Indonesian is so simple that we don't have genders, moods, aspects, cases, articles, plurals, or even tenses. We just use time markers when needed. And we have two words for "us" based on clusivity.
English just has one definite article THE instead of DER/DAS/DIE/DEN/DEM/DES with an almost arbitrary system of which is which. Barely conjugates at all. Very few words change depending on their grammatical function. On the other hand I suppose it is rather fussily reliant on word order
But articles at least convey information. I have no philosophical opposition to gendered languages like some of the crazies, and I don't think they need to change, but linguistic gender conveys no information whatsoever.
This is patently false, though. For instance, in Portuguese, there are many words whose meaning differs depending on the gender. For instance,
O capital --> the capital (money)
A capital --> the capital (city)
O rádio --> the radio (device)
A rádio --> the radio station
O Google --> Google (the website)
A Google --> Google (the company)
Furthermore, there are plenty of words that are just the same thing as the other but with a different ending that changes it to a different gender. For instance
A casa --> the house
O caso --> the case
O pombo --> the pidgeon
A pomba --> the dove
It is also reasonably common to switch the gender when you want to give someone a nickname. For instance, suppose you wanted to nickname some dude Caveira (skull), which is a feminine word. Then you would say O Caveira. If you said A Caveira, people would be confused, but if you say O Caveira, people would immediately understand it as a nickname.
Vai falar com a Caveira --> go talk to the skull (why would I talk to a skull)
Vai falar com o Caveira --> go talk to Skull (oh okay Skull is some guy)
I would say that's a "fault" of the Portuguese lexicon. The gender still doesn't really serve any purpose beyond clarifying homophones. The information that it conveys doesn't have anything to do with gender. It doesn't convey information in any systematic way, the way that articles, cases, tenses, etc. do. It's just vocabulary. Like, "o pombo" and "a pamba" are just... different words. That's not a grammatical feature in any way.
>But articles at least convey information.
I mean, not really in English. They're fairly superfluous.
I saw a dog. The dog was in the house.
I saw dog. Dog was in house.
They're not superfluous at all.
1. "Have you seen the dog?"
2. "I have seen a dog."
1 clarifies a specific dog, which would be understood through context, 2 clarifies that it may have been a different dog. Obviously languages which don't use articles can express the same information using more words, but using articles makes it trivial.
I could write a lot. For start, so-called "perfective verbs" are often derived by adding a prefix to the base verb. For example, **čitati** means "read", but **pročitati** means "read completely". The problem is that some other verb (like **pisati** "write") you have to add the prefix **na-**. For some other verb, other prefix, e.g. **o-**. For some other verbs, **po-**. And so on.
Furthermore, the rules when to use each of them are... weird from the standpoint of almost all other languages. If you're interested, read what I wrote [here](https://www.easy-croatian.com/2014/11/37.html).
Then, there are special verbs for "doing something for a short while", "doing something once", "start doing something", and even some verbs for "start doing something because you've gained an ability" (e.g. you've learned to swim). Even worse, the verb for "start to swim because I've learned it" is derived with **pro-** from the base verb, and that prefix (as I wrote above) has a different meaning with some other verbs :(
I mean, it's nice to have all these things... but why the different prefixes?
Nope, tense is run, ran, and will run. Aspect refers to how an action extends over time (think was it finished, is it in the process, is it about to begin, will it extend over forever?).
Tense refers to an action in reference to a time period (past, present, future).
I’m not sure if all languages have them, but it is very common. Even languages without tense would typically have aspect.
Hope this helps.
I looked into it, and even if Italian doesn't have aspects, I can build english progressive and perfect aspects' tenses with Italian compound tenses, except for the perfect progressive aspect. So I still struggle to see a clear difference between aspects and tenses. As another example, Spanish has almost the same exact tenses as Italian, but it seems like it organizes them in aspects, while Italian doesn't. This was very interesting anyways, thanks!
yea, romance languages tend to prefer coupling aspect and tense (english also does this), so I can see why it would confusing from a romance speaker.
