. That's not surprising since they're both insular celtic languages, but it's a fun observation to make.

I've noticed while tracing the etymologies of certain words that some of Proto-Indo-European's reconstructed words have one of the letters in the middle of the word capitalized, e.g. wiHrós ("man; husband; warrior, hero"). What is that supposed to signify?

I have made some significant progress on my own conlang recently, but I'm nowhere near done. The next step is to decide if I want it to be inflected or analytical/isolating. Then I have to decide on whether to allow consonant clusters and/or diphongs, and then I have to decide if I want to settle on a CVC phonetic structure, and then...

From what I can see, in reconstructed languages uppercase and lowercase are two different letters (presumably, different pronunciations). They don't have the same purpose as in modern languages.

I've never seen that, and that seems confusing.

Finally found an answer on this page. For PIE reconstructions, it's supposed to symbolize that any of PIE's three laryngeal consonants (formally denoted h₁, h₂ and h₃) could be in that position within the reconstructed word.

Edited by MarqFJA on May 9th 2023 at 11:15:46 AM

Not quite the same context, but in at least two major Southern Bantu languages (Xhosa and Zulu), proper nouns typically remain capitalised even when they have uncapitalised prefixes attached. So for example, from the root word "Zulu", you could have:

• umZulu (Zulu person)
• amaZulu (Zulu people)
• isiZulu (Zulu language)
• KwaZulu (Zulu Kingdom/land)

In most other Bantu languages (like fellow Southern Bantu languages Sotho and Tswana, or Northeast Coast language Swahili), only the prefix to a proper noun is capitalised. So you'd write down the native name for the Sotho language as Sesotho, and so on.

Yes. The late discovery of the IE Anatolian family finally proved those sounds' existence. But ancient Greek actually gives us the clearest idea of what the three pharyngeal consonants were like, even though it lost them: before vanishing, those consonants "colored" the pronunciation of a neighboring vowel in Greek to /e/, /a/, and /o/ respectively!

Is "redeem the people to purity" ^note that is to say, to save them from a state of sin and return them back to a state of purity a valid construction?

Well, it comes across as somewhat old fashioned or poetic to me. Not a construction one would use in a casual conversation among friends, but it would work in sermon.

Yeah, it sounds about right for Biblical texts. It depends on your audience whether you find that acceptable. Ask yourself: does my audience want their bible texts to feel a bit archaic and traditional? Or would they rather prefer a modernized text with modern diction?

Linguistically speaking, there is absolutely no reason why you can't translate a Hebrew/Greek/Latin bible into present-day English, but religion is a strange beast, and people get really attached to first translations, even if they are centuries out of date linguistically.