Bad Language?

[truehobbit]

Have I ever mentioned that I love German?

Have I ever mentioned how much I'm in awe of your immediate grasp of German?

And of course of your knowing the ß.

At a guess, "insurance company for legal protection"?

I'm not sure if there's a technically more accurate term, as you seem doubtful of the meaning, Prim. It means a company that provides insurance (i.e. will take over the costs) if you have to go to court.

And so did Mark Twain, enough to write an essay on it

That's one of the most hilarious texts ever! I was in stitches when I first heard it (a teacher read it to us at school).

There's also this anecdote: an English diplomat was listening to a speech by a German politician. He was waiting for his translator to start translating what was being said, but the translator remained silent.
After a while the Englishman asked: Why aren't you translating what he's saying?
The translator answered: I'm still waiting for the verb.

English is so much easier once you absorb the rules: you just have to slap together those little verbs to say "had been going," "would have been singing," "will have walked." In many other languages that would all be done with verb endings.

Exactly, Prim.
But what I find so astonishing is that apparently it's the older languages that have those complicated structures with verb endings.
I mean, you'd think that things would develop from simple to complicated, but in languages it seems the other way round. They seem to start out with a zillion different forms, and only those that keep developing and are subject to foreign influence result in having those forms simplified. Just guessing, though.
(Swedish is another language with a very simple grammar, but I don't know anything about its history.)

[Primula Baggins]

Thanks, hobby, but you do me too much honor. I did remember "Recht" and "Versicherung" and "Gesellschaft" but had to look up "Rechtschutz."

I wish I had "finished" learning German. I think I might be able to learn to speak it serviceably if I lived there for a while, or to read it if I really applied myself, but I don't think either one is likely anytime soon.

Russian was one of the fun languages we've been talking about. Six cases, no articles, so case and gender are both conveyed by noun endings; no present-tense verb "to be"; many many verb endings; like French, a different past tense in first person, depending on the gender of the speaker; and of course a whole different alphabet. I studied it for three years and can sound out words and ask "How are you?" in familiar and formal mode. Not much to show!

Also, you speak it with your front teeth.

[truehobbit]

I think I might be able to learn to speak it serviceably if I lived there for a while,

Well, you're welcome here for a little brushing up anytime!

And, ooooh, Russian! Much worse than French! I did it for three years, too, isn't that a coincidence?
But if I had trouble getting all the endings to agree in French, imagine how I did in Russian! And I found it difficult to remember the words, they were just too unconnected to anything else I knew at times.
I loved learning to read and write, and I liked the pronunciation, it sounds soft and cuddly, I think. Nowadays I can only read a bit (but sometimes don't remember all the letters), and I can say "I don't understand anything" - so that's very useful.

[Primula Baggins]

Oh, yes, the ever-useful "Nye ponimayoo."

And thank you for the invitation! I would love to take you up on it someday—I've never seen Cologne.

[baby tuckoo]

French, by contrast, is very hard to learn at the beginning (conjugation in all tenses differing according to what kind of verb you have, pointless word gender and adjectives having to agree with their noun in case, gender and number.

Adjectives don't have to agree in case, just gender and number, which is bad enough, and completely irrelevant to understanding. One wonders why so many languages have stuck with the gender of objects and with the agreement of adjectives. English dumped it in the transition from OE to ME, and good riddance.

Of course we need a gender version of pronouns for people, but why do we only have them in the third person singular? Why not a first and second? Is it because you and I are talking and can tell by looking, but we can't tell for that person who's not here? "They" covers all persons as well as all things. Many of these things have distinct forms in other languages.

[vison]

The lack of articles in Russian explains what I never could figure out before: when a Russian speaks English he says stuff like, "I bought car", or, "I assassinated Prime Minister".

Those examples mean nothing that is anti-Russian, I assure you. They are just the first words that popped into my mind.

[Primula Baggins]

A lot of languages don't have articles, or don't have both definite and indefinite ones ("a" or "an" are indefinite, "the" is definite). I frequently edit writing by people who haven't figured out the difference. It's surprising how confusing the text can be because that one small distinction is lacking.

[baby tuckoo]

Articles are just one of a precious group of adjectives called "determiners." In English, they are placed in front of nouns but not pronouns. I wonder why not. In most respects, nouns and pronouns have the same functions (there are 6), but the determiner is used only for real nouns be they common or proper.

They are "determiners" because they always answer the adjective question "which one." And they do it with great specificity, unlike those waffling indefinites.

The articles are the most common: a, an, and the.

We also have demonstratives, for pointing things out: this, that, these, those.

Then there are the possessives, if it matters most whose it is: my, your, his, her, its, their, our.

You get to use only one determiner. Choose the one that matters. Is it "my" book or "this" book or "a" book? One is all you get.

Determine your determiner with care. It's these little guys that focus a language, and all languages handle it differently.

In English, it's pretty simple but pretty important. In Romance languages, it's complicated. Russian just dumped them.





.

[truehobbit]

Adjectives don't have to agree in case, just gender and number

Correct, I missed that up, sorry. (And I still made no end of mistakes in that.)