Malayalam, in contrast, maintains a fairly obvious divide between tense and aspect.
I'm pretty sure they're distinct. I don't think Korean has moods and in verb conjugation it's pretty obvious which part marks the tense and which part markes the aspect. I could be completely wrong, though. I never explicitly studied Korean verb conjugation thoroughly.
Turkish doesn't have gendered pronouns (he/she etc) everything and everyone is 'O'. Doesn't have articles like 'la/el/der/die/das' either. I appreciate this because I confuse them alot in Spanish and German.
God bless the day Arabic was made with only 3 tenses , past , active, and future ... I hate when we have too many tenses ... like French and Spanish with 8 tenses and every time you have irregular verbes
Don't even start with my mother tongue Nepali! Has cases, postpositions, 5 moods, 5 aspects & 3 tenses. Along with 8 personal conjugations (1 got removed because royals were removed.) Plus the orthographic baggage. Not like English but not exactly Italian either!
It's elementary from a phonotactical perspective though.
There are not many languages that can scare me grammatically.
We have that imperative, too , but we don't really call it a tense ... it's more of a form that the vereb takes when you want to order something ( Do this !) Hebrew and Arabic are very similar so I suppose its logical that we have many things in common
French and Spanish tenses are actually coupled with aspect too. Fairly surely Arabic has aspect but they’re probably not tied as fusionally as Romance verbs.
That's interesting! Cuz it had the opposite effect on me. After learning Chinese, I realized how useless definite and plural forms are.
Like you said, you can often infer from context, and if not, you can make it evident in other ways.
You could simply say "I want apple" if the context is clear, if you mean a random apple you can say "Give me an/one apple" and if you mean a specific apple, you can say "I want that apple". No "the" required.
For plural, "I want three **apple**" is not any less clear than "I want three **apples**", and if you don't have a specific number, you could just say "I want several apple".
Here's an interesting example I'd experienced the other day.
I was solving a reading comprehension question in Japanese.
The question said "circle sentence which fits with the text" with 4 possible sentences.
So I circled one sentence.
But to my dismay, I actually got half the points because it actually meant "sentences". Plural.
I read the question and interpreted it as one sentence, so I didn't bother to continue reading the other sentences. And even if I had, I would assume I needed to choose the most correct sentence.
Plurality would really help in this scenario.
This is making a lot of bad training materials I see for Asian students (learning English) make a lot more sense. They don't think to pluralize properly in English when they intend the students to pick more than one answer and it causes a lot of frustration there too.
Wow, I never thought it that way. I speak Korean which also pretty much doesn't distinguish plurability, pretty much the same system as Japanese. I don't know much about Japanese, but if it were in Korean, it always says "every sentence", "all sentences", etc if there were more than one answer. If the question said "Circle sentence.." I would have marked only one as well lol
As a programmer, it actually took me years to realize that Tagalog verbs act more like functions in programming, and they take arguments through pronouns and marked objects/arguments. The conjugation of the verb decides what purpose those pronouns and marked objects/arguments will take. And this purpose is related to [thematic relation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thematic_relation). For example, an *ang*-marked argument can be the inflictor, or transmitter, or cause, or topic of the action, etc. depending on the conjugation used. Similarly, a *ng*-marked argument can be the inflicted, or receiver, or effected, or experiencer of the action, etc. This way, our language can use one root word, like *patay* (death), and derive various morphologies on it. In the inflictive conjugations like *pumatay*, it means *to kill*. In the experiential conjugations like *mamatay*, it means *to die*. In the self-inflictive conjugations like *magpakamatay*, it means *to commit suicide*.
Afrikaans is my first language and English technically my second but I'm fluent in both and I started learning French about 4 years ago. I definitely appreciate the gender neutrality of my native languages haha. Also, in Afrikaans, "Are","Am" and "Is" are all the same so that's nice.
