- cross-posted to:
- linguistics_humor
- cross-posted to:
- linguistics_humor
I’m moving my posts from Reddit to Lemmy before delete them.
This post is from 2021-03-09.
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Funny enough, the Japanese doesn’t have the word “the” per say. It most depends on context and how you translate it. Example: ねこは赤です -> literal translation: Cat red Now time to add some English words to make it sound ✨better✨ “The cat is red”
I think that’s what the meme was trying to say.
I think that’s what meme was trying to say
Japanese has demonstratives like “that”, just no articles.
‘That’ wasn’t meant to be deleted, so thanks for pointing out typo. (Sorry if this is double posted)
“Cat red” makes Japanese sounds way more vague than it really is, you’re just not bothering to attempt to transliterate the grammar structures because it’s too hard for English speakers to understand without a half-hour lecture.
It’s “Cat (topic marker) red (basic copula)”, which obviously carries a lot more information than just “cat red” to a person who intuitively understands what those weird grammar markers signify
Japanese not having articles is just as weird as PIE languages not having things like topic markers.
topic markers are just a fancy way to say case endings
Not really, topic markers are… uh… and case endings… analytical instead of… wait a minute
Der Hund ist rot; 犬は赤いです
Ich esse den Hund; 犬を食べる
no it can’t be
Der Knochen des Hundes; 犬の骨
fuck
Ich gebe dem Hund einen Knochen; 犬に骨をあげます
Why say many word when few word do trick?
はい、そうです。
If you’re interested, please do crosspost this (and any other linguistics memes you have) over to /c/[email protected]
Heh, that’s my kind of humor. Will do. :)
I speak bengali and we don’t have the word “the” nor do we have any gendered nouns, verbs, or even pronouns. So much easier and straight forward and no pronoun politics necessary.
We do have a respect hierarchy though like japanese, so we have 3 version of the language lol.
So it’s kinda different from general Indo-European. In that regard, Bengali looks like Turkish, no articles no gendered anything.
Three version of the language? You mean the alphabet or?
Nope I mean of the language itself has three different version for most words.
So for example, for the word “you”, when you are speaking to someone who is a close friend or sometimes a child, or someone of much lower social standing, you would say “tui”. If you are talking to a friend (not close), someone of similar age that you know well but aren’t super close, speaking to someone noticeably much younger than you, or to an elder who you are very comfortable with, you would say “tumi”. When speaking to someone you don’t know who is visibly not much younger than you, or when speaking to most elders, you would say “apni”.
If you don’t want to assume age and you aren’t speaking to a child, it’s best to default to “apni” as that is the most respectful form of the language.
So there are three versions of the language with it’s own set of words based on the level of formality in the social interaction that is taking place.
Ahh I see, like Keigo for Japanese. Interesting, thanks for the info.
Latin: German has 4 cases? That’s cute.
deleted by creator
Years ago I studied Malayalam while living in India (Malayalam is the language of Kerala state on the southernmost tip of the country). When I learned the grammar I was surprised to see that it had nominative, dative and accusative cases just like German, which was convenient since I’d studied German in high school. Turns out the grammar had actually been sort of imposed on Malayalam centuries ago by a wandering German monk.
couldn’t stop laughing. could I have a source please?
Hermann Gundert. I was a bit off: he was a missionary rather than a monk, and it was a century and a half ago rather than “centuries ago”. His book on Malayalam grammar was called Malayalabhaasha Vyakaranam. My Malayalam tutor at the time told me that Gundert learned the language in one week, which seems a bit unlikely.
Also Russian
“Yeah, we don’t have articles. But the words have genders. Just deal with it.”
Meanwhile: plural in Japan (kind of).
Funny though German has the more complex rules on the surface, English becomes the more complicated when counting all the exceptions.
Do you have a source for this? Also, what sort of “exceptions” do you mean? German has cognates of most of the English inherited grammatical exceptions, and has many more classes of its own that aren’t reflected in English.
No I don’t have a source, it’s what my German teacher claimed. So maybe not an unbiased source?
As someone who learned English as my second language and German third, they both have exceptions and the only thing German is easier than English is that you can spell a word after hearing it, while English it can really be anything.
Everything else though? German is insanely harder, I don’t think I could get it to the level of my English if I studied for 10 years (been about 4 years of studying it now)
Same here, English 2nd German 3rd. I’ll never get nearly as good at German for many reasons. Mostly I’m way more exposed to English, and I use it every day.
English exceptions aren’t so bad, you just need to know that there’s a ton of loan words, what their origin was, when it was anglicized, and which country’s preferred version you’re learning. If it’s not a loan word it’s either standard or somewhat re-latined to maintain class hierarchy.
Oha, that’s it?
What exceptions?
through trough tough bough bought
I’m a native English speaker and even for me that list gets rougher the longer I look at it - pun intended.
mouse mice, ox oxen…
you should see turkish
Tagalog: Ang
Bonus: Tagalog pronouns are all gender-neutral. “He” and “She” is just “Siya”, indirect form is just “Niya”, and possessive form is just “kaniya”.
Also bonus: Ang is an article for objects. There is another article designated for people (or sentient beings): Si.