You get to use only one determiner

Well, you can say thing like "these our times". Just sounds a bit pompous.
(Our former chancellor Kohl was infamous for saying "in this our country" - kept stand-up comedians really happy. )

I must say that I don't like addressing a language under the aspect of what is "best" at all!
There is no reason to believe that English is better than other languages for not having cases etc. (even though I personally prefer learning as few rules as possible).
Like I said above, it seems natural in the development of a language to start out with complicated variations of word-endings to denote different meanings and relationships between words. At least, I've not yet come across an ancient language that didn't function according to that principle.

And maybe you can also become too stingy about grammar, and wish everything away that doesn't appear "necessary", leaving you with the rudiments of expression in the style of "Thog kill mammoth".
It's noteworthy, I think, that Tolkien created his languages out of a love for Finnish (as complex, or even more so, where cases and endings are concerned as Russian, from what I hear) and Welsh (a seemingly chaotic mix of mutual influence of sounds and endings). He seems to have seen something of value in those immensely complex interrelations of forms and sounds - something that made sense.

[Primula Baggins]

Great post, hobby! I find myelf wondering how these complexities ever form—I mean the rules across whole categories of words. Though maybe there's a clue in how small children tend to apply rules they know to words they don't know. Perhaps all it took was someone deciding that they needed a new word for more than one stick, and creating a variation that other people applied to other words.

I would never say what's "best" in terms of languages. To judge between any two of them, I think you would have to know both equally well from birth, which is rather rare.

From what I can tell, they all have their individualities.

[truehobbit]

Thanks, Prim!

Perhaps all it took was someone deciding that they needed a new word for more than one stick, and creating a variation that other people applied to other words.

Yes, I think you're right there! And I guess that it seemed easier to come up with a variation each time, rather than a more abstract construction (in that sense, I guess one could say that the simpler grammar, being more abstract, is the more complex one).
For example, Thog would say "grmph" and mean "stick".
Then his buddy Bip would say "grmpho" and mean "my stick" and "grmphi" to mean "your stick".

To come up with the idea to use an additional word to describe the different relations of the stick to the speaker suddenly seems the bigger mental step to take.

And other changes are explained by phonetic conditions.
Dubb, who has just said "phroo" to mean "dinner" realises that it's a bit difficult to make a rule from what Bip just said, if he wanted to say "my dinner" - and he says "phrooe" instead. So we now have the birth of a different category of noun, where the first possessive ending is not -o but -e.

Just guessing here, because I'm enjoying this so much.

Btw, did you know that many languages have a different vocabulary for men and women? Not sure if they have different grammar, too.

[Primula Baggins]

I vaguely remember that from anthropology class, hobby—that there are some cultures where adult women use a whole different set of words than adult men.

There used to be an extremely feminine diction in English that very few women I know ever use—saying a hat is "simply adorable, too too precious, I'm over the moon about it!" and so forth. And in those times I think "manly" diction often included a lot of the words that—well, that started this thread.

[anthriel]

Well I declare!

[truehobbit]

ROFL - good point, Prim! Whereby we see again that supposedly exotic cultures aren't all that far removed from us at all.

(Maybe they just came to terms with the fact that men and women don't understand each other anyway, using different approaches to communication, and thought they'd just as well institutionalise that! )

Before bed, I thought I'd give an example of what I meant by the complex sound/ending interrelations in Welsh - I read that at work recently, where I couldn't access much more besides wikipedia and the BBC, and was amazed at the fascinating things I found.
From a Welsh grammar on BBC online:

There are three forms of the definite article (the) in Welsh
(i) ‘y’ is used in front of a consonant. Singular, feminine nouns
will undergo a Soft Mutation after ‘y’ (except those
beginning with ‘ll’ and ‘rh’). See S.M. rule 1.
e.g.
ci - y ci - the dog
cath - y gath - the cat
bachgen - y bachgen - the boy
merch - y ferch - the girl

(ii) ‘yr’ is used in front of a vowel and in front of h. Remember that
‘w’ and ‘y’ are vowels in Welsh.
e.g.
ysgol - yr ysgol - the school
enw - yr enw - the name
afal - yr afal - the apple
het - yr het - the hat

(iii) ‘’r’ is used after a word ending in a vowel - no matter
whether the word which follows begins with a vowel or
with a consonant.
e.g.
Mae’r plant - The children are
Mae’r ysgol - The school is
Dyma‘r llyfr - Here’s the book
Dacw‘r afon - There’s the river

I just went

If anyone is interested in the whole document, it's here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/learnwelsh/p ... lrules.pdf

[axordil]

I was married to a Southerner once. I know what "my, my" really means. And on this board it requires stars.

[Primula Baggins]

Well, perhaps that "feminine" diction remains in some parts of the country. . . .

[Frelga]

The lack of articles in Russian explains what I never could figure out before: when a Russian speaks English he says stuff like, "I bought car", or, "I assassinated Prime Minister".

Those examples mean nothing that is anti-Russian, I assure you. They are just the first words that popped into my mind.

Or

"Pencil red."

Russian is not wasteful, with all the "The pencil is red" trimmings. What part of pencil red do you not understand?

The fun part of Russian is that nouns have gender, but you can't deduce gender by any logical rule. Den' (day) and pen' (stump) are masculine. Ten' (shadow) and len' (laziness) are feminine. Sun is neutral, moon is feminine although another word for a crescent moon is masculine. And all verbs and adjectives work differently for genders.

[vison]

Thog head hurt.

Too much words.

[Frelga]

U Thoga bolit golova.

[vison]

Um.

Thog go now.

Thog afraid.