The "be" verb in English and also the ability to make a noun a verb 😄 and this isn't a grammatical thing but we have very specific words for very specific instances to distinguish minute details which are so so so useful.
Particles like "ci" and "ne" in Italian, I think they're called pronominal particles or clitic pronouns. I learned to appreciate them while learning Spanish, when I really felt like I was missing them to put emphasis on a part of a sentence.
I was trying to explain how they work in this comment but my broken English and lack of knowledge won't help make it clear, other people online made a better job than me if you're interested
The German tense system. It's so much simpler than e.g. the English or Latin tenses. It only tells apart past and non-past by tense. That's the only thing you need to get right. And it's also super simple to tell apart: past is indicated with the perfect tenses (auxiliary+Partizip II), and non-past is indicated with the plain tenses.
Yeah, there are fourteen tenses in German in sum but those seven pairs are there to tell apart facts, narration, assumptions, hearsay, non-facts, hearsay assumptions (plus a replacement form). **And it's completely up to you whether you mark something that way** e.g. as a fact or non-fact. No need to tell something in subjunctive or tell apart conditional from that. No funky progressive and mixed perfect progressive forms either.
I also learned a bit of Japanese and I appreciate its tense system for the same kind of simplicity. (Actually, it's even simpler.)
After learning Khmer, I've come to appreciate how English offers a wide and predictable variety of ways to express time, particularly with past and present tenses.💖
I once saw a cartoon. A bunch of Japanese guys were standing around the water cooler in an office. In the other room was an American, clearly frustrated. One of the Japanese guys says to another "And then you told him we say WHAT?"
That we don't use the 'I' in casual speech because the verb changes its form depending on the tense. So it's just 'Went to the store." Or "Will fly home."
> Additionally, the definite article ('the', or "ha" in Hebrew)
I appreciate that my language does not have these. They come across as useless thing just designed to make foreigner trip over grammar.
Compared to that, grammatical genders are easier to make sense of, although they are similarly useless.
Lack of definite/indefinite articles like "a" and "the" in Polish :3 After 20+ years of English I still don't get what their point is. It's not a necessary information. Nor useful.
Nah, it completely depends on personal preference and situation. Either way is totally OK and common. Japanese is much more flexible than you might think. And actually I prefer 'ねこ' or '猫', the first looks more adorable to me and the latter seems more well-educated.
Those poor, poor Chinese folks. They don't have katakana! They simple write 猫. And they don't even know the word for it ("neko"), so they just call it a "mao". I assume that is really "miao", but they don't have letters either, so what can they do?
False. The Katakana is more commonly used for animals which have really complex kanji. But even then, it's considered better to use the kanji in academic contexts.
To use pronouns correctly, such as "that" "which" "who" "whom" after studying Latin.
Indonesian is so simple that we don't have genders, moods, aspects, cases, articles, plurals, or even tenses. We just use time markers when needed. And we have two words for "us" based on clusivity.
Do you guys have gendered personal pronouns like he/she? I love the double "Us"
Nope, even that's gender neutral so we use the same word for he/she/it. But we do differentiate between singular and plural "you".
English just has one definite article THE instead of DER/DAS/DIE/DEN/DEM/DES with an almost arbitrary system of which is which. Barely conjugates at all. Very few words change depending on their grammatical function. On the other hand I suppose it is rather fussily reliant on word order
then there are the languages without articles
But articles at least convey information. I have no philosophical opposition to gendered languages like some of the crazies, and I don't think they need to change, but linguistic gender conveys no information whatsoever.
This is patently false, though. For instance, in Portuguese, there are many words whose meaning differs depending on the gender. For instance, O capital --> the capital (money) A capital --> the capital (city) O rádio --> the radio (device) A rádio --> the radio station O Google --> Google (the website) A Google --> Google (the company) Furthermore, there are plenty of words that are just the same thing as the other but with a different ending that changes it to a different gender. For instance A casa --> the house O caso --> the case O pombo --> the pidgeon A pomba --> the dove It is also reasonably common to switch the gender when you want to give someone a nickname. For instance, suppose you wanted to nickname some dude Caveira (skull), which is a feminine word. Then you would say O Caveira. If you said A Caveira, people would be confused, but if you say O Caveira, people would immediately understand it as a nickname. Vai falar com a Caveira --> go talk to the skull (why would I talk to a skull) Vai falar com o Caveira --> go talk to Skull (oh okay Skull is some guy)
I would say that's a "fault" of the Portuguese lexicon. The gender still doesn't really serve any purpose beyond clarifying homophones. The information that it conveys doesn't have anything to do with gender. It doesn't convey information in any systematic way, the way that articles, cases, tenses, etc. do. It's just vocabulary. Like, "o pombo" and "a pamba" are just... different words. That's not a grammatical feature in any way.
>But articles at least convey information. I mean, not really in English. They're fairly superfluous. I saw a dog. The dog was in the house. I saw dog. Dog was in house.
They're not superfluous at all. 1. "Have you seen the dog?" 2. "I have seen a dog." 1 clarifies a specific dog, which would be understood through context, 2 clarifies that it may have been a different dog. Obviously languages which don't use articles can express the same information using more words, but using articles makes it trivial.
I love that in English we can take almost any noun and just use it as a verb.
"I like to verb nouns" -Calvin, I think. Maybe Hobbes.
"Verbing weirds language."
Me too.
Verbal aspect in Slavic languages. It's an uncommon and unnecessary complex feature.
Could you try to explain it to me? Just curious 😁
I could write a lot. For start, so-called "perfective verbs" are often derived by adding a prefix to the base verb. For example, **čitati** means "read", but **pročitati** means "read completely". The problem is that some other verb (like **pisati** "write") you have to add the prefix **na-**. For some other verb, other prefix, e.g. **o-**. For some other verbs, **po-**. And so on. Furthermore, the rules when to use each of them are... weird from the standpoint of almost all other languages. If you're interested, read what I wrote [here](https://www.easy-croatian.com/2014/11/37.html). Then, there are special verbs for "doing something for a short while", "doing something once", "start doing something", and even some verbs for "start doing something because you've gained an ability" (e.g. you've learned to swim). Even worse, the verb for "start to swim because I've learned it" is derived with **pro-** from the base verb, and that prefix (as I wrote above) has a different meaning with some other verbs :( I mean, it's nice to have all these things... but why the different prefixes?
A really "fun" thing is that the same prefix for the same verb will not always give you the same meaning in different Slavic languages
And not even in the same language!
TL;DR: Do I care about the process or the result? Didn't ancient Hebrew have this as well?
Many languages have something *similar*, but not exactly.
i thought aspects are fairly common tho
English has them. Ex: I am running. vs I have ran.
Yes, but Slavic aspects are a bit different.
Stupid question probably: isn't that just a different tense? Don't all languages have them?
Nope, tense is run, ran, and will run. Aspect refers to how an action extends over time (think was it finished, is it in the process, is it about to begin, will it extend over forever?). Tense refers to an action in reference to a time period (past, present, future). I’m not sure if all languages have them, but it is very common. Even languages without tense would typically have aspect. Hope this helps.
I looked into it, and even if Italian doesn't have aspects, I can build english progressive and perfect aspects' tenses with Italian compound tenses, except for the perfect progressive aspect. So I still struggle to see a clear difference between aspects and tenses. As another example, Spanish has almost the same exact tenses as Italian, but it seems like it organizes them in aspects, while Italian doesn't. This was very interesting anyways, thanks!
yea, romance languages tend to prefer coupling aspect and tense (english also does this), so I can see why it would confusing from a romance speaker. Malayalam, in contrast, maintains a fairly obvious divide between tense and aspect.
Not just romance, aspect/tense/mood are very commonly coupled. Romance languages do that a lot, though.
if you don’t mind, i’m curious as to how korean handles aspect, tense, and mood. Are they coupled or distinct?
I'm pretty sure they're distinct. I don't think Korean has moods and in verb conjugation it's pretty obvious which part marks the tense and which part markes the aspect. I could be completely wrong, though. I never explicitly studied Korean verb conjugation thoroughly.
Malayalam too. Ex: ഞാൻ ഓടിക്കുകയാണ്. vs ഞാൻ ഓടിയിരുന്നു.
Turkish doesn't have gendered pronouns (he/she etc) everything and everyone is 'O'. Doesn't have articles like 'la/el/der/die/das' either. I appreciate this because I confuse them alot in Spanish and German.
God bless the day Arabic was made with only 3 tenses , past , active, and future ... I hate when we have too many tenses ... like French and Spanish with 8 tenses and every time you have irregular verbes
Don't even start with my mother tongue Nepali! Has cases, postpositions, 5 moods, 5 aspects & 3 tenses. Along with 8 personal conjugations (1 got removed because royals were removed.) Plus the orthographic baggage. Not like English but not exactly Italian either! It's elementary from a phonotactical perspective though. There are not many languages that can scare me grammatically.
Arabic has 3 "tenses," but is a nightmare grammatically . I still dream about them sometimes and I get chills
Same with Hebrew! Technically we have another tense called the imperative tense (Eat! Drink! Do! etc), but overall just three tenses.
We have that imperative, too , but we don't really call it a tense ... it's more of a form that the vereb takes when you want to order something ( Do this !) Hebrew and Arabic are very similar so I suppose its logical that we have many things in common
Semitic languages gang 😎
I think you could say that the imperative in any language is a mood, not a tense. Tenses are generally related to time.
French and Spanish tenses are actually coupled with aspect too. Fairly surely Arabic has aspect but they’re probably not tied as fusionally as Romance verbs.
That's interesting! Cuz it had the opposite effect on me. After learning Chinese, I realized how useless definite and plural forms are. Like you said, you can often infer from context, and if not, you can make it evident in other ways. You could simply say "I want apple" if the context is clear, if you mean a random apple you can say "Give me an/one apple" and if you mean a specific apple, you can say "I want that apple". No "the" required. For plural, "I want three **apple**" is not any less clear than "I want three **apples**", and if you don't have a specific number, you could just say "I want several apple".
Here's an interesting example I'd experienced the other day. I was solving a reading comprehension question in Japanese. The question said "circle sentence which fits with the text" with 4 possible sentences. So I circled one sentence. But to my dismay, I actually got half the points because it actually meant "sentences". Plural. I read the question and interpreted it as one sentence, so I didn't bother to continue reading the other sentences. And even if I had, I would assume I needed to choose the most correct sentence. Plurality would really help in this scenario.
This is making a lot of bad training materials I see for Asian students (learning English) make a lot more sense. They don't think to pluralize properly in English when they intend the students to pick more than one answer and it causes a lot of frustration there too.
Wow, I never thought it that way. I speak Korean which also pretty much doesn't distinguish plurability, pretty much the same system as Japanese. I don't know much about Japanese, but if it were in Korean, it always says "every sentence", "all sentences", etc if there were more than one answer. If the question said "Circle sentence.." I would have marked only one as well lol
As a programmer, it actually took me years to realize that Tagalog verbs act more like functions in programming, and they take arguments through pronouns and marked objects/arguments. The conjugation of the verb decides what purpose those pronouns and marked objects/arguments will take. And this purpose is related to [thematic relation](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thematic_relation). For example, an *ang*-marked argument can be the inflictor, or transmitter, or cause, or topic of the action, etc. depending on the conjugation used. Similarly, a *ng*-marked argument can be the inflicted, or receiver, or effected, or experiencer of the action, etc. This way, our language can use one root word, like *patay* (death), and derive various morphologies on it. In the inflictive conjugations like *pumatay*, it means *to kill*. In the experiential conjugations like *mamatay*, it means *to die*. In the self-inflictive conjugations like *magpakamatay*, it means *to commit suicide*.
Afrikaans is my first language and English technically my second but I'm fluent in both and I started learning French about 4 years ago. I definitely appreciate the gender neutrality of my native languages haha. Also, in Afrikaans, "Are","Am" and "Is" are all the same so that's nice.
Hungarian is my native and I love that we do not have grammatical genders in our language. It really makes easy (at least for that part) :D
The "be" verb in English and also the ability to make a noun a verb 😄 and this isn't a grammatical thing but we have very specific words for very specific instances to distinguish minute details which are so so so useful.
Particles like "ci" and "ne" in Italian, I think they're called pronominal particles or clitic pronouns. I learned to appreciate them while learning Spanish, when I really felt like I was missing them to put emphasis on a part of a sentence. I was trying to explain how they work in this comment but my broken English and lack of knowledge won't help make it clear, other people online made a better job than me if you're interested
The German tense system. It's so much simpler than e.g. the English or Latin tenses. It only tells apart past and non-past by tense. That's the only thing you need to get right. And it's also super simple to tell apart: past is indicated with the perfect tenses (auxiliary+Partizip II), and non-past is indicated with the plain tenses. Yeah, there are fourteen tenses in German in sum but those seven pairs are there to tell apart facts, narration, assumptions, hearsay, non-facts, hearsay assumptions (plus a replacement form). **And it's completely up to you whether you mark something that way** e.g. as a fact or non-fact. No need to tell something in subjunctive or tell apart conditional from that. No funky progressive and mixed perfect progressive forms either. I also learned a bit of Japanese and I appreciate its tense system for the same kind of simplicity. (Actually, it's even simpler.)
After learning Khmer, I've come to appreciate how English offers a wide and predictable variety of ways to express time, particularly with past and present tenses.💖
You litteraly speak japanese and you're criticizing other languages ? Come one !
I once saw a cartoon. A bunch of Japanese guys were standing around the water cooler in an office. In the other room was an American, clearly frustrated. One of the Japanese guys says to another "And then you told him we say WHAT?"
=))))))))))
I wouldn't call it criticism, but I was comparing Japanese. Not other languages.
No genders and only 1 way to say "the".
That we don't use the 'I' in casual speech because the verb changes its form depending on the tense. So it's just 'Went to the store." Or "Will fly home."
> Additionally, the definite article ('the', or "ha" in Hebrew) I appreciate that my language does not have these. They come across as useless thing just designed to make foreigner trip over grammar. Compared to that, grammatical genders are easier to make sense of, although they are similarly useless.
Because of the case system we can put almost every word in a sentence where we want as long as the verb goes second and get a different emphasis.
Because of the case system we can put almost every word in a sentence where we want as long as the verb goes second and get a different emphasis.
Lack of definite/indefinite articles like "a" and "the" in Polish :3 After 20+ years of English I still don't get what their point is. It's not a necessary information. Nor useful.
[удалено]
There are many animals this is not the case for: 猫、魚、犬、鳥、牛、among many are commonly seen in kanji.
Nah, it completely depends on personal preference and situation. Either way is totally OK and common. Japanese is much more flexible than you might think. And actually I prefer 'ねこ' or '猫', the first looks more adorable to me and the latter seems more well-educated.
Those poor, poor Chinese folks. They don't have katakana! They simple write 猫. And they don't even know the word for it ("neko"), so they just call it a "mao". I assume that is really "miao", but they don't have letters either, so what can they do?
False. The Katakana is more commonly used for animals which have really complex kanji. But even then, it's considered better to use the kanji in academic contexts.